LUV4All interview with Calvin Neufeld: Prison Farms Can Heal Prisoners, Animals, and Mother Earth
By Calvin Neufeld
CALVIN NEUFELD is an independent speaker, thinker, and social justice advocate. He’s a man of conviction, who does not take on popular causes. He put forth the concept of trans-veganism. And since 2016, he has taken on Prison Farms, with the ambitious mission of steering them in an ethical direction.
Which translates to Plant-based Agriculture and Therapeutic Rehabilitation.
Which further means:
# 1: He defends prisoner justice and environmental justice.
#2: He proposes a sustainable and ethical model for Canada’s prison farms.
And #3: He opposes any model that exploits or harms prisoners, therapy animals, or the environment.
Racine: Calvin, can you tell us why you have taken on the mission of evolving Prison Farms?
Calvin: I used to live right beside Collins Bay Institution where a prison farm used to be before all of Canada’s prison farms were closed by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. I remember the farms there, the cows in the fields known as the “Pen Herd.” I remember the protests opposing the closures and Harper’s “tough on crime” cuts to prison programs. This was a decade ago. I supported the protests, I honked as I drove by. As a vegan I had conflicted feelings because the cows were being farmed for milk and I wasn’t aware at the time that those cows were slaughtered by prisoners. I also didn’t know that there were 10,000 chickens crammed into a dilapidated building out of sight. All I saw, from my cozy apartment, were a few seemingly happy cows in the fields, and I saw the obvious value of getting outdoors to feed oneself and one’s community. In this case, prisoners were getting out of the confines of prison cells to feed themselves, their fellow prisoners, and food banks. Prisoners enjoyed it, there was a waiting list to work on the farms and interact with the cows, although I now know that no one wanted to work in the abattoir or the ammonia-filled chicken barn. Those were the parts of the farms that no one talked about.
When Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government promised to bring prison farms back, they held public consultations for a new prison farm model. That was the beginning of Evolve Our Prison Farms. I, and others, saw an opportunity for prison farms to be better than they had been in the past. There were alternatives that had greater rehabilitative, nutritional, and environmental benefits than prison dairy, beef and egg operations.
It was originally my mother, Franceen Neufeld (author of Suffering Eyes: A Chronicle of Awakening), who had the idea in early 2016 as we were discussing the prospect of prison farms returning. She said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the Pen Herd cows could come back to a prison sanctuary?” It was so obvious, so obviously beneficial for all concerned, yet it was something no one had considered before. That seed of an idea has grown into everything that Evolve Our Prison Farms is, a grassroots social justice movement fostering a conversation about rehabilitation and therapy, the human rights of prisoners, the rights of animals, and the need for climate solutions. This is something I am profoundly passionate about, I have poured my whole heart into the intersection of all these things. I’m hooked on healing. Prison farms are an opportunity to heal humans, animals, and earth, if done right.
Tragically, Canada’s prisons are places of terrible suffering and prison farms are on that same trajectory. The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) is not adopting a therapeutic or sustainable prison farm model. They are reintroducing dairy and meat production but on a larger scale, and the new prison farms won’t feed prisoners anymore. Instead, they will be a for-profit agribusiness using prison labour to industrially farm thousands of goats to sell milk to the private sector. This is a violation of everything I care about.
I took on this mission because I cared about healing and now I can’t let go because I care about the harms being inflicted, in the name of rehabilitation, by the very institution tasked with restoring – “correcting” – broken people.
Racine: This particularly challenging version of Compassion for All involves both prisoners and farm animals. Why is this an important issue in our current times?
Calvin: I believe that intersectionality is the future of justice advocacy. Everything is connected. We have to care about healing all – healing ourselves, healing one another, healing the animal world, and healing the world itself.
Prisoners and farmed animals are two elements of society that most people don’t think about or don’t care about. Why don’t we?
What closes our hearts to the incarcerated members of our society? Is it because we think prisoners deserve to suffer and be exploited? Is it because some of us, or those we love, have been victims of crime and we are fearful or unforgiving? Or is it simply because it’s something that hasn’t (yet) touched our lives personally?
What closes our hearts to caring about farmed animals? Is it because we think they exist to be farmed, and we can’t allow ourselves to think of cows and goats as having the same personalities, intelligence and right to life as cats and dogs?
Is this why we shut prisons and slaughterhouses out of our conscience?
These issues are important in our current times because the world is suffering from an absence of caring. How do we heal a world that has turned cold? And how do we heal a world that is warming? We need to care about this planet, we need to care about animals, we need to care about each other. Every time we limit our circle of compassion we dig our moral and literal grave deeper. We can’t hope to heal this world or ourselves if we’re limited to the kind of compassion that is easiest. We need to extend our compassion to the most neglected, the most hurting corners of society, and begin the healing there.
That’s why prison farms matter to me. If we allow prison farms to capitalize on the vulnerable – exploiting prisoners in the exploitation of animals for institutional and corporate profit – what kind of future will we reap? If we transition prison farms into places of restoration for people, animals, and land, we are planting seeds of change that promise a rich harvest for an ethical and sustainable future.
Racine: Can you offer some examples of ethical programs that have been successful?
Calvin: There are so many examples. One of my favourites is Sheriff’s Office Animal Farm in Florida, a haven for rescued animals “where inmates are taught how to care for and care about animals in the hopes they will carry that lesson on in their lives once they are released from jail.” Farmer Jeanne Selander has run the program for over 15 years, funded entirely by community donations and proceeds from the jail canteen.
It began when the sheriff noticed that ducks were often hit by cars on the road. He suggested having inmates rescue some of the injured ducks. That proved so beneficial and therapeutic that they began rescuing other animals: emu, cow, horse, turtle, sloth, fox – even two alligators – and the popular favourite, French Fry the goat, who inmates describe as “like a dog.” They have about 150 animals today who enjoy the protection and healing of the farm.
Canada’s approach to prison farms is the opposite of this. Cows will be farmed for milk that will go to “research quota” – no one will drink the milk, not prisoners or anyone else. Beef cattle are being bought and sold and slaughtered for external sale – no prisoners will eat the meat, no part of the new prison farms will feed prisoners since CSC privatized its food contracts. But the cows are peripheral. The “major livestock enterprise” of the new prison farm program in Kingston Ontario will be an industrial goat dairy operation, a multi-million-dollar facility where as many as 3000 goats will be mechanically milked (never pastured) to produce up to 9000 litres of milk per day for sale to the private sector. It’s hard to conceive the contrast between French Fry the goat with his fun-loving personality, and the 3000 nameless goats coming to Canada’s prison farms who will be reduced to numbers and units of production like the prisoners who will be farming them.
There are other positive examples elsewhere in the world. In the UK, prisoners care for goats as part of animal therapy sessions funded by the National Health Service to teach inmates to “take responsibility for others” and to promote “positive social activity.”
At Gorgona Penal Colony in Italy, there was a working farm for decades, including a slaughterhouse (no prisoners worked in the slaughterhouse). Inmates would farm the animals and send them to the slaughterhouse. As one prisoner described it, “One moment I was caring for them, the next bringing them to the slaughter. I felt terrible. I am very attached to these animals: they have helped me a lot. In them I perceive loyalty – they never betray you.”
This year, Gorgona shut down its slaughterhouse and ended its farming operation, sending the majority of the animals to a refuge and keeping 180 of the animals at the prison as a “human-animal project” under the supervision of staff, academics, and animal rights advocates. This is a wonderful example of what’s possible.
Again, it’s hard to conceive the contrast between this scenario and Canada’s prison farms. Not only are we introducing animal agriculture to prisons at a time when other countries are ending such programs, but we have a prison abattoir that has used prisoners in slaughtering animals for decades. It is operational to this day, even through this pandemic, at Joyceville Institution. This is contrary to everything we know about the psychological toll of slaughter work, which is traumatic, physically dangerous, and criminogenic; it leads to increased violence and violent crime. We should be outraged that the Correctional Service of Canada is training prisoners to kill.
One of the men involved in shutting down Gorgona’s slaughterhouse explained the obvious logic: “In order to be able to re-enter society, a prisoner needs to be able to develop empathy, and if we’re killing animals, for sure they can’t develop positive connections with other humans. It’s very important that they learn the concept of care.”
When Florida’s Jeanne Selander learned that prisoners in Canada slaughter animals, her response was equally obvious: “I truly believe that animals save people. One cannot form a bond with something that you’re going to eventually kill. What a heartbreaking thought.”
There are countless examples of prison programs that grow healthy plant-based foods for inmates and communities. For example:
- Pê Sâkâstêw Healing Lodge in Alberta produces thousands of kilograms of vegetables grown and harvested by inmates for the local food bank to help “break that cycle of poverty.”
- Organic gardening at HMP Rye Hill in England “helps inmates kick drug addiction” and “creates a space that is beautiful, peaceful, and conducive to reflection.”
- Planting Justice in California “empowers people impacted by mass incarceration with the skills and resources to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing.”
Canada’s prison farms fall short of anything remotely ethical. We need to hold our taxpayer-funded institutions to account and refuse to accept any prison farm program that violates human rights (underpaid prison labour for the private sector) or harms prisoners, animals, or the environment.
Racine: We, who deeply care, are tragically aware of the state of the unfathomable cruelty endured by “farm” animals, first on factory farms, then in slaughterhouses. The voices of these sentient beings are brutally silenced by the hidden normalized violence and oppression taking place every moment, of every day, in the animal agriculture industry. You, Calvin, have opened your heart and heard their cries of despair.
You have also been able to listen to some of the voices of prisoners. Can you tell us what they have shared with you?
Calvin: This is a beautiful question. The pain in the animal world is without comparison. The suffering there has no equal. Yet the closest human comparison is in our prisons.
There are those who have argued that I’m just an animal activist using the prison farms to advance an animal rights “agenda.” They are half right. Yes, I care about the animals on the prison farms. It is better for them – and better for the purposes of rehabilitation – that they be cared for and protected instead of farmed and slaughtered. Call that radical. To me it is simple truth.
Also, the years have brought me deep into the world of prisons and prisoners. I care as much about human suffering as I do about all suffering. Evolve Our Prison Farms grew out of a love for all, human, non-human, and our hurting mother earth. There is no agenda to that.
My experiences with prisoners are some of the most enlightening of my life. This journey has brought me into connection with many inspiring people – David Suzuki, Margaret Atwood, Fred Penner, Elizabeth May – yet the most impactful encounters I’ve had were with the incarcerated.
What have prisoners told me? Stories. Story after story. Each different and each the same. I have learned just how destructive the prison system is in Canada. I also tangibly understand how human brokenness makes a prison system necessary, but I wholeheartedly refuse to believe that cages are the answer. Punishment and retribution solve nothing, they create more brokenness and more crime. The world is broken, people are broken, animals are broken, the earth is broken. The solution is to heal. There’s no reason that we can’t smarten up and heal all of it.
Prisoners are suffering. Many, most, are themselves victims of crime. How many are victims of childhood physical or sexual abuse? Too many. How many are Indigenous, victims of intergenerational harm and ongoing ripples of a genocide that haunts our country’s conscience? Over 30% of the federal prison population is Indigenous, despite being just 4% of the general population in Canada. The genocide has not ended.
There is no excusing or erasing crimes that have been committed. Caring about incarcerated people does not exclude caring about victims of crime, yet there is no healing possible without caring about all suffering, wherever we find it.
Animals suffer as innocents. The only crimes they know are those that are committed against them. Prisoners do not share that innocence, but at the same time I can’t shake Sarah McLachlan’s words: we are all innocent.
Prisoners tell me stories of interpersonal and institutional violence that they experience in prison, sometimes on a daily basis. Prisons are harsh places. I used to think I had some idea, but I had no idea until I became entangled and all too familiar with the realities. The stories are haunting and ongoing.
On the brighter side, prisoners tell me about their love of animals. There are so many stories. So much tenderness, protectiveness.
A chipmunk that the inmates fed, built a house for, cared for, until she was accidentally killed when one inmate stepped backwards not knowing she was there. Everyone grieved. You can’t make something like that right again.
A rabbit on the grounds that inmates would watch – a taste of wild freedom. One day a particularly violent inmate found the rabbit hole and stuffed it up. Destruction for the sake of destruction. No one dared stop him for fear of retribution but when the coast was clear they dug that hole out again.
A frog that hopped into the prison one day. A new inmate picked it up, wanting to act tough, threw it against the wall thinking it would earn him respect from the other inmates. It had the opposite effect. The inmates grabbed him and told him if he ever did that again he’d be the one thrown against the wall.
One inmate spoke about a pig he loved as a child on his family’s farm. To this day it breaks his heart to think about the day that pig was sent away.
Stray cats sometimes wander in for the affection they get from the inmates. One inmate told me if there is such a thing as reincarnation he wants to come back as a prison cat – the best life with the most love.
All of the prisoners I’ve met are men capable of kindness, if given the opportunity to show it.
Years ago a social worker told me about prisoners she knew who worked in the prison slaughterhouse. They were traumatized by the experience. She added that prisoners can relate to farmed animals even better than the rest of us can. “They know what it is to be caged,” she said, “to be separated from their parents, their children, to be treated like a thing.”
As much as I fight for the lives and dignity of animals, I fight for the lives and dignity of the incarcerated. Anyone who feels abhorrence at oppression and suffering cannot in good conscience turn a blind eye to our prisons.
Racine: What keeps you going, Calvin, jumping over those obstacles, never giving up? How do you stay sane?
Calvin: There are days I don’t know how to answer that question. First and foremost, being a daddy to my seven-year-old boy keeps me sane. When you’re a parent, you have no choice but to get up every morning and do the thousand things you have to do. Responsibility never ends. Could I have enough stamina to keep battling government and institutions if I didn’t have loads of laundry and dishes and housework and homeschooling in this crazy pandemic and playtimes to keep lively and dramas to douse every day that make my political battles seem like recreation in comparison?
In all seriousness, it’s draining and difficult work, but I’m buoyed by the joy that is found in each new encounter, each little victory, each opportunity to prevent or ease a suffering in this world.
People think that this sort of advocacy work is soul-draining, and it is. I understand burnout and the need to work at a pace that is sustainable. But not doing it, I believe, carries a much greater toll. If I stop responding to the suffering all around me, that’s what would cost me my sanity.
Racine: Do you have anything else that you would like to add?
Calvin: Do you remember what you were like before you were vegan, before you had awareness of the lives of farmed animals? I remember not thinking about it, not knowing or caring where meat, milk and cheese came from. I remember when I learned that cows don’t simply produce milk. I never really thought about it, I just assumed that’s what cows do, I had no idea about the process of insemination, removing calves, slaughtering the males, and slaughtering the mothers at a fraction of their natural lifespan. I never thought about the horrors that take place every moment of every day in slaughterhouses. It was all out of sight, out of mind. To me a cow was just a cow, cud-chewing, pooping, standing around blandly in a field. Cows, to me, were a caricature, all painted with the same brush in my limited field of vision. I didn’t see their individuality, their personalities, their intelligence, their capacity for love and joy – and suffering. Now that I do, there is no going back to the time before awareness.
It is the same with prisoners. It is exactly the same. If you’ve been through the eye-opening journey of veganism, I invite you to take the same journey here. We paint prisoners with a single brush, a caricature of a man sitting cell-bound, tattooed, in stripes or an orange suit. How will it change you to see the individual?
It will change you exactly as veganism changed you. You will discover how limited your compassion was before awareness. You will discover that the journey to awareness is never-ending and that love grows limitlessly along the way. You will never want to return to the way you were before.
To me, this is exciting, and I hope it is for you too, to discover a whole other world of suffering where you can encounter the joy – the salvation – of contributing to its healing.
Racine: For those who are interested, what can they do and how can they reach you?
Calvin: That is a question I prefer to ask rather than answer. What can you do? Reach out and tell me!
Follow Evolve Our Prison Farms on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The story is continuously unfolding. We need you watching, caring, sharing. We need you to engage and act when action items come up. If you have political or media contacts, please connect us so we can raise awareness of what’s happening and why it matters.
Contact me at info@evolveourprisonfarms.ca or info@calvinneufeld.com. My door is always open, tell me your story, tell me what you think of this. Your voice matters.
Racine: Thank you so much, Calvin.
Recommended:
Podcast Interview with Calvin Neufeld: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1oILmwswwuMeO8LoGVg42D
Links:
http://evolveourprisonfarms.ca/
https://www.facebook.com/EvolveOurPrisonFarms/
https://twitter.com/evolveopf
https://www.instagram.com/evolveourprisonfarms/
Back to Issue 3
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January 2nd, 2021 @ 1:18 pm
Thank you for drawing out such meaningful dialogue, thanks for understanding why this matters, thanks for being a source of encouragement and moral support, and thanks for truly “walking the walk” of embracing Love For All.
January 24th, 2021 @ 11:04 am
How dismal and sad –albeit not shocking– that the Canadian government found a way to monetize the suffering of prisoners, both animal and human, in place of capitalizing on the golden opportunity for healing offered by prison farms for all those involved. Calvin, you get it. You get it on such a profound level. The intersectionality you speak of is so true. Thank you for being such a loving soul and extending your compassion even to those who have been banished not only from civil life, but also from most human kindness, and for reaching for a path that leads to true and lasting healing.
January 25th, 2021 @ 9:30 am
What a kind comment, thank you!