‘Hardening up’ jails doesn’t help prisoners’ rehabilitation: senator
Sen. Kim Pate doesn’t pull any punches when describing Canada’s prison system.
At best, she says, our jails have become a warehouse for the country’s poor, its minorities and those who suffer from mental illness. At worst, she says the prisons brutalize inmates and send them back into their communities worse off than when they were first incarcerated.
“We know that the people who end up in prison aren’t from another planet, they’re from our communities by and large,” said Pate, a member of the Standing Committee on Human Rights. “And unless they die in prison, they’ll be coming back to our communities. ... If the goal is truly to rehabilitate these people, we’re failing them.”
The commission was in Quebec this week as part of its fact-finding mission about the rights of Canada’s 23,000 federal inmates.
Pate and four of her colleagues in the Senate toured the Joliette Institution for Women and the Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Penitentiary to speak with prisoners and guards and get a glimpse of life behind bars.
More than any of her colleagues on the commission, Senator Pate can speak to the devastating effects of lockup. In her previous career, as a prisoners’ rights advocate, Pate saw prisoners stripped naked and thrown into a cell not much larger than a phone booth. She heard stories of beatings, of relentless electroshock therapy and of one inmate who tried to gouge her own eyes out.
And while those are extreme cases, Pate says prisons still need serious reform. The amount of people who entered prison with a mental illness nearly doubled between 1997 and 2010, according to Correction Services Canada.
“The mental health issue is overwhelming and it’s overwhelming the system,” said Senator Jim Munson, chair of the committee.
Pate says too many aren’t getting the services they need.
“The system keeps hardening up,” said Pate. “We’re going to more and more restrictive measures, more bells and whistles — cages, razor wire, eye-in-the-sky monitoring — as opposed to human and personal intervention. We know that is the least effective and most expensive way to deal with prisoners.”
On Thursday, Pate and three fellow Senators heard from community groups in Montreal who say too many young people plead guilty to crimes they may not have committed because they can’t afford legal costs. They added that the system does a poor job preparing inmates for life after prison.
“Some of the guys we work with, they’re really nervous about coming home after so many years away. It’s a real culture shock, it can be unsettling,” said Teeana Munro, a community worker at DESTA in Little Burgundy. They come back to a neighbourhood like Little Burgundy and they don’t see the same faces, they don’t see the people who cared for them, their families aren’t around anymore.
“We work with the black community and there’s a problem of racial bias in the system. I was talking to an administrator at a halfway house and she said, ‘You know, to be real with you, black inmates don’t get day parole. It just doesn’t happen.’ So, without that gradual transition into the community, you’re sort of just thrown back on the street without much support.
“In many cases, it’s as though the world has moved on without them. At DESTA, we try to be that grounding force for them, to support them, but it’s hard.”
What’s unknown to a lot of the outside world, according to Munson, is that most inmates have day jobs and lead productive lives inside the prison walls. The women at the Joliette penitentiary, for instance, make men’s underwear and other facilities run industrial laundering services.
“The problem is, they’re learning skills and trades that are being phased out of the modern economy,” said Munson. “You see welding and so on and so forth but because of the lack of computer technology on the inside, the teaching of new and innovative things for these prisoners is basically nonexistent.
“You have people from the Gaspé who end up in a halfway house in Montreal with $50 in their pocket and no experience in the modern workplace. Many feel they’re being set up to fail.
“Whether you like it or not, these people will be your neighbours again. And they’re people who, from what I’ve seen, live with a great deal of regret and guilt. They acknowledge their crimes and they just want a second chance. The challenge now to try to make the kind of change that could allow for that.”