|
|
| Fingas: Troubling move on prison food delivery |
| By leaderpost.com- Greg Fingas |
| Published: 01/30/2014 |
|
The likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Fyodor Dostoevsky have argued that a society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners. Indeed, it takes a profound commitment to civilization and human rights for a government to resist the temptation to demonize prisoners. After all, inmates are by definition subject to punishment for having transgressed social boundaries. And that in turn makes them ripe for stigmatization by any government that is more interested in stoking popular outrage than respecting the humanity of every person under its power. That said, it's also relatively easy to make the case for reasonable treatment of inmates as a matter of fairness. In deciding to punish an individual in service of a social good, the state takes on the responsibility of providing that individual with the bare necessities of life - ideally along with the means to contribute to society once a sentence expires. And the essence of imprisonment is the elimination of an individual's ability to provide for himself or herself - meaning that people detained in a correctional centre are completely dependent on the state for their survival. In order to ensure state power isn't misused, Canadian governments are constitutionally required not to inflict cruel or unusual punishment. A lack of food or nutrition has rightly been recognized as a breach of that standard. Unfortunately, the Saskatchewan Party government is planning to take a massive step backward in Saskatchewan's commitment to meeting its constitutional duty. The government recently announced that it wants to privatize food services at several of Saskatchewan's correctional centres. And its argument for turning the basic necessities of life into a profit generator is that food services don't form part of the "core business" of a jail. Read More. |
MARKETPLACE search vendors | advanced search
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
|
Comments:
No comments have been posted for this article.
Login to let us know what you think