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Some prisoners, myself included, also exhausted the correctional service’s internal grievance procedure, a requisite step for the case to be heard by the federal court.

Finally, in May 2014, we made the request for judicial review. As one among the many stakeholders in this matter, the questions is, where do we go from here?

The payment prisoners receive for work they carry out in penitentiaries should be revisited. It would enhance conditions of confinement and the reintegration prospects of the confined. If the wisdom of decades past has taught us anything, it is surely that unless the government re-orients the CSC to its obligations towards humane treatment, history will only repeat itself. There is a connection, made by former correctional investigator Howard Sapers in a 2012-13 report, between an explicitly punitive correctional system and violence behind those walls.

He also underscored the necessity of governments of every stripe to recognize, for reasons of humanity and public safety, that CSC orient itself to its “rehabilitation obligations and a stronger commitment to community re-integration.”

Many prisoners were hopeful when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued his mandate letter to Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould, and called for a review of “the changes in our criminal justice system and sentencing reforms over the past decade.” We hoped that “sunny ways” would be forecast for corrections.

Long before we ended up in a legal battle we could barely afford to fight, Head, who was on his way out as commissioner, and Blaney would not take us up on our offer to come to the table and have a reasonable discussion about this policy.

So the question for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale is – will you?

Jarrod Shook, who served time for drug-related offences, is a University of Ottawa criminology student and lead editor of Volume 26, Number 1&2 of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.