MONTREAL, May 14, 2019 /CNW Telbec/ – Delegates from the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers (UCCO-SACC-CSN) voted in favour of an agreement in principle with the Treasury Board to compensate public service employees, including prison officers, for problems caused by the Phoenix payroll system. As highlighted in this special issue, ashley Smith`s death has created a series of analytical approaches to the socio-legal analysis of conditions in Canadian federal women`s prisons. However, this article is unique in that it addresses the paradox of trade unionists who seem to carry out the activities of the Carcenic State irreflexively. One of the first (and only) Canadian publications on the classified structure of prison custody is Desmond Ellis` (1979) The Treatise on the Introduction of the Therapeutic Manager into the Canadian Prison System as a strategy for the spread of intra-economic conflicts (prison disorders) between the “prison proletariat” of prison guards and prisoners (44). Since then, there have been no published Canadian empirical studies of prison guards as employees. This contrasts with the lively stories of prison work and prisoner organization in the United States (Blankenship Reference Blankenship and Sarat2005; Thompson Reference Thompson2011; Reference Thompson2016; Zinn Referenzn Zinn2003; Room and Jacobs reference room and Jacobs 1981). Joshua Page (reference site 2011) and James Kilgore (Reference Kilgore2013) testify to the rise of professional prison officers` associations in the United States, which have been severely supported by criminal conservative politicians, as well as the effects of the neoliberal criminalization of the working class. I think it is important that we consider the experience of American unions to be part of the prison state, because, as Wacquant claims, “the global firestorm of law and order, inspired by the United States, has raged from afar, even though it follows different ways and forms in the different countries it [strikes]” (2014, 72). The neoliberal state of Canada has triggered the fragmentation of labour, where “the working class itself is confronted with criminalization” (Kilgore Reference Kilgore2013, 360). Well-paying jobs – such as those of prison officers – are defended harshly, despite documented evidence of human rights violations in the workplace.

However, I suggest that these important work studies do not concern the vulnerability of women in detention such as Ashley Smith. The 200 or so prison officers in the country`s 49 federal prisons overwhelmingly adopted the agreement providing immediate compensation for prison officers, as well as the establishment of a simplified procedure for collecting and assessing compensation for collective agreement claims, as well as the payment of damages. A team of union advisors exclusively responsible for our collective bargaining, their application and the union culture of UBO-SAF-CSN. We now have a real chance to negotiate our own global agreement. At present, the FB Group does not have access to such an agreement under PSAC. The CX Global Agreement is currently clarifying the following sections of their collective agreement: in this text, we are witnessing the segregation of risks in the context of employment contracts between prison officers and the state – and we show the transcendence of risk logics, from segregationist cells to those accompanying them in the community for rehabilitation and unblocking purposes. Women in detention are constantly being pushed back into the re-registered form of stupid but potentially dangerous returns — even more so than male prisoners. Instead, the purpose of women`s escorts must be justified and their behavioral characteristics acceptable.