From guard to prisoner
What’s prison like for a former Regina jail guard who crosses the line from keeper to kept?
The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal recently got a glimpse into Brent Miles Taylor’s life behind bars as it weighs legal arguments in a Crown appeal to boost his five-year prison sentence for drug smuggling.
“As a former jail guard, Brent faces unique challenges at the penitentiary from both staff and inmates,” his lawyers said in documents filed with the appeal court. “Because he effectively has a target on his back, he has spent much of his time in segregation,” they add.
For his own safety, the 51-year-old spent his first 90 days in segregation — generally 23½-hour a day lockup — while prison staff assessed where to place him. Now an inmate in the minimum-security Riverbend Insitution, next to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, Taylor is among what his lawyer James Korpan described in an interview Friday as “the least dangerous demographic of the people who are in the centre.
“He’s been a lot happier since he’s able to be working in minimum security,” added Korpan. “He wants to get through it as a model prisoner and get back out into the community.”
Once considered a model employee as a Regina Correctional Centre guard — working at times as a supervisor — he lost his job after he was charged in 2010 with taking drugs into the facility for two prisoners. Freedom ended last July when he was sent to prison for a raft of offences, including conspiracy, drug trafficking, and breach of trust by a public official. The first-time offender now has a record of 15 convictions — the 14 registered by the jury and one more charge he pleaded guilty to of breaching a non-contact order with a witness.
Two women testified at last year’s trial that they packed tobacco pouches with drugs, including morphine, cocaine, pot and hash oil, and gave them to Taylor, known as “the Eagle” to deliver to two inmates. In arguing earlier this month for a doubling of Taylor’s fiveyear term, federal Crown prosecutor Doug Curliss characterized the crime as an egregious breach of trust that put the entire jail at risk; Taylor’s lawyer maintained his client was, at worst, a “wilfully blind mule” with poor judgment.
The court has yet to rule on the Crown’s bid to extend Taylor’s stretch behind bars.
But for one fellow-inmate “who had a problem with the fact he was a jail guard,” Taylor has faced relatively little grief, Korpan said. He attributed that to the reputation Taylor garnered as a guard. Korpan recalled how during the trial, a former Regina jail inmate came to the courtroom to show support for the ex-guard that the inmate described as “the only white man who has ever treated me with respect.”
A Correctional Service of Canada report, filed by the defence, paints Taylor as a bit of a square peg in a round hole — with an inmate population that is largely economically and socially disadvantaged, poorly educated, suffering mental health issues, and drug and/ or alcohol addicted. The report is clear Taylor is none of those things so his correctional plan, outlining required programming, is punctuated by one, repeated phrase: “No Immediate Need.”
A Regina high school graduate with three years of university classes, Taylor played four years with the Regina Rams, two as part of championship teams. After university, he worked for Bosco Homes, which assisted troubled youths. When it closed, he became a correctional worker at the jail in 1987. After losing that job, he turned to construction work — skills he is now honing in prison.
Married for 22 years, Taylor has a stable and supportive family — many of whom packed the court during the trial and when the appeal was heard earlier this month even though he didn’t personally attend. Many visit him at the prison where Taylor now passes the time.
He is a regular Sunday churchgoer, receiving escorted absences from the prison to attend. He’s escorted by a prison chaplain, one of two who sent supportive letters for his appeal.
But there isn’t a mea culpa for his crimes. According to the submitted documents, Taylor accepts responsibility for poor judgment, maintains his mistake was being too trusting, and said he wouldn’t even know what drugs look like.
During the appeal hearing, Curliss, a veteran prosecutor of narcotics crimes, was skeptical that any jail guard would be unable to recognize drugs, especially one of his experience.