ROOMS WITH A VIEW: PART ONE

Lawn Chairs And Razor Wire, Barbecues And Armed Guards:
Bath Institution Sums Up The Canadian Struggle To Choose Between U.S.-Style
Hard Time And European-Style Rehab.

Sunshine pours down on a cluster of modest townhouses, drawing the
residents outside to engage in the rituals that typically greet the first
warm day of spring. A man fills a charcoal barbecue. Another strolls with
his shirt off, his pale skin shining. Neighbours talk at a picnic table. A
man sits on a plastic lawn chair, stroking a plump black-and-white cat. In
the distance, a ribbon of Lake Ontario can be seen glistening in the sun.

This scene could play out in any number of Canadian neighbourhoods, but
this is Bath Institution, a medium-security federal penitentiary west of
Kingston. If the inmates need any reminder of where they are, they have
only look to the twin fences that ring the property, both topped with razor
wire that sparkles like the lake. Or they can look in the other direction
and see Millhaven, the notorious maximum-security prison, where they have
all been and to which none wishes to return.

Townhouses and razor wire. Barbecues and armed perimeter patrols.
Lawnchairs and a good view of Millhaven. Bath is a study in contrasts, an
appropriate battle ground for two very different visions of crime and
punishment. The war is fought in battles over tougher sentences, parole,
boot camps, "Club Feds," "superjails," young offenders and other controversies.

Although we don't usually see these battles as connected to part of a
larger struggle, they are. In each case, Canadians are confronted with a
choice between the liberal European approach or the U.S. tough-on-crime
model. And each choice we make shifts the balance in one direction or the
other.

There are 119 people per 100,000 incarcerated in Canada. That's just a
fraction of the imprisonment rate of the United States, now swollen to 702
per 100,000 by 25 years of tougher criminal justice policies. But the
Canadian rate is higher than those of most western European countries. The
Irish rate is 78 per 100,000. Sweden's is 64; Finland's is 52. Germany's
incarceration rate is 97, France's, 75, and Italy's, 93. Only England and
Wales, at 124 per 100,000, incarcerate at roughly the same rate as Canada.

In Europe, incarceration is never the norm for criminal convictions, but in
the United States almost 70 per cent of felony convictions are punished
with incarceration.

While a precise comparison is difficult, Canada's indictable-offence
category is comparable to the U.S. felony category; of those convicted of
indictable offences in Canada, 54 per cent were incarcerated.

On sentence lengths, Canada is closer to Europe. In 1996, the average
sentence in U.S. states was five years, whereas in Europe fewer than five
per cent of sentences lasted for more than one year. In Canada, just 3.9
per cent of sentences are for more than two years. Two-thirds of sentences
given to women and half for men are for one month or less.

But when it comes to murder, Canadian punishments have followed the U.S.
trend. In the United States, death sentences and life without parole are
fairly common. In Canada, both first- and second-degree murder convictions
carry automatic life sentences, with parole eligibility only after 25 years
for first-degree murder and after 10 to 25 years for second-degree murder.
A first-degree murderer in Canada is on average likely to spend 28 years in
prison, a term in line with sentences in many U.S. states, and more than
double the European average.

That makes the contradictory scene at Bath all the more odd. The open
environment borrows from the European model that seeks to minimize the
length of imprisonment, provides generous and humane conditions, and
prepares offenders for safe re-integration to the community. And yet there
are 80 lifers at Bath, serving sentences more typical of the U.S. model of
justice that favours long sentences and harsh conditions. Bath, in other
words, is preparing for the safe return to the community of men who will be
incarcerated for decades to come.

This muddle may not be good public policy, but it is at least democratic.
Canadian popular opinion on justice issues is often contradictory and
volatile, capable of swinging from one view to its opposite, depending on
how issues are raised and questions are framed. Most European and U.S.
jurisdictions have clear popular support for one particular approach to
justice. Canada does not.

That divide is reflected in our institutions and politics. Largely on the
side of the European model are the federal prison system, federal
corrections law and some sections of the Criminal Code. Meanwhile, the
Ontario jail system and other sections of the Criminal Code are leaning
toward the U.S. model. The Canadian Alliance party and the Conservative
government of Ontario are vociferous advocates of the U.S. approach, while
the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois pull toward Europe. Atop it all, the federal
Liberal government awkwardly tries to straddle the divide.

It's unlikely that any of this weighs on the mind of Cliff Sullivan as he
sits on a lawn chair beside his townhouse at Bath Institution, petting
Boots, a very well-fed cat. Yet Mr. Sullivan is sitting directly on the
faultline. In a sense, he is the faultline. He was declared a dangerous
offender after being convicted of sexual assault with a weapon in 1979. For
a criminal like Mr. Sullivan to be enjoying this spring day in such
pleasant surroundings appals those who demand tougher treatment of
offenders. Even his cat would offend some.

When pictures of Karla Homolka in federal prison were released in 2000,
Ontario's minister of corrections, Rob Sampson, sent a scathing open letter
to the federal minister in charge of prisons, Lawrence MacAulay. Not only
was Mr. Sampson offended that Ms. Homolka was seen in what he called "an
evening gown," he was shocked that she was photographed cradling a cat.
"Only the federal Liberal government," he wrote, "must think it is
appropriate for the author of a heinous crime to keep household pets in
prison."

When even Boots the Cat can spawn outrage, the divide is truly fundamental.

Jim Marshall knows better than most the emotions and conflicts that prisons
ignite. Recently made the warden of Millhaven, Mr. Marshall was, at the
time of this interview, warden of Bath. Before that, he spent six years
designing and building Fenbrook, a minimum-security institution in Muskoka
that has become a favourite symbol for get-tough politicians denouncing a
corrections system.

But Mr. Marshall is not in the least apologetic. Nor is he a liberal
softie. With his high energy and rapid, blunt way of speaking, an
unmistakable aura of authority surrounds him. There is no mistaking that he
is the warden. And it has nothing to do with a uniform -- Mr. Marshall is
in fact dressed in a golf shirt and chinos, like a suburban accountant out
to play nine holes on a Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Marshall's casual dress is emblematic of his philosophy of corrections,
one he shares with the Correctional Service of Canada, the agency that runs
federal prisons. No one at Bath wears a uniform, not even the guards, who
are only distinguishable by ID badges and the radios and panic buttons they
carry. No weapons are allowed inside the fence.

Bath has a "very open 35 acres inside the fence," Mr. Marshall explains,
"so the whole premise of the place is what we call dynamic security, which
is getting to know people. We don't sit in a static post and watch them
walk by. Staff go to all areas of inmate activity."

Correctional officers are expected to talk with inmates, get to know them
and work with them. That's why there are no uniforms.

"Why do detectives in police agencies go out of uniform?" Mr. Marshall
asks. "Because people deal with people out of uniform much easier than they
do when the guy's standing at the door with a billy club and a blue shirt."

Nor are inmates taught respect for authority when surrounded by uniforms.
"It's the person that's inside the uniform, not the uniform. It's the way
you deal with people," he says. "We still hold people accountable here.
When I say, 'Get up and go to bed,' I don't need a uniform. That's the
basic skill."

Until 1994, Bath Institution was a minimum-security prison, but that year
its status was raised to medium-security, double fences with razor wire
were erected and armed guards were posted to man the outer perimeter.
Inside, it remained as open as before.

That unique history makes Bath an appropriate comparison with Avenal State
Prison, a minimum-medium security facility in California. The sharp
contrasts between the two highlight the differences between the U.S. and
European visions of what a prison should be.

Bath is home to 321 men; Avenal holds 6,500. Bath has 215 staff, a
workforce that's 67 per cent the size of the inmate population; Avenal has
1,500 staff, a complement 21 per cent as big as the inmate population.
Bath's staff and inmates wear civilian clothes; Avenal's staff wear
police-style uniforms and prisoners wear prison-issue blue jeans and blue
shirts. Bath's staff mingle with prisoners throughout the prison; Avenal's
staff, organized in a "paramilitary" structure, watch prisoners from
platforms and posts.

Bath's inmates live in traditional cells as well as townhouses as
comfortable as university residences; in Avenal, prisoners are housed in
concrete-and-steel barracks and sleep on army-style bunk-beds. At Bath,
there is no "administrative segregation unit," separate cells used to
punish bad behaviour and protect prisoners threatened by other inmates; the
brutal isolation unit at Avenal, with room for 200 men, is always jammed.

Of all the components of Canadian crime and punishment -- the Criminal
Code, sentencing, provincial jails, federal prisons -- the federal
corrections administration comes closest to consistently applying one
philosophy, thanks largely to Ole Ingstrup, the commissioner of the
Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) from 1988 to 1992 and again from 1995
to 2000. During his first term, Mr. Ingstrup drafted a mission statement
and helped craft the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA), the
law that governs federal corrections. Both have a clear vision for federal
prisons.

"Up to 1988," Mr. Ingstrup says, "we had what we called the 'opportunities
model,' which meant the offenders, if they wanted to better themselves,
educate themselves, what not, they should be given that opportunity. And
there were some programs, some education, some work." Today the CSC
aggressively engages prisoners in programs and work designed to help them
return to the community.

"It's up to us," Mr. Ingstrup says, "to motivate (inmates) to find that
capacity, to make it happen." He calls this "active intervention."

Essentially, the CSC follows the century-old dictum of Sir Alexander
Paterson, England's commissioner of prisons: "Men come to prison as a
punishment," Paterson insisted, "not for punishment." The loss of freedom
is the price a prisoner must pay; the CCRA dictates that no further
restrictions or indignities are allowed. Courts have further ruled that the
only constitutional right a prisoner loses is his liberty, and the
practical restrictions that follow from that.

For Mr. Ingstrup, the key fact to remember is that almost all prisoners
will be released and return to the community. "What do you believe is the
safest way of reintegrating people, given that the vast majority are coming
back?" he asks. "Do you think it's best to wait until the last day, open
the door, and hope for the best? Or do you think it's better to start from
Day One to gradually prepare these people for their eventual release into
society (by) trying to influence all these factors in their lives that
actually led to crime?"

In Canada, Day One begins at Millhaven. All convicts sent to federal prison
must first pass through the tough maximum security prison, where a full
review of their rehabilitation needs is done. This includes a review of
their literacy and numeracy levels and a mental health assessment.

Prisoners are also evaluated to determine how likely they are to attempt
escape or to harm others. Each prisoner is accordingly assigned a security
level -- maximum, medium, or minimum -- and sent to the appropriate prison.
The CCRA forbids officials to put a prisoner in a higher-security prison
than his security risk warrants.

Misbehaviour while inside can send a prisoner to a higher-security prison
if it is serious enough. Generally, however, the expectation is that
prisoners will "cascade" down through the security chain. At each stage,
inmates are given more freedoms, not only increasing access to education,
therapy and work, but also earning the ability to do more for themselves,
such as food preparation and laundry. Lower-security prisons such as Bath
are designed to be pseudo-neighbourhoods. The townhouses, gardens,
barbecues, baseball diamonds and even, in some places, fast-food
franchises, are not frivolous perks. They are there to prepare prisoners
for life on the outside.

Throughout the 1990s, as Mr. Ingstrup's reforms were being rolled out,
critics in the Reform party vilified him for imposing what they thought of
as soft European ideas. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ingstrup, a native of
Denmark, rejects the suggestion that Canadian reforms simply mirrored
European models. European countries, he points out, had largely abandoned
rehabilitation in the 1970s, just as North America had. In fact, he says,
Canada's renewed focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into the
community, accompanied by extensive research and evaluation of programs,
inspired the Europeans to follow this country's lead. The European model is
in part a Canadian creation. European corrections officials, in fact,
consider much of what is done in Canada's federal prisons to be the gold
standard.

Yet the approach is deeply controversial. The Alliance party and the
Conservative government of Ontario hate it. Police associations and
victims' groups regularly denounce it. Populist media fulminate against it.

The fate of CSC's philosophy is in the hands of the federal Liberal
government. So is most of the rest of the criminal justice system: In
Canada, provincial governments administer criminal justice, and house
lesser offenders in provincial jails, but it is the federal government that
controls parole, young offender law and the Criminal Code. It is ultimately
the federal government that will settle the clash between the U.S. and
European criminal justice models.

So far, says Julian Roberts, a criminologist at the University of Ottawa,
"the Liberal government has tried to straddle things." On one side, it has
introduced, or allowed to continue, elements of the European model. But at
the same time, he says, it has "tried to sort of look tough and act tough"
on a few high-profile issues. And sometimes, it has simply split the
difference.

He cites as an example of the Liberals' "straddling" the way the government
handled the "faint-hope clause," which allows murderers who have served at
least 15 years to apply for early parole through a jury hearing. During the
early 1990s, the debate was intense, "with a lot of calls to get rid of it,
and a lot of people saying there's nothing wrong with it," Mr. Roberts
says. "So (then justice minister Allan) Rock had a tough call." In the end,
he barred those convicted of more than one murder from its provisions. "It
still exists, but it's somewhat tighter. And that's a sort of typically
Liberal response."

The controversy came to a head last year, when family members of murder
victims held a press conference on Parliament Hill to demand that lifers be
sent to maximum. Within two hours of the press conference, Solicitor
General Lawrence MacAulay announced the policy would change. Henceforth,
Mr. MacAulay said, convicted murderers would automatically be sent to
maximum security for at least two years regardless of the outcome of their
risk assessment.

The order backfired almost immediately: One of the first men it would send
to maximum security was Robert Latimer, who was still in the assessment
phase at the time of the change. CSC quickly issued a revision exempting
offenders sentenced before the rule change from its application. To do
otherwise would have been "unfair," said CSC spokeswoman Michele
Pilon-Santilli.

But that's not likely to be the end of the matter. The new rule is probably
illegal -- violating Section 4 (d) of the Corrections and Conditional
Release Act. CSC's defence is weak. The two-year stint in maximum security,
says Ms. Pilon-Santilli, is a safety measure that will allow CSC to assess
"how (convicted murderers) will adjust in our institutions." But for that
to be truly necessary, the current assessment period -- used for all
offenders -- must be insufficient, something CSC denies.

As well, the change sets a precedent that flatly offends the philosophy of
the CCRA and the federal prison system. Under the new policy, murderers are
put in maximum security not for safety reasons but because authorities want
them to expose them to tougher conditions. In other words, the government
is sending murderers to prison not only as punishment but for punishment.

"I think it's a fair decision," says Mr. MacAulay, quickly adding, "it's
not to indicate that anybody just serves two years (in maximum). It's
important to note that that's the minimum. Many serve a lot longer." Asked
if the policy change violates the law, he answers, "I think Canadians would
totally agree that anybody convicted of a murder offence should serve (at
least) two years in a maximum-security institution. That's my view." The
government, he says, is prepared to defend the change in court "and quite
likely we will."