National Post (National Edition)
Faux Nation inmates make farce of prison
IComment
t has been seven months since we learned of Correctional Service Canada’s jaw-dropping decision to transfer Terri-lynne Mcclintic to a zero-security healing lodge for Indigenous women, just eight years into her minimum 25-year sentence for the first-degree murder of eight-year-old Tori Stafford.
Well, OK, not exactly “zero security.” It’s just that actually preventing escapes is not within security staff ’s purview — as was helpfully illustrated by inmate Joely Lambourn, who walked away from the facility amidst the controversy.
Remarkably, in the bewildering cavalcade of things that were wrong with her move — which was later reversed after Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale requested (cough, cough) CSC review the matter — the fact that Mcclintic is almost certainly not in any meaningful sense Indigenous could barely crack the top five.
Over the weekend, Isabelle Hachey of La Presse brought us another astonishing tale from Canada’s prison system. This time, inmates’ Indigenous identity is the crux of the issue. “Hundreds of Québécois criminals are declaring themselves Aboriginal as soon as they enter prison,” Hachey reported, which “gives them certain advantages, such as more frequent spousal visits and faster reassessment of their security classification” — i.e., faster access to the exit door. Other perks, at least in some institutions, seem to include single cells rather than double. For the record, a CSC spokesperson says “offender access to (outside) contact is offered equally” — but Quebec’s inmates seem to think otherwise.
How, you may be asking, does CSC check these claims to Indigenous identity? Or perhaps you’ve already guessed.
“The principle of self-reporting” applies, a different CSC spokesperson told La Presse. She conceded some inmates might “perceive an advantage” in joining a “Pathways Unit” — described by CSC as “a living environment that addresses the cultural and spiritual needs of First Nations, Métis and Inuit offenders” — but “very quickly,” she bravely averred, “they will realize it is not a privilege, but rather a path of healing that requires full involvement.”
Those fully involved in navigating their difficult paths to healing include Casper Ouimet, leader of the Trois-rivières Hells Angels during its bloody war with the rival Rock Machine biker gang in the late 1990s — and more recently a self-declared Métis. Ouimet is doing 27 years for conspiracy to murder, among other things. “I have always been close to nature,” he told Hachey, which is nice. But genealogists from the Alliance Autochtone du Québec told her you need to go back 13 generations to find his first actual Indigenous ancestor.
As you might expect, the situation is going down rather poorly with some actual Indigenous inmates. One told Hachey it’s highly uncomfortable to participate in a healing circle of 18 people when you know 15 of them are taking the piss. Another likened to rape the idea of white prisoners taking advantage of programs specifically designed to mitigate (among other things) the lasting harms of the white-designed residential school system. Another, a real live Mohawk, said he couldn’t even get into the Pathways Unit at the medium-security Cowansville Institution because it was full of the self-declared.
An obvious solution would be to ask inmates to verify their Indigenous identity before admitting them to programming designed specifically and exclusively for Indigenous inmates. Some might say that’s so “obvious” that the word “obvious” hardly suffices.
It’s obvious in the way it was obvious CSC shouldn’t have sent the ghoul who facilitated the rape of Tori Stafford and then murdered her with a claw hammer, and more recently savagely assaulted a fellow inmate at a medium-security prison, to a facility from which she could literally walk away unopposed.
Clearly CSC needs some outside guidance on these matters. But the fundamental problem here is baked firmly into Canada’s justice system.
From a rehabilitative standpoint, culturally specific programming makes great sense. And culturally specific special treatment such as early release makes sense as a means of reducing Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system. The Supreme Court ruled in R v. Gladue that judges must pay “particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” in considering alternatives to incarceration, and CSC claims to have adopted “Gladue principles” across its institutions.
But a goal of reducing Indigenous overrepresentation, as opposed to the number of Indigenous inmates per se, requires non-indigenous inmates to stick around. It’s one thing to say Indigenous criminals deserve less harsh sentences and conditions of incarceration than the norm. It’s more difficult to explain why, as a result, non-indigenous prisoners should endure harsher treatment than Indigenous ones — especially if their lives are marked by the same sorts of early-life trauma that the Gladue principles are meant to mitigate, which of course many inmates’ are.
It’s perverse that any one inmate’s bloodlines should bear heavily on conditions of incarceration as fundamental to justice and public safety as when they get out. The idea of offering Inmate A fewer spousal visits than Inmate B because Inmate A isn’t Indigenous — whether by design or by accident — defies any rehabilitative logic. But that’s the country we live in. It creates many perverse incentives, as we are seeing. CSC should not be in the business of indulging those who decide to take advantage, and someone in charge should really tell it to stop.