CANADA'S INHUMANE PRISON PLAN

In the past two years, as regular readers in this space would know,
thanks to my gracious hosts in the U.S. government, I have had what
could be called extensive hands-on experience of the American
correctional system. I have been tutoring and teaching fellow
prisoners in English, and in U.S. history. And some of them have
taught me how to read music, play the piano, keep fit, diet sensibly
and assimilate some local folkways, while I have been fighting my way
through the courts toward a just disposition of the few remaining
(unfounded) charges that bedevil me. The fact that all my life any
definition of Canada's virtue and distinctiveness has prominently
included references to civility and decency explains my alarm and
outrage at finally reading the three-year-old report on the
Correctional Service of Canada, misleadingly titled "A Roadmap to
Strengthening Public Safety."

As so often in other fields, this document seeks to import to Canada
much of the worst of American practice, and none of the best, unless
Canada now idealizes gratuitous official severity.

I have not succumbed to an inverse Stockholm Syndrome, and become an
apologist for the convicted community. But I disbelieve even more
fervently than I did before my sojourn among them, in the Manichaean
process of baiting, dehumanization and stigmatization promoted by the
Roadmap, and similarly inspired correctional nostrums.

In my present abode, I have met many rather dodgy people, but none
whose ethics I consider inferior to some prosecutors and judges I
have encountered in the last few years. And I have met many fine, as
well as some mediocre and poor correctional officers, but few who
rise above the level of benign non-skilled labour, profoundly under
qualified to practise untrammeled social engineering on those
entrusted to them.

I believe, civilly and theologically, in the confession and
repentance of wrongdoing; in the prosecution and punishment of crime,
and in a maximum reasonable effort by the state to protect the
public, especially from threats to person and property. But I also
believe that everyone has rights, including the unborn, demented,
incurably ill, military adversaries and the criminal, and that the
rights of those whose entitlements are for any reason circumscribed,
are not inferior for being narrower, and should be as great as they
practically can be, without violating the rights of others.

This Roadmap--which was released in 2007, and which the Harper
government began officially responding to in its budget in 2008,
setting out a five-year plan -- turns the humane traditions of Canada
upside down. It implicitly assumes that all who are convicted are
guilty and have no remaining claim to decency from the state, and
that treating confinees accordingly is in the interest of the legally
unexceptionable majority.

The Roadmap does not mention prisoners' rights, beyond basic food,
shelter, clothing and medical care, and assumes that they are
probably not recoverable for society and that the longer they are
imprisoned, the better it is for society. Almost no distinction is
made between violent and non-violent offenders.

Of course, great caution must be shown in the reintegration into
society of violent criminals. But the objective of the penal system
must be to return those capable of functioning licitly in society as
quickly as practical, allowing also for straight punitive or
retributive penalties, but not for mindless vengeance. The whole
system must be guided by the fact that the treatment of the accused
and confined has been recognized by ethicists and cultural historians
for centuries as one of the hallmarks of civilized society.

The Roadmap holds that anything beyond the necessities for physical
survival must be "earned." Traditionally, the punishment is supposed
to be the imprisonment itself, not the additional oppressions of that
regime, and the proverbial debt to society is paid when the sentence
has been served; it does not continue as a permanent Sisyphean
burden. In the interests of eliminating illegal drugs in prison, the
authors of the Roadmap want all visits to be glass-segregated, no
physical contact. This is just a pretext to assist in the destruction
of families and friendships.

The importation of contraband by prisoners' visitors can be stopped
by strip-searching the prisoners before they leave the visitors
centre, as happens to us here, unless the prison staff, who have the
unfathomable delight of inspecting us au naturel, are on the take,
which is, of course, the problem, as correctional officers in many
prisons are frequently caught smuggling, and aren't well enough
trained to command higher salaries to make them more resistant to
temptation. It is a problem, but it will not be solved by targeting
unoffending relatives of inmates. The Roadmap also has naively
exaggerated confidence in certain types of scanning devices.

It also recommends unspecified concentration on generating employment
skills, which is sensible, except that it is specifically foreseen
that they will shoulder aside other programs of more general
education, substance abuse avoidance and behavioural adaptation.

I am no hemophiliac bleeding heart, but non-violent people can
sometimes be helped to abandon illicit practices by some of these
programs. No useful purposes will be served by cranking back into the
world unreconstructed sociopaths who can fix an air conditioner or
unclog a drain. The Roadmap even asks for research to be undertaken
that will support this recommendation, an inversion of the usual
sequence in the determination of policy.

There is a demand for investment of over $1-billion in new and larger
prisons, (an insane extravagance), and for sharply longer sentences,
mandatory minimum sentences, and "earned parole" in place of
supervised release after two-thirds of the sentence, in the absence
of misconduct that would militate against such comparative
liberality. In practice, this means imprisonment at the pleasure of
the carceral establishment for the maximum time possible. (Prisoners
cost $40,000 per year to keep.) All of these draconian measures have
been tried and have failed in the United States.

As Michael Jackson and Graham Stewart point out in their excellent
essay in the current Literary Review of Canada, "Fear-Driven Policy,"
this plan would fall especially heavily on native people, who already
comprise nearly seven times the percentage of imprisoned Canadians
than they do of the whole population.

The Roadmap is the self-serving work of reactionary, authoritarian
palookas, what we might have expected 40 years ago from a committee
of southern U.S. police chiefs. It is counter-intuitive and
contra-historical: The crime rate has been declining for years, and
there is no evidence cited to support any of the repression that is
requested. It appears to defy a number of Supreme Court decisions,
and is an affront, at least to the spirit of the Charter of Rights.

The Canada I remember and look forward to returning to should do
exactly the opposite. Prison is an antiquarian and absurd treatment
of nonviolent law-breakers. It only continues because it has.

The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent
criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by
closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded
convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers,
hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should
serve their sentences by contributing honest work to
government-insured employers.

Canada would save a billion dollars annually in prison costs and the
employers of the penitent-workers would save $2-billion annually, a
tremendous shot in the arm to national productivity. Many of the
prisons could be recon-figured as assisted housing for the homeless
and slum-dwellers. Canada would again be a model of the innovative
public policy pursuit of institutionalized decency and social reform.

The principle that the rape of the rights of the least is an assault
on the rights of all is attributed to Jesus Christ and is at the core
of Judeo-Christian civilization and the rule of law in both common
and civil law jurisdictions. And it is not just a tradition; there
are several million Canadians in families that have bitter memories
of personal or close relatives' encounters with the vagaries of
justice. They aren't a visible bloc, but this is not a political free lunch.

It is painful for me to write that with this garrote of a blueprint,
the government I generally support is flirting with moral and
political catastrophe. My respect for the Prime Minister prevents me
from being any more explicit here about the implications of failure
to reconsider the government's course on this issue.

The Roadmap is a bad plan to take Canada to a destination it should
not wish to reach.