North America – In jail on election day

People always think of Canada as being different from the USA: more social, more liberal, and somehow a little more educated. But like most good news, this one is of course not true: the public health system is so broken that acquaintances sometimes drive 300 kilometers to the gynecologist, Canadian oil states are politically and culturally like Texas, and the big cities here are like those in the USA primarily made up of parking spaces, single-family homes and four to six-lane arterial roads.

On election day, I will find out what connects Canada with the USA and perhaps also separates it from them during a visit to the local maximum security prison. Because the local university runs an educational program for prisoners, I was allowed to go into prison and tell you something about US drug policy in Latin America. When it comes to the size of the prison population, Canada is more similar to Europe – 107 people are incarcerated here for every 100,000 people. In the USA, which is known to be the freest country in the free world, there are a remarkable 750. But when it comes to the composition of the prison population, Canada is again based on the USA: of the 50 prisoners who registered for the courses that day three quarters black. This is remarkable simply because the proportion of blacks in the total population in Canada is only 4 percent.

Anyone who only knows North American prisons from television and has now held their breath can breathe a sigh of relief. In our high-security wing, the prisoners are rather cordial. The young men, almost all of them under 30, are happy to come together and are almost overly polite towards us. They are not disturbed even by the panoptic cage architecture, which constantly produces echoing noise.

During our discussions that day, no one brought up the elections in the neighboring country. But the prisoners say pretty sensible things about “the system” – about structural racism and a lack of social perspectives. I finally became irritated when my colleague handed out a conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and had the prisoners read about black feminism. Life is sometimes better than Netflix.

By the way, when you leave prison, Donald Trump’s name comes up. At the security gate, one of the uniformed men remembers the US election. “I’m a Trump fan,” replies the other closer. This should come as no surprise considering his career choice.

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