Alberta Report/Western Report, Edmonton, 8 January 1996
Crime and no punishment
Reformers push for a hard-right revolution in Canada's soft-touch prisons
By Celeste McGovern
(extracts)
Jack Linklater, warden of the Edmonton institution, was not taking any chances last month. As boss of a maximum security penitentiary that houses some of Canada's most dangerous and heinous criminals, Mr. Linklater has an occupational aversion to unnecessary risk. However this time his fretting focused on politicians, not convicts. Three Reform Party members of parliament were scheduled to visit his prison. The chief jailer issued an earnest memo to his staff. "These gentlemen are known to be ardent critics of the CSC (Correctional Service of Canada)," he wrote of MPs Art Hanger, Randy White, and Myron Thompson. "I do not want inmates lying around doing nothing (not that this would happen anyway)," directed Mr. Linklater. Just to be sure that his prison inmates didn't look listless, he ordered the institution's snow blowers tucked out of sight and the offenders put to work. "Push shovels are more appropriate. Buy them if we need them."
Warden Linklater's public relations endeavour backfired, however. His memo was leaked to the press and the public reaction was one of eye-rolling amusement. "It's not surprising," says Reform justice critic Hanger. "Everyone knows that our prison system is a joke."
If everyone doesn't know, they may find out. MP White has visited more than a dozen of Canada's 43 federal prisons, where inmates serve sentences of two years to life for crimes ranging from fraud to first-degree murder. The forays are key to a Reform campaign aimed at exposing to public view the cushy conditions and soothing methods of the jail system. Ordinary Canadians believe that prison has to do with punishment for crimes, says Mr. White. But the Correctional Service of Canada, a federal department that spends more than one billion tax dollars each year running prisons, is of an entirely different mind. It views the more than 14,000 offenders in its charge as incarcerated citizens, not convicted criminals. There is no room for punishment in the modern Canadian prison, which warehouses inmates in a style that many law-abiding Canadians would envy.
To date, Mr. White has compiled a list of 25 "absurdities" in the penal system -- a collection of rights, amenities and benefits that are available to prisoners of every stripe. They include:
-- Free room and board. It costs taxpayers an average $48,000 each year to house a criminal in a federal prison and up to $80,000 to keep a high-security prisoner like Paul Bernardo, convicted of murdering teenagers Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy. But inmates, whether wealthy or not, don't pay a penny towards their costly keep.
-- Free time. "A criminal in the system can only be asked to work, not made to work," says Mr. White. "It's his right to 'just say no'.
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-- Conjugal visits. Every prison features at least one comfortably furnished "cottage" or "trailer home" where inmates can have "private family visits." Every two months, inmates can schedule up to 72 hours for sex.
-- Television. Taxpayers pay more than $1 million per year providing cable television in prisons. At Edmonton Institution, inmates do contribute some of their program pay for a satellite service that brings them all the regular programming plus a few perks including the Discovery Channel, the Arts and Entertainment Channel, CNN, TSN, MuchMusic and more.
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-- An elaborate system of rights and grievance outlets. Inmates are encouraged to know their rights and complain if they are not met. In 1993-94 federal prisoners launched 836 official grievances. It's a busy business. The incomplete figure for 1994-95 was 1,156.
-- Free legal aid. Victims of crime may have to pay for a lawyer if they want one. But inmates in prison have unlimited access to legal services and legal resources must be made available to them on request through the prison library. Serial child molester and murderer Clifford Olson has sued the federal government more than 30 times for everything from being refused the "right" to join the Book of the Month and Tape Clubs and for "cruel and unusual punishment" because he was allowed to exercise for an hour a day only. In a rare move, Olson was declared a "vexatious litigant" in 1994 but he was back in court, at the provincial level, last month protesting a prison transfer.
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Mr. White prophesies that simply finding out about all these privileges and grants for convicted criminals will stir ordinary Canadians into demanding change in the prison system. Until now, he adds, the correctional system has veiled itself in a cloak of secrecy and successfully deflected public criticism. Warden Linklater's snow-shovelling memo, the parliamentarian comments, is in itself relatively minor. Yet the manipulation aptly illustrates "a system unto itself that puts on an image to outsiders that is not there to insiders." However, the desire to cover up laxity is also evidence that the people in charge of the system know they have something to hide. Says Mr. White, "It's symbolic of a system that is trying to protect itself from a changing outside world."
Recent polls suggest he is right. A Maclean's/CBC poll published last week found that 51% of respondents believe that sentencing and punishment will be harsher on criminals by the year 2000. And a Reader's Digest poll published last August indicated that 59% of Canadians favour tougher sentences and harsher penalties for criminals rather than more programs.
Even if Canadians are beginning to bristle at the way prisons are managed, the system itself is so steeped in decades of liberal dogma that real change would have to be nothing short of revolutionary. Still, there is hope for reform. The criminal-coddling practices that progressively saturated this country's jails over the last half-century were themselves revolutionary in their time.
The 1938 report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, known as the Archambault Report, listed 88 recommendations for change in the penal system. No single item, however, was as significant as the document's overall shift in focus towards "rehabilitation" and away from punishment. "It is admitted by all the foremost students of penology that the retributive character of punishment should be completely eliminated" because, its authors thought, "the deterrent effect of punishment alone ... is almost valueless."
The Archambault Commission is generally recognized as Canada's harbinger of prison reform in this century but it was not until after World War II that its recommendations were slowly put into practice. According to one retired prison guard, who declines to be named, corporal punishment was used (though infrequently) when he started working as a "screw" in 1960. While this man was on duty at the B.C. Penitentiary (now closed), a rapist received what was likely Canada's last court-ordered flogging with a cat-o'-nine-tails.
The cat, so-named for its splay of nine whips, sometimes lead-tipped, gave way to the "paddle" or "strap" -- a rubber-coated piece of heavy webbing with holes to prevent air from acting as a cushion between it and a prisoner's buttocks. The device was used chiefly to maintain discipline within the prison system. A recalcitrant offender first faced internal charges in a prison-run hearing; if found guilty of violating prison rules or disrespecting guards, he was taken to Keeper's Hall. There the inmate would be stripped, blindfolded (or given dark goggles to conceal the identity of the punishing guard), secured to a holding board, and fixed with a protective belt round his waist to protect his internal organs from stray blows. A physician was required to be on hand to stop the punishment if the lashing threatened to permanently injure the inmate. Often the full sentence of say, 10 strokes, was suspended by half and the remaining five could be forgiven if a prisoner was well-behaved. The effect was "model prisoners," according to the prison guard, whose practical experience contradicts academic sociological theories that punishment can't improve human behaviour.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the push for "prisoners' rights" intensified dramatically. Even the Archambault Report had recommended that corporal punishment be maintained for internal order. Nonetheless flogging was banned in 1967 and all corporal punishment formally ended five years later. In 1971, then-solicitor general Jean-Pierre Goyer, head of the correctional service, stated the penal system's new intentions openly. The notion of punishment in prison, already a shadow, vanished entirely from officialdom's correctional vocabulary. "We have decided to stress the rehabilitation of prisoners rather than the protection of the public," Mr. Goyer, a Liberal, told Parliament. A flood of psychologists and social workers lined up at prison gates for jobs -- and got them. Hard labour in jail was dumped in favour of job-generating therapy and "getting a program."
By 1976, as a National Film Board of Canada interviewer put it, "over and over, we hear that prison, at least ideally, should 'cure' or at least 'readapt' the criminal -- it should be more 'therapeutic' than 'punitive'." In the same documentary Raymond Boyer, a founding member of the Prisoners' Rights Office of the Human Rights Association of Quebec, said that, "The only right that a person sentenced to a prison term should lose is that of circulating freely in society. All other denials are repressive and punitive."
The penal system of the 1990s is Mr. Boyer's dream come true. A 147-page handout given to inmates upon arrival at Edmonton Institution includes a section entitled "Your rights." It reads: "It is important for you to know that as an offender, you keep the rights that you would have as a free citizen, except for those that are limited as a necessary result of your incarceration. Your loss of freedom in itself is the punishment for your offence."
"Prisons are not for punishment," explains Chuck Andrews, Edmonton Institution's chief of education and training, echoing a sentiment that is repeated like a mantra by correctional officials everywhere. "We don't whip people or chain them up against walls anymore. When individuals receive a term of incarceration, that is their punishment. By law, they have to be given everything they are entitled to on the street, except where it threatens security."
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