Kingston Life magazine. March/April 2014. Go to  http://eedition.kingstonlife.ca/doc/kingston-life/_kl_feb2014/2014031001/#24Hope in Hell
Shouldn’t prisons make offenders better, not worse?

By Lawrence Scanlan

In the tiny chapel at Pittsburgh Institution, a prison just north of the city, stand three stained-glass windows made years ago inside notorious Kingston Penitentiary — some twenty-four kilometres to the southwest. Ten feet tall, the windows were damaged during a terrible riot in 1971 (and later repaired by a prisoner wrongfully convicted for murder).
I’m struck by one window: an iconic Christian image of the Holy Spirit depicting a dove, wings wide, casting light from above. Below is a line from the Bible: “for a helmet the hope of salvation.” The line is from Thessalonians: “But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love and, for a helmet, the hope of salvation.”
And I wonder: if the federal government continues its relentless campaign to ensure that prison time is hard time, can hope of salvation endure?
In the summer, I was invited to Pittsburgh Institution’s volunteer-appreciation night, along with about 36 others who come to the minimum-security facility to teach – victim empathy, yoga, meditation, conflict management, Bible classes. I had been spending some time with the prisoners’ book club, meeting in the chapel with the then chaplain, Ms. Kate Johnson.
In the officers’ mess, men in starched white linen uniforms served us no fewer than 15 delicacies, including spanakopita, miniature croissants and, for dessert, lemon tartlets. The men were proud and happy, having purchased and prepared the food themselves, and they seemed genuinely grateful.
As well, their choral group sang for us, including a song by The Beatles – With a Little Help from My Friends. And that’s how they viewed their guests – as friends. Over the course of the evening, the value of that friendship, and the hope it engenders, became powerfully clear.
But can hope and the hard line co-exist?
There are nine prisons in the Kingston area, and I have been inside six of them (always, I might add, as a volunteer or to research a book). A day inside – especially inside the higher security facilities – always leaves me drained, so palpable is the tension. My sense, though, is that this tension is now rising.
Justin Piché, an award-winning professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, has been tracking what he calls “the punishment agenda” the federal government is imposing on prisons. Essentially, he says, it’s now easier to be sent to prison and harder to get out, and conditions inside have gotten worse.
Piché cites as evidence of the latter the normalization of double-bunking – the practice of putting two prisoners in a space meant for one. Double-bunking is now at what Piché calls “an all-time high” of some 3,000 prisoners in federal prisons, or 20 per cent of the total – up from 6.1 per cent less than 10 years ago. At that time, the Correctional Service of Canada had stated its ambition to abolish cell-sharing, and for the obvious reasons: for their own sanity and safety, prisoners need time alone.
Even at Pittsburgh, a minimum-security institution, overcrowding is a concern. The prisoner population has gone from 250 (the rated capacity still cited on the web site) to 326 – an increase of more than 30 per cent – and members of the book club confirm that tension is rising as a result.
They say things have changed – for the worse. The 35 self-contained housing units have been reframed to provide double occupancy. Now eight to 10 men share a kitchen and a small living space. On the other hand, those with housemates who drive them batty (and social skills aren’t what get you into a place like this) can at least roam the grounds from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. (They must be in their bunks by midnight and they are counted hourly at night and five times during the day.) There is green space here, and there are no forbidding walls topped with razor wire.
But what if your housemate flicks the contents of his nose here and there, or snores, or turns constantly in his sleep in the steel bunk below you? Or has body odour or flatulence or, worse, has hepatitis C but casually leaves the sink bloody after shaving?
Overcrowding means less privacy, the men explained, and that means more tension and plummeting morale. There are more fights now (listed as “sports injuries” on official forms). When I was there, the wait to see prison chaplain Kate Johnson was two weeks long, and only two staff psychologists were available to treat the 326 men (many of whom are supposed to be dealing with the trauma of what they have done and/or what’s been done to them).
“The pressure valves in the system,” one prisoner told me, “are disappearing.”
Another said, “This place was supposed to be preparing us for the outside. It’s not. It’s poisoning us.”
**
Prof. Piché brings historical perspective to crowding. He describes what happened on April 14, 1971, when more than 500 prisoners rioted at Kingston Penitentiary, took six guards hostage and held control for four days while inflicting terrible damage – the stained glass was hardly the lone target. Fourteen “undesirables,” some of them sex offenders, were tied to chairs, covered with sheets and beaten with metal bars. Two died.
When order had been restored, a detective-sergeant with the Kingston police went inside the prison to investigate and found “a horrendous scene” awaiting him. “I have never seen anything like that in my life,” he told a local reporter.
After an inquiry confirmed that overcrowding was a leading factor, judges were allowed to hand out conditional sentences and alternatives to incarceration – especially to aboriginal prisoners. As long as offenders met certain conditions, they could live in the community.
Federal laws passed since, Justin Piché laments, are aimed at retributive punishment or what he calls “poke the bear” policies. “When you take hope away from people, what is there left?” he asks. “The moves are politically expedient, for they appeal to the federal government’s base. They win either way. If the prison system doesn’t blow up, they can say, ‘Look, our policies are working.’ If it does blow up, they can say, ‘Look, see all these dangerous people in prison? We have to build more prisons and ratchet up security’.”
Will history repeat itself? He hopes not, “but it’s a risk.”
**
The mission of the John Howard Society is “effective, just and humane responses to crime and its causes.” Catherine Latimer is the executive director and she says from her Ottawa office, “I can’t begin to tell you how bad it is. Overcrowding is bad in the federal system, it’s worse in the provinces and, in the remand centres, it’s a crisis.” In some parts of the prairies, forty-seven per cent of prisoners are double-bunked. Despite dropping crime rates, Ms. Latimer points out, sentences are getting lengthier and the capacity for parole has diminished. “How does all this benefit society?” she asks. “Where’s the rehabilitation?”
Ms. Latimer points to an article in the November 2013 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal that warned about overcrowding in prisons leading to the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and TB so that the already compromised physical health of many prisoners is imperiled while mental health programs inside prisons are stretched beyond capacity.
Those responsible for order in the prisons have their own fears about overcrowding. “The research is clear,” says Jason Godin, Ontario regional president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. “There is a direct correlation between violent incidents and increasing inmate populations. That means more violence in our prisons and increased danger for correctional officers.”
Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults nationally, he says, have risen 33 per cent in the past four years. At Millhaven Institution, the maximum security prison where Mr. Godin works, guards have deployed “lethal force” on prisoners six times in 18 months, resulting in one prisoner fatality.
“I have not seen that,” he says, “in my 20 years as a correctional officer.”
The Harper government clearly sees itself standing up for victims of crime (and there was more evidence of that in the recent throne speech with its promise of a Victims’ Bill of Rights), but are those victims pleased with tougher punishment for criminals?
Winnipeg mother Wilma Derksen certainly isn’t. In 1984, her 13-year-old daughter, Candace, was kidnapped on her way home from school and murdered. Only in 2007 was her killer charged and convicted (though a new trial in the case was ordered in October 2013).
Wilma Derksen has had ample time to ponder her experience and out of that have come two books (Have You Seen Candace? and Confronting the Horror) as well as two conclusions: Rage does not help with healing nor does inflicting more punishment on offenders. In fact, as she told The Winnipeg Free Press last March, this former victims’ rights advocate is extremely wary of being used as a political pawn.
In 1996, Derksen agreed to meet with prisoners inside Stony Mountain Institution north of Winnipeg. The thinking was that both parties would benefit: the prisoners might learn something about empathy, and Derksen could confront the rage she still felt. She lambasted the prisoners for the harm each of them had done and, to her great surprise, she got honest and thoughtful responses. As the evening unfolded, each side had meaningful questions for the other.
“The whole thing,” Derksen said, “just astounded me. It changed my life.”
The inmates were likewise hugely impacted. Prisoners created the Candace Derksen Fund to support services for victims and Derksen herself underwent a sea change in her thinking on victims’ services. She came to understand that while victims of crime need support and counselling to deal with their pain and suffering, longer and harsher sentences offer no relief.
At Pittsburgh Institution, Chaplain Kate Johnson did something similar. She taught a twelve-session course in empathy to 225 inmates, then had some of them meet with victims of crime. She called it “a deeply healing experience” for both groups. But no one is offering that program now. Overwhelmed with other issues, chaplaincy resources remain in disarray due to a series of government decisions (a hiring freeze, a privatization process) made in the past year.
Other moves have also caused upheaval. The greenhouse operation here was cut, along with the composting facility and the tree nursery and all the prisoner jobs that went with them. The ball diamond and track are shut down – the latter two facilities to make way for another 50-man housing unit. Many men fear that it, too, will be double-bunked.
**
Follow the dots, if you can. The crime rate in Canada has been steadily declining since peaking in 1991. Statistics Canada data show that the homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level in 46 years and the overall crime rate is at its lowest point since 1972. An aging population is largely credited for this trend. And as Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, puts it: “We’ve become a somewhat more civilized and more rights-conscious society.”
But tell that to Howard Sapers, Canada’s ombudsman for federal inmates. He finds nothing civilized in the federal government’s tough on crime policies that have introduced stiffer sentencing, mandatory minimum jail times and other strategies that are filling Canada’s prisons. Easier to get in, harder to get out. The ombudsman’s position as prison watchdog was created in the wake of the 1971 riot and Sapers warned in a speech in Toronto last November that Canadian prisons are just as dangerous, overcrowded, volatile and unpredictable now as they were then.
But that’s not how the federal government sees it. As I researched this piece, I tried, and failed, to elicit comments from both Minister of Justice Peter MacKay and Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney. But their press secretaries did respond to the Sapers speech. “We make no apologies for standing up for victims’ rights,” MacKay’s spokesperson told The Globe and Mail, while Blaney’s representative had this to say: “The crime rate has declined, we have closed prisons, and Canadian families feel safer in their communities.”
Howard Sapers and many others (certainly all those I interviewed for this piece) view overcrowding in prisons as a serious matter – as did Correctional Services Canada once upon a time. But CSC seems to have changed its mind. A document published on the corrections web site in November of 2012 and called “Review of the Prison Overcrowding and Double-Bunking Literature” begins: “The literature suggests there is not [italics mine] a strong relationship between institutional misconduct and crowding, but it does suggest that strategies are available to mitigate effects.”
But if there are no impacts, why say there are ways to deal with impacts?
**
Ms. Johnson is a Quaker, and the Society of Friends has a long history of work inside prisons. The blue tattoo on her arm suggests that whatever I thought a prison chaplain might look like, I was wrong. (Looks do deceive. At the dinner, I met several women who accompany men from Pittsburgh to church services at a nearby convent. One recalled being asked by a local politician what she did and replying cheerily: “I’m an escort.” She is also a nun – a member of the Sisters of Providence.)
At Pittsburgh, Ms. Johnson walked a fine line. After many years of counselling young people in trouble with the law, she obtained a master’s degree in restorative justice — for she had seen the pattern: Child victims grew up to become adult offenders. As a pastor, she felt broad compassion — for victims who have been hurt, for the men who have offended, and for the men and women who have donned the Correctional Service of Canada uniform.
During all my prison visits, I picked up some critical points of etiquette: calling someone “a goof” can get you killed, and a prisoner must never look inside another’s cell unless invited. I learned that guards are sometimes attacked by inmates high on drugs that guards themselves have smuggled inside. But I also learned that prisoners can be transformed when they have someone who believes in them. And that someone can be a guard.
“There are,” Ms. Johnson says, “a lot of hard-working people in corrections who care about the prisoners and even more about public safety. I hear all the time from staff members who feel that the increased population and decreased resources make their important work more dangerous and more difficult. Many of these officers are highly trained and have significant backgrounds in criminology or other social sciences. So much of what is happening right now flies in the face of what we know works best. Combine all that with the many pending job losses in the correctional services and you have a difficult time for staff and prisoners alike.”
**
The tendency of hardline politicians to demonize prisoners is appalling to Chris Brown. A gifted musician and producer (he has worked with Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies, Sarah Harmer and The Tragically Hip), he has volunteered his services to produce a CD entirely inside Pittsburgh Institution using the talent that’s here.
Why? “To help to humanize the condition of these men and to show their potential,” he told me at the dinner.
To Brown’s and others’ dismay, many traditional methods of allowing prisoners to express their humanity are being eroded. Kate Johnson tells me about research showing that family visits are a key indicator of a prisoner’s future success. But for security’s sake, the cars of visitors are now being searched, seniors and children are subjected to sniffer dogs and families may no longer bring in food. The predictable result? Fewer visits.
As well, demand on the library and gym at Pittsburgh Institution has mushroomed with the influx of new prisoners. The population at Pittsburgh has traditionally been a blend: younger men serving short sentences for relatively minor offences and older men who have served longer time for more egregious crimes but who have earned the privileges of this place. But now there’s a third population of edgier men who probably belong in medium-security prison.
Correctional officers have taken away the powdered coffee creamer and the hot sauce – the former for fear it might be used in bomb-making, the latter because it might be used as a pepper spray. Then, last summer, came a national directive: desserts are no longer to be sold in the grocery store. The loss of these items may seem like small things, but as Kate Johnson pointed out, “In prison, the small things are all you have.”
Pittsburgh Institution is a place where hope lives and dies. On the one hand, this “camp” (as some prisoners call minimum security) is as good as it gets and every prisoner knows that. On the other hand, if an incarcerated man screws up here, so close to the finish line, he has more to lose. The prisoners feel that staff has enormous power and if a prisoner snaps at what he believes to be an abuse of that power, he will land in hot water (perhaps Joyceville, the medium security prison right next door, or worse).
**
So what’s to be done? Unless Ottawa can be persuaded to alter course, it may be for the courts to impose a solution. Catherine Latimer notes that Canada’s judicial system, like the American one, features certain imperatives that allow the courts to lower prison populations when they exceed a certain level – lest incarceration constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.”
California prisons had to respond in 2011 when their system reached 137.5 per cent capacity. In many parts of Canada, we’re already there and beyond, Ms. Latimer says. Five facilities in Saskatchewan are at 200-per-cent capacity.
Quality of life matters to all of us, as does dignity in death. Consider this. Much of Kate Johnson’s work at Pittsburgh involved palliative care, as aged and gravely ill prisoners – who pose no threat to society – breathe their last in custody. Cruel and unusual punishment indeed.
Kate Johnson left the Institution to become the new chaplain at Queen’s University before students came back for the fall in 2013. “I wanted to leave Pittsburgh,” Ms. Johnson told me, “while I still loved it there and could feel good about what I had done.” For twenty years, she conducted research and worked with both victims and offenders, and she is convinced that harsh treatment of prisoners will backfire. “People ask,” she says, “why we should treat prisoners with any compassion at all. Research (North American and especially Scandinavian) tells us overwhelmingly that humane treatment of prisoners reduces crime. Lengthier sentences and harsher conditions have been shown time and again to be costly ways to increase crime — which means more victims. Some say the government’s motive is ideology, others say it’s about profit and privatization. Whatever the reason, they are leading Canadians down a dangerous path.”