“On February 27, 2018, the federal Liberal government announced the gradual reopening of two prison farms in Kingston, Ontario, at the Joyceville and Collins Bay institutions. This announcement marked the successful culmination of a local grassroots campaign which began soon after the initial closure was announced in 2009, and aimed first to save, then later restore, the farms. Dianne Dowling, a key figure in the campaign as a member of the Save Our Prison Farms (SOPF) committee, concluded that success came from the diversity of the cause’s supporters: “Some people liked the idea that inmates were contributing food to the prison system. Others saw it as good employment training, or as a rehabilitation program, particularly through working with animals.” Although many other issues – from public land use to food security – galvanized members of SOPF, the rehabilitative nature of farming has remained central to the local support for the prison farms.
Perhaps best summarized on the now-defunct Save Our Prison Farms website, this support suggested that “farming provides rehabilitation and therapy through working with and caring for plants and animals.” There is a long history to this view. In fact, claims that prison farming rehabilitates inmates have remained remarkably consistent over more than a century. The reopening of these prison farms provides a necessary opportunity to reflect on where these continuing claims come from, and why, if farming can rehabilitate criminals, it has not succeeded even when part of widespread official policy. More importantly, can prison farming be relevant today, when it is historically rooted in fears of the urban population, an assumption that farms are inherent repositories of moral virtue, and a reliance on coerced labour?
The conviction that farm labour could effectively produce reformed citizens from convicted criminals has, historically, been widespread. C.F. Neelands, Deputy Provincial Secretary for Prisons and Reformatories of Ontario, wrote in 1935 that
at the Industrial Farm, Burwash, a very large proportion [of inmates] enjoy the advantages of work in the open country on the farms and receive the healing influences of direct contact with the soil which is so conducive to restoring sane thought and a proper perspective toward one’s fellow beings.
Neelands served as Superintendent of the Burwash Industrial Farm, and later the chief administrator at the Guelph Reformatory – institutions that used inmates to clear colonized land, practice experimental agriculture, and provide profits for the province while claiming to “make men new”[i] through a closer connection to the land, industrial and vocational training, and less strict discipline.
Both Burwash and Guelph were representative of the “industrial farm” model that developed across Canada shortly before the First World War, as Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia opened new prisons built on an explicitly agricultural model to replace older local jails. The ideal was to provide training that would prepare the inmate for farm work upon release, and to maintain the support of parsimonious governments by providing food and otherwise lowering the costs of incarceration. These dual objectives remained at the heart of the demand for prison farming for a century and a half, and re-emerged as arguments for prison farming by supporters of SOPF.
The industrial farms were given tremendous impetus by the great increases in the urban population of Canada between 1881 and 1921. The rapidly growing industrial cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries provoked two conclusions in criminologists and penologists. The first, emerging from a broad “environmentalist” consensus about the origin of crimes, saw the moral and infrastructural “decay” and “neglect” in Canadian cities, concentrated in slum areas, as driving the inhabitants to delinquency through poverty, disease and vice. Such views persisted well beyond the “age of light, soap, and water,” as well. One of the most significant documents of Canadian criminology and penology, the 1938 Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, identified the “demoralization of the present day…slackening of religious influences, the loosening of family ties, licentious pictures, publications and magazines” and the influences of “poverty, resulting in over-crowding, semi-starvation, and the absence of facilities for recreation at home” as root causes of crime.
The second conclusion was that the farm, and outdoor work more generally, could be a form of treatment, if not for the conditions of the city, then at least for the criminal symptoms they provoked. Like many other Canadian elites, the 1938 commissioners, committed to expanding prison farms, accepted the dominant “agriculturist” assumptions of the early 20th century that held that the family farm and rural life were the repository of Canadian virtues – religion, family, self-sufficiency, self-control, hard work – and the opposite of the degenerative stimulation of the “jungle” of Winnipeg and the slums of Toronto. Although few reformers seriously advocated widespread resettlement in rural areas, the selective removal of populations considered deviant – from enemy aliens to indigenous children to convicted criminals, especially young delinquents – was widely embraced, with the farm held capable of countering the ‘demoralizing’ effects of urban life.”
- Cameron Willis, “Can Prison Farms Be Saved?” Activehistory.ca, March 28, 2018.
