Live From the House of the Dead: Lounging in hell
By I.M GreNada, Special to The Province
When the Canadian government recently sank spades on the biggest prison-building campaign since the days of Diefenbaker, the press carped loudly. Crime is lower than it’s been in 30 years, they howled. What no one took note of, though, was the role that Canadian correctional policies played in that. Especially since 1992, Canada has been a world leader in results-driven correctional programs, parole practices that reduce incidents of criminal re-offending, and lower rates of prison violence than any of its G8 partners. Whenever a developing nation needed help implementing a prison system focused on public safety, Canada was the first name in the Rolodex. How the correctional service realized this was by adopting one simple principle: Look south. Whatever the U.S. is doing, do the opposite.
While Americans were embracing “three strikes” legislation and mandatory minimum prison sentences, Canada was curbing its bad puppies with conditional sentencing, specialized aboriginal courts and electronic monitoring bracelets. When American jails were bursting at the seams with overcrowding, drugs and gang-related violence, Corrections Canada eliminated double-bunking, implemented successful methadone treatment and urinalysis programs, and redirected the energies of First Nations gang members (the largest piece of the prison-gang pie in Canada) into specialized programs that addressed aboriginal realities. While American prisons teemed with HIV and hepatitis C, Canadian prisons brought in condoms, syringe-bleaching stations and a prison tattoo program regulated by community health professionals. The result? Tens of thousand of ex-cons (the largest demographic of violent criminal offenders in any western society) coming out of prison healthy, drug-free, educated, supported, monitored and enlightened by correctional programs. Ninety per cent of those did not return to criminal activity — or at least not within five years. If all that seems good, then you’ve probably spotted the problem. It was too good.
Compared with some of Canada’s other human rights partners — like Brazil, Russia, India or China — our prisons are pretty plush. Cable TV, basketball courts and an inmate canteen are just the high notes. We also get fed three times a day. There are hot showers, mail and the ever-contentious practice of inmate pay; until recently, we even had library services and access to a daily newspaper. No armed insurrection. No mass prison rapes. If you’ve never slept a night in the crowbar hotel, it might sound like too much hotel and not enough crowbar. Until you sleep here.
A few years back, a con I knew named Mike was struggling with heroin addiction. He would do OK for a few weeks, and then fall. One time, after he’d been on a two-day bender, I went looking for him — just in case. With addiction, you just never know when a guy is ready to say “uncle.”
I found Mike barricaded in his cage — his 18-inch-wide cell window covered with cardboard. His stereo screeched out something called Cannibal Corpse while, like a hunting hyena, his eyes burned at me from the depths of hell. The only thing missing was the smell of rotting meat. I laughed.
“Are you happy, Mikey?”
The answer, while slow in coming, was sure and deliberate. “Nope,” my dope-sick friend said. “But I am f---in’ comfortable.”
For the first 100 years, Canadian prison was just like every other dungeon in the world. Convicts were whipped, worked to death, hung, starved as punishment, segregated in solitary confinement for years on end, and generally treated worse than animals. And why not? Acting like animals is what brought them here. Did they deserve any better? But in the 1970s, after an unprecedented decade of prison violence, Canadians began asking questions. Why so many murdered prison staff, hostage takings, multimillion-dollar riots? What seems to be the problem?
“There is a great deal of irony in the fact that imprisonment — the ultimate product of our system of justice — itself epitomizes injustice.” This was the salient finding of the 1977 Parliamentary Sub-Committee on the Penitentiary System in Canada. It was that committee’s call for reform — a call supported by all political parties — that changed the Canadian penitentiary from a torture chamber into a place where you just might get your act together; a place where you could start to think about how to live life with accountability. It’s a truth that, in their quasi-religious zeal to reintroduce suffering to the house of detention, Canadians have all but forgotten. So I guess it’s time to get comfortable.
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I.M GreNada is the pen name of a Canadian prisoner who has been serving life for murder since 1994. The people he writes about are real, but their names have been changed. You can read more about him at theincarceratedinkwell.org.
