Volunteers go behind bars to tout vaccine
Group launches campaign to educate inmates, curb hesitancy in jails, prisons
Michael Amichand was feeling “a little anxious” Friday heading into the Toronto South Detention Centre on a mission to nudge naysayers to rethink their reasons for not getting the COVID-19 vaccination.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever walked into a jail without handcuffs on,” Amichand said outside the south Etobicoke facility. He was flanked by a small delegation of volunteers who share his concern that so far less than half of Ontario’s correctional population has opted for their first jab.
As of May 21, the first round of inmate vaccinations had been completed at 25 provincial correctional institutions where 6,794 inmates are incarcerated, according to a Solicitor General briefing memo obtained by the Star. The average vaccine uptake rate was approximately 50 per cent.
Yet only 400, or 29 per cent, of the TSDC’s roughly 1,370 inmates were vaccinated in April and just 13 per cent at Toronto East Detention Centre, where just 50 of approximately 400 inmates were vaccinated, according to separate ministry figures. The numbers don’t reflect the current number of vaccinated inmates, as provincial jail turnover is high.
Amichand’s experience of living 16 years inside both provincial and federal penal facilities gives him a unique understanding of why any denizen of a high-risk congregant setting would turn down a potentially life-saving needle.
“There’s always so much politics inside,” he told the Star.
And the “guys who are running the range” tend to be facing lengthy penitentiary sentences, “so they’re not really in the best position to be giving advice to a guy who is going to be living in a shelter,” which is where a majority of shorter-term inmates initially go after they’re released from custody.
That is highly problematic because without a vaccination, “it’s almost impossible for them to get housed,” explains Amichand, who now works for the John Howard Society helping discharged inmates find places to live.
Vaccine conspiracy theories are “running rampant” inside the jails — just as they are in the outside world — but a key difference is people who are locked up don’t have access to information sources that could help dispel bogus notions, he says.
Jails and prisons are notoriously susceptible to coronavirus outbreaks.
The TSDC currently has 22 active cases and more than 240 inmates and 100 staff have had it since the pandemic began. The Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont., has 146 active cases among inmates and at least nine staff cases.
Joining Amichand at the jail on Friday was his John Howard Society colleague, Julia Laine, along with defence lawyers Daniel Brown, Frank Addario, and Dr. Gary Bloch, a family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto.
They and others appear in a COVID education video produced by the Criminal Lawyers Association — of which Brown is a vice-president — that the Ministry of the Solicitor General has agreed to play inside provincial correctional facilities.
Also featured in the 15-minute video are Nanook Gordon and Brianna Olson, both Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction workers.
They explain they were initially hesitant to be vaccinated, in part, because of the racism they’ve experienced in the health-care system.
But after being exposed to Indigenous health-care workers, and realizing, as Olson said, “we’re more at risk for death,” they decided it was in their best interest to get vaccinated.
Brown speaks directly to an inmate audience. “All we want you to do is to listen to the information we’re giving you … and you can make your own decision on why it’s right to get vaccinated.”
Addario explains to the incarcerated audience how he cares about his clients and asks Bloch to address concerns such as “will vaccines make us sick?”
In an interview, Bloch said the vaccination concerns of his regular patients are likely “somewhat different” than those behind prison walls, although “there is certainly overlap” such as what they’re about and “whether the processes are well-understood and trustworthy.”
But Bloch has worked in homeless shelters for 20 years where he regularly interacts with people who have been incarcerated, so he is aware they would also have a different set of concerns.
“They do not have the same freedoms, of course, and quite understandably have a mistrust of authority,” Bloch told the Star.
As well, a disproportionate number of people in prisons come from groups that have experienced discrimination “at the hands of society and in many cases at the hands of the health-care system that is now asking them to accept one of these vaccines.”
He sees the best approach as gentle persuasion, to see all concerns as legitimate and to address them in a way that is respectful. He said it is also important to “make clear we are approaching them as people whose lives and well-being we value” and that “we see the vaccine as a pathway to health for each of them as individuals.”
That means “taking the time to explain how the vaccines work, why we think they’re important” and why the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Starting next week, the province will begin the next round of inmate vaccinations, focused on offering the vaccine to all newly admitted inmates and increasing uptake in the general population.
After their visit to the TSDC on Friday, Brown described the experience of going range to range to meet with groups of between 30 and 40 inmates. One told them he had heard catching COVID in jail would entitle him to “more dead time,” so he perceived it as an incentive for getting sick, which could get him out sooner.
“We explained that wasn’t the case,” Brown said.
Others said they had heard the vaccine “changes your DNA, or they were getting one of the vaccines that was heavily associated with negative side effects. All of the things we heard about anecdotally were the same kind of questions we received.”
By the end, Brown felt some minds had been changed. “We could tell people who started off saying they weren’t going to be vaccinated ended up asking how they could make a request to get vaccinated.” The delegation plans other jailhouse visits in the coming weeks.