Andrew Neville wears a lot of hats—poet, musician, This Hour Has 22 Minutes researcher and erstwhile podcast co-host, for starters—but he might never have worn a hat quite like this one. This Saturday, Dec. 16, he’ll be co-running the first-ever Propeller Arcade Family Christmas, a telethon-style fundraiser with a lineup of performers that sounds about as jam-packed as Propeller’s basement is with pinball machines. (Think Christmas Daddies, but with more punk music—and more beer.)
From 7pm until midnight, the Gottingen Street brewery’s basement arcade will turn into a TV set-slash-concert space with a rotating cast of acts from Halifax’s music, stand-up and improv scene. All of it will be livestreamed.
“There’s bands, there’s comedians, there’s puppets, there’s improv, there’s contortionists,” Neville says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “Santa will be there… We’ve cleared out some of the stills that were previously used for brewing, so there’s quite a bit more space than normal.”
22 Minutes’ Stacey McGunnigle will perform. Hello City is on the books for an improv set. Local bands Ritual Warfare, Outtacontroller, Penhorn Summer, Lizzie Lives Forever and Heavenly Blue are on the lineup, along with comedians Amanda Rose, Steve Mackie, Kyle Hickey and Dan Hendricken.
Proceeds support Books Beyond Bars, an abolitionist collective that leads prison reform work in Halifax and brings books into the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Burnside. It’s an initiative that touched both Neville and Propeller’s Ian Matheson.
“There’s obviously an infinite number of good and worthy causes within our city right now,” Neville says. “But I think what they do is underappreciated. And especially at the holidays, being incarcerated must be especially heinous.”
Books Beyond Bars approaches two decades of advocacy
Nova Scotia spent $77.5 million on its adult prisons in 2022. Per the province, that breaks down to an average daily cost of $393 per person behind bars. (By contrast, an executive suite at the Fox Harb’r Resort costs $311 a night—and sleeps four people.) For all that spending, Nova Scotia’s correctional system has inspired little confidence: Research finds that spending time behind bars can actually increase the likelihood of a person re-offending. And as The Coast has reported, contrary to the prison system’s rehabilitative aims, former inmates often face barriers finding work upon their release.
“It’s designed to hold you, designed to break you, designed for you to think that there’s no other way besides prison,” Corey Wright, who has been in prison twice in Nova Scotia, told The Coast in 2020.
A 2018 auditor general’s report found that Nova Scotia’s prisons weren’t consistently following protocol for solitary confinement, nor were their correctional officers sufficiently trained in responding to mental illness or suicide concerns. Both African Nova Scotians and Indigenous people are also overrepresented behind bars: Despite holding 2.4% and 5.7% shares of the province’s population in 2016, per Canada’s census, Black and Indigenous people made up one of every six people sentenced to prison.
It’s an issue former justice minister Diana Whalen said represents a “long-standing problem.”
"I think it reflects racism. I do think it reflects poverty, educational opportunities," she told CBC News.
Since 2005, Books Beyond Bars has run a library program in the women’s unit of the Burnside prison—one of several initiatives the volunteer collective leads as it advocates for prison reform. In addition to hosting writing and poetry workshops and educational programming, the collective takes book requests from women and non-binary folks in prison and offers a biweekly lending program.
“It’s a small group,” member Kaley Kennedy tells The Coast, “but we’ve managed to do quite a bit with very little resources.”
For around $8,000 a year, the volunteers maintain a library in a north end storage unit and are able to source books that inmates want to read. Through a partnership with the King’s Co-op Bookstore, the collective is also able to buy books at discounted rates.
“Right now, urban fiction is really popular,” Kennedy says. “But there’s always interest in books about dreams and astrology—and people might be really into a sci-fi or fantasy series.”
Most of Books Beyond Bars’ budget comes from donations—which makes Propeller’s offer all the sweeter, Kennedy tells The Coast.
“It means we can spend the limited resources from our collective on delivering programs as opposed to having to also figure out how to raise money.”
As of Thursday afternoon, limited tickets are still available for Saturday night. Admission is $22.63.
