A debate heavy on outrage, light on facts
Few people want to really think about prison, or at least think very hard, and this is where we come to Frank Caputo. He’s a Conservative MP, one of the party’s critics of justice and the attorney general, and a former Crown prosecutor and parole officer. He also recently toured the Quebec prison that houses Paul Bernardo, one of Canada’s true monsters. And Caputo said he was shocked, shocked, at what he saw.
Caputo was given a tour of Bernardo’s empty cell at La Macaza prison, northwest of Montreal, and was horrified to find … empty margarine containers drying on a top bunk, mint chocolate bars and an electric razor. Caputo said in a seven-plus-minute video, “You could see all these things, and it looks like somebody very ordinary lived in that jail cell. And yet he’s a monster.” He told a story about seeing Bernardo, and coming eye to eye with the devil.
But what really outraged him was that the prison had an outdoor hockey rink, and tennis court. Were you a sitting MP who was familiar with the justice system, what would you do? Would you ask for more information? Or would you commission what looks like an AI graphic that reads “Canadian Taxpayer Funded Serial Killer Pick-Up Hockey” and tweet it out, claim that Bernardo was living better than most Canadians, and, once your claims were contested, offer to debate the head of Correctional Service Canada?
Caputo, regrettably, did the latter. Welcome to social media outrage theatre, prison rules. Of course, there were problems with Caputo’s story. The Canadian Press called up
Correctional Service Canada and asked about it, and was told the hockey rink hadn’t had ice in two years, the tennis court was not operational either and, in a later update, that Caputo’s eye-to-eye moment with Bernardo was in fact at either end of a hallway. Oh, and it appears the rink isn’t new.
This fact-checking could not be allowed to stand, so the CPC did its usual dance of trying to discredit straightforward media work. Andrew Scheer, the Conservative House leader, called the CP piece biased, because clearly no ice meant the federal government was inept. Caputo said there was no ice because it was spring, and 15 C. (The temperature part was true.) Pierre Poilievre spokesperson Sebastian Skamski and Toronto Sun columnist Brian Lilley both claimed CP had reported the rink didn’t exist; Caputo tweeted out two pictures of the rink and wrote, “Here is the hockey rink for serial killers that the Trudeau government says doesn’t exist.”
Again, CP called the arm’s-length federal agency in charge of prisons and reported what they said. Nobody reported there was no rink. Dig any further, guys, and people will think you’re tunnelling under the fence.
But even leaving aside these particular exaggerations, fabrications and blatant attempts to relitigate reality in real time, there are serious issues at play here. Which makes the unserious social media obfuscation worse.
Why is it a problem if there is a hockey rink in a medium-security prison? Or a tennis court? Or a commissary? Caputo claimed he was not arguing for inhumane punishment, but when a CSC spokesperson told CP, “It should also be noted that opportunities to participate in recreational activities is not unique to La Macaza, and can be found in other institutions,” Caputo sarcastically replied, “please, tell us more!”
As for living better than most Canadians, La Macaza was a military base, then a school for Indigenous children, and is now a medium-security prison with a secure perimeter fence that specializes in sexual offenders, and calling that swanky is perverse and insulting. It’s not Club Med. If you are a party that complained about public health restrictions but say a literal prison is better than living in the rest of Canada, you may not be arguing in good faith.
But more, it’s a misunderstanding of what prison is for.
“We send people to jail as punishment, not for punishment,” says veteran Ottawa-based public defender Michael Spratt, a former president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association. “Jail’s not about vengeance. Jail’s not about dialing the conditions of incarceration to correspond with public outrage.”
Look, the thirst for vengeance is understandable. In 2021, three decades after his crimes, the parole hearing board still deemed Bernardo a high risk of sexual reoffending; he should never be allowed to step outside a prison for the rest of his life.
It’s easy to want to punish people who have committed that kind of evil, and Bernardo earned whatever suffering he has. You can reasonably argue Bernardo should be in a maximum-security prison, with fewer amenities and less relative freedom. You just can’t argue it makes anyone any safer.
But not every inmate is Paul Bernardo, and the idea of recreation in prisons is that some offenders can be rehabilitated, or at the very least, many will eventually be released. Experts will tell you controlled recreation creates a safer environment in prison: as a reward, as an outlet. And the current legislation regarding levels of incarceration comes in the shadow of the Harper government’s attempts to get tough on crime getting struck down or clawed back on Charter grounds. So Correctional Service Canada, and the staff who run prisons, make those calls.
“Having politicians decide based on what’s popular and what is politically advantageous on the treatment of individual prisoners is a recipe for abuse, or is a recipe for disaster,” says Spratt. “If there’s any place that we should have expert gatekeepers decide when someone’s classification should be adjusted, and when it’s safe to do so, it’s in facilities with literal gates.”
As Spratt notes, the severity of punishment or conditions doesn’t deter crime anywhere but in corporate situations, where people are making risk-benefit analysis. Slamming the vengeance button, or the tough-on-crime button, doesn’t usually reduce crime. And that quote that gets wrongly attributed to Dostoevsky — that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons — is at least partly true.
But that would require serious discussion of serious issues in this country, in the interests of justice. It would be nice if our more of our politicians seemed interested in that at all.