Gabby Aquino
Law students wear many hats, and at Osgoode, many students also wear the hat of being community organizers. I had the honour of interviewing 12 JD students about their involvement in various social justice movements and community initiatives this past year. Here is an overview of their work.
Gabby Aquino (1L) is a settler with Philippine roots living in Tkaronto, with stories to listen to, and stories to share. She is actively involved with the Toronto Prisoner’s Rights Project (TPRP). She highlighted the coalition’s guiding principles and underlying goals of advocating for decarceration and prisoners’ rights.
TPRP recently launched a campaign calling attention to prison phone systems in Ontario. Gabby explained key problems with the phone systems, including how they impose extreme restrictions on inmates and their families: “Inmates’ phone calls are limited to a maximum time limit of twenty minutes at a time. They’re only able to call landlines and not cell phones, but because most families don’t have landlines anymore, it’s very difficult for inmates to reach out.”
“One of the biggest limitations is that people receiving these calls will be charged about $1 per call, for a call that lasts no longer than 20 minutes; and for long distance calls (because a lot of inmates are often transferred between different facilities), the calls can run up to $30 because of long distance fees.”
“What the prison phone system essentially does is cut off a very important lifeline for folks who are already in very isolated circumstances in the prison system. It prevents them from making basic but necessary phone calls to family and friends, legal counsel, and community services.” In addition to limiting inmates’ social connections, and thereby compromising their mental health, Gabby said it also “hinders their preparations for reintegration into the larger society.”
“Phone companies like Bell and Telus are part of the problem – they’re contributing to the ongoing mental health crisis and to the violation of prisoners’ rights.”
For Gabby, TPRP is an intersectional cause that speaks to many societal issues: “in terms of racialization and decolonization, those issues are quite central to my heritage and my family’s history, and they’re also deeply connected to prison abolitionism.”
“Black, Indigenous, and people of colour folks living with mental health issues, and folks from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, are disproportionately overrepresented in prison systems globally. The idea of caging people and subjecting them to extreme state violence, isolation, deprivation of basic rights, and so on, bears a lot of similarities to the settler-colonial state – how it has created false borders (on stolen lands, nonetheless) and asserted its sovereignty. A lot of the prison abolition movement’s goals parallel or overlap with decolonization, as well as anti-capitalism, anti-racism, feminism, etc.”
Gabby’s offered her perspective on the relationship between law school and community involvement, voicing her recognition that “Canadian colonial law is inherently violent. Part of the reason that different communities are oppressed is because of oppressive laws. The law functions in many contexts as an institution that legitimizes the violence and oppression that different communities face.”
“Something I was recently and importantly told was that being in law school is not necessarily activism; at most, it’s harm reduction. It’s about ensuring that the law doesn’t continue to harm certain groups in ways that it’s historically been doing and continues to do.”
Her reflection culminated in a powerful call to action: “A lot of the legal ‘wins’ we see in court, legislation, etc. would not be possible without the work done on the ground by communities themselves. Community activism is so important because it’s a reminder that, if our goal is to liberate communities or even address a social cause, it’s not enough to just be in law school and confine our understanding or learning about how to address those problems in legal paradigms or frames of thinking. Those experiences necessarily have to be supported by doing activism or community-based work; they have to go hand-in-hand.”