Pushing for cows in pen
FARMERS FIGHT FOR PRISON FARM RETURN
It is easy to pick out the short- timers from the lifers on Jeff Peters’ beef and pork farm. The 14 black and white Holstein dairy cows stand in sharp contrast to his regular herd of chocolate- brown Limousin beef cattle in the open winter barns.
The dairy cows are excons of a sort. Peters is one of eight Ontario farmers who, for more than five years, have looked after the remnants of the dairy herd that once lived on a farm at the Collins Bay prison complex in Kingston. For most of that time, the farmers, hundreds of residents and a few celebrities have been fighting to reopen the farm and send the cows home.
Years of weekly protests and fundraisers had led nowhere. But hopes have blossomed with the October defeat of the Conservative government, which closed the farm. Now, the new Liberal MP from the Kingston area is campaigning to bring farming back to the prison. There is a growing feeling among protesters their efforts will finally be rewarded.
Farms have formed part of the Collins Bay Institution since it opened in 1930. In 1962, a farm annex, later named the Frontenac Institution. Prisoners swept stalls, and fed the cows and chickens. Many stayed up all night to help birth calves. In the farm’s final years, an inmaterun operation provided milk and eggs for all the federal prisons in Ontario and Quebec, and some provincial jails.
Why the Conservatives closed it and five other prison farms across Canada in 2010 was never clear. The move followed other steps that seemed intended to eliminate any notion life in prison was soft. The minister responsible for prisons at the time, Vic Toews, called the farm programs ineffective at rehabilitating prisoners. “Less than one per cent learned any skills that were relevant,” he said.
For Peters, the minister’s dismissal of farming was a rallying cry. “That was an insult that stuck,” the 64-yearold said. “From then on, I was determined to right what we thought was a real wrong.”
Others in Kingston were also upset. Many feared the 340- hectare farm site, now surrounded by strip malls, auto dealerships and suburban housing, would be paved over. Groups that worked with prisoners, like the Sisters of Providence, j oined in a campaign to protect what they believed was an effective form of rehabilitation. Many protesters found the closing shortsighted.
“Even people I knew who had been small C or capital C conservatives said, ‘ This doesn’t make sense; closing the prison farm doesn’t make any s ense,’ ” s ai d Dianne Dowling, a local beef and dairy farmer. “Some of them liked the idea that the inmates were doing actual physical work to help pay for the system.”
The initial protests concluded with an unsuccessful two- day blockade of the trucks brought to take the cows to auction and the arrests of about two dozen people. Shifting tactics, the protesters formed a co-operative to buy the prison farm cows, with the hope they could be returned one day. Conrad Black and Margaret Atwood were among those buying shares at $ 300 each. The co- op raised enough money to buy 23 cows.
Meanwhile, the Monday protests continue at the Collins Bay entrance.
Dorothy Krawetz, a local writer with no connection to farming or the prison, stood there on a cold January night — she calculated it was her 280th Monday night.
“It’s hard to have had hope for so long; it’s hard to trust the government,” she said. “I hope the Liberals reinstate the farm, I really do, because they’ve helped us so much in the past, before it was dismantled.”