Tagged Criminal Justice

Close up of a hand writing a letter. Through the bars, correspondence with people in prisons matters!

Through the bars: making connections

Have you ever had a pen pal? Was it a good experience? Did you learn about where they lived, their customs and culture, or perhaps their life circumstances, including the joys and the sorrows? When I was in grade 7, our teacher decided that assigning pen pals to the class would be a great learning…

Elevate the Voices of Those with Lived Experience

Elevate the Voices of Those with Lived Experience

When I close my eyes and think about lived experience, I can still hear the words of children and youth I’ve met over the years: “They asked me questions in front of my parents. I couldn’t say anything with them in the room.” “It took me a year to say something to the teacher. I…

Cartoon depicting the situation of children of incarcerated parents

Breaking the Silence: 2020—2022

A major concern of CFSC’s in recent years has been the plight of children when their parents or caregivers are incarcerated. One way CFSC seeks to move this work forward is by using the United Nations as an avenue for advocacy and awareness-raising. Canada is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights…

Image of a phone playing a podcast. Podcasts are one helpful way to hear the stories of incarcerated people.

Inside Outside: Podcast Profiles

In our criminal justice work, CFSC seeks to elevate the voices of those with lived experience. We believe that listening to these voices is essential for genuine and meaningful system change. For obvious reasons, direct access to the voices of people currently or formerly incarcerated can be hard to find. Intriguingly, the development of podcasting…

The 40th anniversary of Quakers' minute on prison abolition

40th Anniversary of Minute on Prison Abolition

What do you believe? can be a challenging question for an unprogrammed Quaker like me, but the minutes of our business meetings contain collective wisdom, innovation, Spirit, and Light that might provide some answers. Reading one of those minutes nearly a decade ago helped lead me to membership in the Religious Society of Friends: Minute…

Inmates in a minimum security prison use a payphone like this one to stay in touch with family

The Lived Experience of COVID-19 in a Minimum Security Prison

During my years working in the youth justice field, I was often stunned by the repeated gaps I encountered between policy and practice. Policy was regularly recited as assurance that legal obligations were being met (all necessary medical and dental care was being offered, prisoners were free from physical punishment, and so forth). Frequently, the…

Bringing it home - image of a peaceful landscape at sunset dotted with trees and homes.

Bringing It Home

In the summer of 2020, the catastrophic death of George Floyd created a sudden swell of public attention regarding calls to defund the police, the over-representation of Black and Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, and systemic racism in Canada. CFSC discerned the need to respond, and began planning for a new project—The Only…

the only way forward

The Only Way Forward: Shifting Punitive Perspectives

Defund the police! It’s a demand that is all over the streets, the news, and in our minds right now. It’s a demand brought on by centuries of inequality and injustice. Although public attention was reignited in May following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States, Canada is certainly…

the convention on the rights of the child

The Convention on the Rights of the Child

After dinner one night, a friend of my mother’s shared a story that has stayed with me. She had been shopping at the local mall with her kids when police officers stopped her and took her in for questioning. She matched the description of a shoplifter they’d been looking for. As it happened, she had…