Weekly, students head to Collins Bay medium-security institution to teach inmates how to debate.
For two years, the Queen’s Debating Union (QDU) has taught debate fundamentals to 15 incarcerated people each week. The two students running the program this year hope it will expand in coming years.
Incarcerated people at Collins Bay students on Mondays with pens and paper, ready to learn from the volunteers. Though some were initially apprehensive about the Queen’s students coming into the prison, the team kept going and slowly started to build trust.
“They really love to share their stories and be heard, and [talk] about injustices they face within the prison. The more comfortable they get with us, the more they can talk to us about their experiences,” previous QDU Vice-President Nimai Koneru, HealthSci’24, said in an interview with The Journal.
QDU students believe that rational argumentation and communication are useful for incarcerated people at parole board hearings and in future job interviews after release. In sessions, incarcerated students learn about different types of arguments and how to refute them, run drills, and practice debating. They receive from the QDU volunteers each week to improve their skills.
This year, an incarcerated person told QDU volunteer Koneru a past participant was granted parole, in part because of the skills he learned from the students.
“People are actually getting parole because of some of the skills that they’re learning here,” Koneru said.
QDU doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, debating the criminal justice system and prison abolition during their sessions. According to QDU Prison Outreach Director Tristan Jones, HealthSci ’25, the inmates are always most engaged when practicing debates.
“When I first went in there, I had a bias that I think most people have, which is that prisoners are brutish, and they’re not interested in learning,” Jones said in an interview with The Journal. “But that was very quickly done away within our very first session.”
Koneru and Jones both acknowledge their privilege to have learned about the debate in the first place, having attended funded international competitions, and are happy to give back in some way.
“A lot of these [debating] skills I’ve had the privilege of gaining just by going to Queen’s, just by nature of having the opportunities here, I feel like there’s almost a responsibility to give back,” Koneru said.
According to Koneru, incarcerated people have much to teach students about debate—they often use arguments Koneru wouldn’t conceive of based on their lived experiences.
Working within the prison system comes with challenges. After preparing a presentation for their first session last year, the QDU team was told they weren’t allowed to bring any technology into Collins Bay. Now, QDU brings in booklets for the inmates to follow along with since volunteers can’t bring laptops or phones in.
Sometimes for weeks at a time, Koneru and the team will arrive at Collins Bay only to find out the prison is on lock down, and the session for that week is cancelled. It has been difficult to get new volunteers on-boarded due to the delays in background checks and fingerprinting.
Despite difficulties, Jones is proud of the fact QDU is giving back to the Kingston community.
“Eventually a lot of these people will be coming back into our society. If we have any free time, [we might as well] take that time to ease their transition back into society,” he said.
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