IT'S TIME TO FIX PRISONS

"Life inside Canadian penitentiaries should mirror Canadian society,
and the core concept should be the same: Earn your own way."

With these words, yesterday's report by Rob Sampson on Canada's
federal prison system sets the stage for the first meaningful reform
of a public institution that has lost its way.

From the day in the early 1970s when Liberal solicitor general Jean
Paul Goyer announced that the rehabilitation of prisoners rather than
the safety of the public would be the key mission of the Correctional
Service of Canada (CSC), the inmates began to run the show.

That change in the corporate culture of CSC ushered in what we have
today -- a prison system awash in drugs, devoid of discipline, where
guards are abused and prisoners rarely rehabilitated.

Sampson recommends that we begin prison reform at the root -- by
amending the legislation under which CSC conducts its business. He
and his panel want to redraft the Corrections and Conditional Release
Act (CCRA), to include a new section defining inmates'
responsibilities while in prison. That is tremendously important.

The current legislation, passed in 1992, is prescriptive about what
we must do for inmates. The proposed changes to the CCRA would be
clear about inmate accountability. The panellists felt that the
CCRA's existing principles "do not meet current and future
challenges" facing the prison system and they are right.

Based on this crucial retooling of the CCRA, Sampson is recommending
some basic changes in how CSC does its business. Statutory release,
the practice of automatically paroling inmates after they have served
two-thirds of their sentence, should end. So should accelerated
parole review, the practice of releasing certain inmates after they
serve one-sixth of their sentence.

In keeping with the principle of prisoner accountability, which
should be added to the CCRA, inmates will have to earn their parole.

To help inmates, 70% of whom have no meaningful work history or
education, Sampson is recommending work programs inside the prison.

The Sampson panel also wants CSC to eliminate drugs from Canada's
prisons. As it is, 70% of federal inmates regularly use drugs and
CSC's "zero tolerance" of drugs is purely rhetorical.

Since substance abuse is part of the criminogenic profile of the vast
majority of federal inmates, looking the other way on drug use inside
our prisons is equal to allowing criminal lifestyles to continue.
That's why the Sampson panel wants to use technology, more drug
detector dogs, thorough personal searches, and better perimeter
security to keep the drugs out. If all else fails, and the drugs keep
showing up inside, Sampson is recommending non-contact visits. That
is a long overdue recognition of the fact that most drugs that come
into federal prisoners are walked in through the front door by visitors.

So here is where we are: The Harper government has the chance to make
prisoners as accountable for their actions while in prison as the
current legislation details the system's duties to inmates. The
government has a chance to give work skills to inmates who currently
enjoy three-hour work days and all too often leave prison with no
skills to sell. The government has a chance to protect the public by
making parole discretionary and earned instead of automatic. Finally,
the government has a chance to rid federal prisoners of access to an
illicit product that is crippling them -- drugs.

It's a long way from porn and pizza parties. Could we be too far from
that kind of prison system?