The experiment got off to a bumpy start. First, inmate Denise Fayant was murdered. Then seven maximum-security prisoners escaped in an 18-day span. After that, new secure facilities were built for high-risk residents, and new security protocols were adopted. Today the federal institution houses a mix of maximum-, medium- and minimum-security prisoners.

Much else has changed since 1995. Where the prison once stood isolated from the rest of the city, it’s now surrounded by offices, car dealerships and warehouses. The institution is full to capacity, and then some. Those homey cottages haven’t aged well. They’ve been lived in, hard, and need significant repairs. But the institution has neither the budget nor the capacity to fix aging infrastructure. They can’t empty the houses to renovate or rebuild them, because there’s no other place to hold the residents. There’s no room on-site to expand. Meanwhile the inmates themselves have to fix up their own living quarters, with a little basic instruction in carpentry and plumbing.

COVID has made everything harder for staff and inmates alike. The pandemic meant strict isolation and lockdowns for residents, the cancellation of many therapies, programs and family visits, the elimination of many of the services done by volunteers (who were largely barred from entering the facility) and strict limits on transfers to Indigenous healing lodges. Those restrictions are just beginning to ease. Not that the coronavirus has disappeared. When I recently visited the institution, alongside my colleague Senator Kim Pate, a long-time prison-reform advocate, it was still dealing with significant COVID outbreaks.

In 1996, 23 per cent of female offenders in Canada’s federal institutions identified as Aboriginal. At the time, that was considered a troubling overrepresentation. A study released last December by federal correctional investigator Ivan Zinger found that 48 per cent of women prisoners in Canada’s federal penal system now are First Nations, Metis or Inuit. But numbers here are far more shocking. As of this fall, 70 per cent of inmates at the Edmonton Institution for Women are Indigenous—despite the fact that only 6.5 per cent of Albertans identify as Indigenous.

How have we created a system so dysfunctional that 70 per cent of the women we incarcerate are Indigenous?

Prisoners don’t just come from Alberta, of course. The institution serves the whole prairie region, so inmates come from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories too. But that doesn’t explain away the 70 per cent figure. It just underlines the full extent of the crisis across the prairies.

Why is the number so grotesquely disproportionate It starts, of course, with intergenerational trauma and the dark, echoing legacy of residential schools, with domestic violence, a broken child welfare system, a poor high school completion rate, a lack of reproductive choice. It’s interwoven with poverty, with childhood sexual abuse, with addiction, with the lack of mental health care, with the lack of supportive housing for the homeless, with the lure of gangs that provide a sense of belonging.

But let’s not ignore deep systemic racism, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle and insidious. For example, an Indigenous woman might be charged with a crime, while a white woman who did the same thing might just get a warning or a fine. In many cases, Indigenous women can’t afford or access the help of experienced, well-resourced lawyers. They may be unable to meet bail or parole conditions, and so end up back behind bars. Then there are mandatory minimum sentences, which rob judges of the discretion to consider extenuating conditions and social circumstances. Such one-size-fits-all sentences can mean imprisoning people for longer periods than might be otherwise warranted if all factors were taken into account. The threat of a long mandatory-minimum sentence can also coerce women into pleading guilty to a lesser offence, such as manslaughter, rather than run the risk of getting the mandatory minimum sentence for murder. Even when a woman has a legitimate defence, she may be afraid to fight her case given the threat of a life sentence hanging over her.

We need to find the funds and capacity to retrofit this aging prison, to make it safe and decent for those who live and work there. But we must also ask how we have created a society and a criminal justice system so dysfunctional that 70 per cent of the women we incarcerate here are Indigenous. Until we address that injustice, all the renovations in the world will neither repair nor redeem the true rot at the core of our culture of corrections—a crisis created far outside the prison fence.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

The post Injustice System appeared first on Alberta Views.

Beginning at the third tier, where the guard places his best-behaved men, the count begins: “One!” Foot stomp. “Two!” Foot stomp. From right to left, from top tier to bottom, all 62 men make themselves known.

The Boot Camp Unit inmates are awaiting trial. The average pretrial inmate’s time in an Alberta remand is 18 days. Most of these prisoners are charged with non-violent offences, such as breaching probation or failing to attend court. A third of those remanded are charged with assault, uttering threats, sexual offences or even homicide. About 8 per cent of remand inmates remain there for one to two years, often because their cases are complex and they are denied bail. To break the monotony of jail, many of those with longer remand time apply to be in the Remand Centre’s only unit that is run like the military. “They earn their way up to the top,” explains the officer. “It’s for their behaviour, cleanliness, performance and attitude.”

After roll call, he assembles the men for a squad drill. The cadence song was penned by the boot camp inmates, who call themselves “1 Alpha.” The group frequently changes, as dozens of remand inmates are admitted and released daily. Even so, these men, says the officer, are the best of the best—vetted and screened for the program that began when the new Edmonton Remand opened in April 2013.

Novel as Boot Camp Unit is, it could not exist without an innovation that affects nearly all the units at Edmonton Remand. Opposite the cells, at the far corner of the octagonal room, there’s an L-shaped wooden desk with computers, paperwork and two of the officer’s colleagues hanging out in the open. That’s it. That’s the innovation: correctional officers are hanging out in the open. That signifies that this is a direct-supervision facility.

Although the 36-year-old brown remand tower in downtown Edmonton was replaced by this sprawling super-jail on the city’s outskirts, the units in both are architecturally similar: three tiers of cells on two sides of a communal area where inmates are free to come and go until curfew or mealtimes, or until a “lockdown,” at which time they are confined to their double-bunk cells. The units in the new remand also have an additional tier, with accents of lime green on finishes and furnishings—and, to the delight of inmates, TVs larger than a shoebox. Still, the only major design difference is whether or not the guards’ desks are behind bulletproof glass.

The new model is designed to lessen physical and psychological barriers—allowing guards to manage behaviour.

The glass and concrete wall that formerly separated inmates and officers was known as “the bubble.” By popping that bubble, the hope is that some of the psychological barriers will be dismantled along with the physical ones. The Boot Camp Unit is just a showy example of what’s possible when both sides interact regularly.

“The inmate-to-guard interaction is steady all day, so you get pretty close with the guards,” says Chris, a raspy-voiced inmate who lives in 1 Alpha’s premier cell. “Anytime [the officer] comes by, he asks me how I’m getting along.” Sometimes they talk about what Chris will do with his life after he’s out. Other times they talk about Chris’s former work, pouring concrete. It’s hard to imagine these conversations taking place over an intercom.

On a Monday morning, “Junior,” a middle-aged man with a slight Newfoundland accent, sits in the office of his attorney wearing muddy track pants and a faded T-shirt. After a 14-month stay in the Edmonton Remand, awaiting trial on felony charges, he was released on bail just 64 hours prior to trial, at 3:00 a.m. Across the table is Tom Engel, a defence counsel who represented 27 inmates in a nine-year lawsuit against the Alberta government for conditions at the old Edmonton Remand. The 2010 decision deemed the conditions for inmates “cruel and unusual,” citing breached Charter rights, poor air quality, inadequate medical care and racial discrimination, among the many violations.

Today Engel’s small office is in a heritage building close to the Provincial Law Courts and a block away from the old, infamous and now closed Edmonton Remand. Junior remembers the inside of that building well, having spent as long as six months there during his several apprehensions. In fact, he’s done the “Alberta Tour,” having experienced seven of the nine prisons under provincial governance over the course of 24 years. He places the new remand on the good end of that spectrum. “They actually treat you with respect,” says Junior. “They call you ‘sir,’ ask how your day is going, ‘How’s your coffee, do you have enough sugar?’”

As for the old remand: “Soon as they [the guards] get behind that glass they have a big chip on their shoulder,” he says. “They feel safe; ‘I’m the man, I can do what I want, I don’t give a shit what you have to say because I can get behind the bubble.’” He says the correctional officers rarely stepped onto the unit unless there were four or five together.

When it came time to construct the new Edmonton Remand—Canada’s largest prison, with a capacity for 1,952 men and women—the Solicitor General committed to a “direct-supervision model” designed to lessen physical and psychological barriers, a system that allows guards to manage behaviour directly rather than just observing it. Wayne Reddon, executive director of Adult Centre operations, says, “It’s a best-practice, evidence-based correctional management tool.” He believes future Alberta prisons will adhere to this model. “We’ve accepted direct supervision as the way ahead.”

Whether correctional officers have accepted it, however, is another matter. Corrections Canada’s research shows that front-line staff—guards, primary workers, parole officers—view these institutions as less safe. Inmates may feel good about being closer to staff, but the staff often feel the inmates are too close for comfort. “Once you’re in the protective zone you can sit back a little bit and you don’t have to watch your back,” explains a veteran officer, on condition of anonymity. “You can look out and monitor without having to worry about your own safety.”

Fifteen days after the Edmonton Remand Centre opened in 2013, an RCMP riot team was summoned to the institution. Seventy guards had staged an illegal strike because, according to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees that represents them, the super-jail’s design violated occupational health and safety laws by making officers vulnerable to potentially violent offenders. Soon sheriffs, court clerks and other prisons’ staff were picketing in solidarity. The protest made national headlines.

Similar situations have developed elsewhere in Canada. In 2011, guards at a BC institution stopped just short of striking over issues of insufficient staffing and the jail’s openness. A 265 per cent spike in assaults on jail staff in Ontario in recent years has led some guards to blame direct-supervision methods. Similar unrest among prison guards exists across North America, and judging by how quickly and seamlessly the RCMP stepped in at the Edmonton Remand when guards there went on strike, it’s hard to believe the Solicitor General didn’t see conflict coming.

A figure at the centre of the 2013 Edmonton Remand strike was Todd Ross, a correctional officer who spent the first 18 years of his career at the two Edmonton remands. In 2011 Ross voiced concerns on a committee overseeing the design of the new facility. Despite training for direct supervision and piloting it at the old facility, Ross, acting on behalf of his colleagues, requested that 60 per cent of the new units keep “the bubble.” Management refused. Before one of his first shifts at the new prison, Ross sent a heated email to management and copied it to the province’s deputy solicitor general. A fellow prison officer replied to Ross in strong language and his reply went to the entire distribution list of Ross’s email. The result was suspension for both officers. When word of this disciplining spread to their colleagues, all of the guards walked.

The officers were forced back on the job after five days, but AUPE still stands by its criticisms of “design flaws” at Edmonton Remand. In April 2015, security footage was leaked to CTV showing an Edmonton Remand inmate blindsiding a guard behind the desk with a cup of hot water, then jabbing him in the face with a broomstick. In a televised interview about the attack, Ross told reporters, “There’s a lot of violence that happens in the jail daily.” Ross has since been reinstated as a correctional peace officer and works at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre, a direct-supervision facility.

Wayne Reddon oversees all the adult prisons in Alberta for inmates serving “two years less a day.” He’s also the former director at the Fort Saskatchewan facility. He says that by encouraging frequent and closer interactions between guards and inmates, the former become role models and the latter learn how best to de-escalate volatile situations “without punching someone in the face.”

When it opened in 1988, Fort Saskatchewan was Alberta’s only primarily direct-supervision adult prison, a distinction it held until the new Edmonton Remand opened. Calgary’s remand has retrofitted 21 per cent of its units to direct supervision since 1993. With the exception of Kainai Community Centre, a residence-style prison managed by a non-profit society and elders for the Blood First Nation, the remaining five adult prisons in the provincial system—Peace River, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Calgary Correctional Centre—use “indirect supervision.”

Under indirect supervision, guards step into the common area a couple times per shift to count heads, or, when necessary, to intervene in violent situations. They communicate with inmates by intercom. Criminologists now believe this approach is too isolating and reactive. It allows assault, rape, theft and gang affiliation among inmates to go unchecked. But the bubble doesn’t only put prisoners at risk of each other. “Having that wall between (guards and inmates) makes it easier for them to be nasty to each other,” says Richard E. Wener, a professor of environmental psychology at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

According to a 1989 study by Jay Farbstein & Associates Inc. with Wener, direct-supervision prisons in the US reported far fewer violent incidents than indirect supervision prisons did. A survey of correctional administrators also rated the direct-supervision model higher on measures of safety. Inmates also favoured the open design, even though it made it more difficult to evade their watchers’ eyes.

It might seem ironic that inmates prefer a model that makes it easier for guards to catch “the play”—cigarettes, home-brew and other contraband. But even in society’s darkest corners there’s a desire for some order and civility.

Most Canadians will have seen examples of direct supervision, if only on TV. On shows such as Orange is the New Black, HBO’s OZ and NBC’s Lockup, the scenes of unobstructed interaction between guards and offenders show direct supervision in action. Most European prisons also operate under direct supervision. The term was born in the US during the 1970s, when over-imprisonment put heavy demands on state and federal budgets. Besides humanizing the environment of US prisons, direct supervision costs less.

The first three direct-supervision jails built in the US had wooden doors, porcelain toilets, table lamps and moveable chairs. Inmates wore everyday clothing. The thinking was that ever-present guards wouldn’t allow situations to escalate to the point where fragile furnishings would be damaged. “It was a more normalized environment,” says Wener. “They wanted it to look more like a residence and less like an institution.”

Professor Wener’s research, published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour, found a decrease of stress, vandalism, maintenance, contraband, suicide and theft in direct-supervision jails. He wrote that they “address the social and psychological needs of inmates and staff by assuring personal safety, providing privacy for inmates, making it clear the officer is in charge of the living area and setting positive behavioral expectations.”

Wener’s research found that direct-supervision prisons’ construction cost per bed was more than $30,000 cheaper than other models. Annual maintenance was also significantly less expensive, as was cost of staff. According to Wener, not only did US direct-supervision prisons hire 123 fewer positions per 1,000 inmates, they had less staff turnover and time lost to sick days and injuries. This lower bottom line may also be influencing Canadian governments to select direct supervision.

If Edmonton Remand is not getting the results the direct-supervision model is known for, as guards attest, one problem might that the model is not being fully applied. Steve Carter, a pioneer of direct supervision, notes that direct-supervision prisons have strayed so far from the model’s original principles that they are at best hybrids. The jails may have removed the most obvious barriers that breed animosity, but the environments are still far from normalized. This would seem to apply to Edmonton Remand, where inmates walk on concrete floors, among bolted chairs and tables, and eat their meals on wall-mounted desks while locked in their cells.

Meals served in cells strikes a nerve with Carter. “The premise of direct-supervision units is opportunity for supervized socialization, and dining together is one of the most important opportunities,” he explains. “Leaving inmates to dine in their cells is usually a sign of punishment, inappropriate staffing levels or laziness.”

Carter is resigned to the fact that pure direct supervision is less embraced in North America today than during the pioneering 1970s and 1980s. Despite its economic benefits, it is often dismissed as “soft on crime,” and some have nicknamed it a “hug-a-thug” prison model. Of the modern hybrids, Carter says, “One could say they are a partial retrenchment. But still, during daylight hours, an officer or officers are there on the floor with those inmates, and (the inmates) are out of their cells, interacting. That’s what direct supervision is about.”

AUPE vice-president and veteran correctional peace officer Erez Raz is a gruff man. He sports a gold chain and goatee and has a large tattoo on his arm. He speaks his mind with little filter. “It’s like management doesn’t have our back,” he says, sitting in the union’s west Edmonton office.

Raz believes that direct supervision is not only ineffective but dangerous. When inmates overhear guards’ conversations, sometimes about their personal lives, he feels it opens up officers to manipulation: “These guys have a way of listening and getting inside your head.” The previous model, he adds, only forced guards to be alert when they stepped out of the bubble or worked in admissions and discharge. “The body was able to relax. Now there are inmates among you all the time. So, on an eight-hour shift, you’re on constant alert.”

When the Alberta government announced it would fund Edmonton’s new remand centre, AUPE designated a few members, including Todd Ross, to sit on the construction and design committee. Raz was optimistic that the union would have meaningful say, but says it was quickly apparent their presence was token.

Another officer familiar with the committee proceedings claims the union was willing to accept direct supervision if the government was willing to commit to it fully. “I like to joke that direct supervision is in the toilet,” says this source. “Because if you put a stainless steel toilet in a cell, you ain’t looking to have a well-behaved inmate. You’re assuming you’re going to have a riot and he’s going to bust things. …When we lost our argument for porcelain toilets, direct supervision was in the toilet.” But Raz says that AUPE advocated for meal slots on doors in the new remand, which means they were pushing for meals in cells. Hence, the union was also not committed to direct supervision in its purest form.

By interacting with guards, prisoners learn how to de-escalate situations “without punching someone in the face.”

It’s difficult to know how much AUPE’s resistance to direct supervision has to do with the model itself and how much owes to the tarnished relationship between that union and the Alberta government. The dispute over prison design may be left over from AUPE’s 2007 “Change the Law” campaign for full bargaining rights, including the right to strike. The battle was still going on during Alison Redford’s premiership when Tim Grant, deputy minister to the Solicitor General, and deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk traded highly publicized jabs with AUPE over the remand strike of 2013. In December that year, the Alberta government passed bills that froze provincial employee wages, bound their right to arbitration and imposed huge fines for illegal strikes. The new fines were even steeper than those issued after the wildcat strike at Edmonton Remand.

Raz says the relationship has improved since these bills were repealed under Premier Jim Prentice. Tim Grant has also been moved out of the Justice department since the NDP’s 2015 victory. Still, one does not need x-ray vision to trace the toxic residue.

“I don’t know at what point we lost trust,” says Raz. “When I started …there was a culture of us and management against the inmates. It was us against them. Whereas now, it seems like it’s the inmates against us and management against us.”

Defence lawyer Tom Engel is astonished by Raz’s statement. “That is completely unprofessional and unacceptable, and illustrates the problem of correctional service in Alberta, that you have guards with this mentality. If you look at their training materials and code of ethics, you won’t find anything like that in there. …That’s the punishment mentality, and it has infected the correctional service. They need to weed those people out and get professionals in there.”

In fact, a changing of the guards is well under way. While Engel’s client “Junior” says “us versus them” perfectly characterizes remand guards’ attitudes during his most recent stay in 2012, it wouldn’t describe the atmosphere he experienced two years later at the new remand. Whereas he remembers the correctional officers at the old facility as “assholes,” “dicks” and “mean,” officers at the new remand are “humans, just like us. You give respect, you get respect.” This sentiment is echoed almost verbatim by Edmonton Remand correctional officer Neil Benner. “Once you show trust, they’ll give it right back in return.”

Officer Benner’s 20-year career has been spent at Fort Saskatchewan and the two Edmonton remands. That makes him an increasingly rare species. On Junior’s last visit to Edmonton Remand, the vast majority of guards were young and unfamiliar to him.

Kim Sanderson, acting assistant deputy minister of Alberta Justice and Solicitor General, replaced Tim Grant after the NDP was elected. She stands by direct supervision, which she compares to a classroom. “[Indirect supervision] is like having a teacher in a bubble, just supervising, as opposed to a teacher walking among the students.” If the officers are not present, “it’s easy for the inmates to run the unit.” She adds, “Staff are given the opportunity to act as role models.”

Ted McCoy, author of Hard Time: Reforming the Penitentiary in Nineteenth-Century Canada, says, “Prison officers were always regarded as potential role models to inmates. They’d create moral outcomes.” In the 19th century, for example, the government specifically hired “white, middle-class respectable married women to look after these fallen women in hopes that they’d see something to aspire to.” But the question is: Do modern day correctional officers see themselves that way?
“Let’s go back 18 years ago, when I started,” says Raz, referencing the inexperience of new remand hires. “What kind of a role model am I to someone who’s been doing crime for 30 years I’m not going to change who they are.”

Tom Engel likens a guard who is reluctant to interact with inmates to a “steelworker who’s afraid of heights.” But he does allow that some of the distrust has been carried over from the former remand, a place so “poisonous” that neither prisoners nor guards had anything good to say about it. The new remand was supposed to repair that reputation.

Alberta’s Department of Justice and Solicitor General remains patient with the guards who struggle with the changes, but the ministry is determined to make direct supervision the new normal. “As time goes on,” says Sanderson, “they’ll have more staff members who’ve only ever worked in the direct-supervision model. It becomes the way you do business.”

Edmonton’s Omar Mouallem is a National Magazine Award-winning writer. 

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Close Contact appeared first on Alberta Views.

The first angle, in the back alley of the Edmontonian’s meat shop, shows Sobieh confronting a younger man on a phone. The business owner has a metal tool in his hand but doesn’t raise it. The young man retreats but doesn’t leave.

At 19:00:42 a camera inside the butcher shop’s storage room captures three male officers entering the back door, weapons drawn. Sobieh arrives from the opposite entrance, and upon seeing the police, throws an object to the ground. He stops, arms akimbo. An officer shows him one raised palm. The 60-year-old raises both hands, then drops them, turns around and takes two steps. An officer kicks the back of Sobieh’s leg and grabs his shoulders. A second officer kicks the butcher’s knee and Sobieh falls on his hands. The same officer knees Sobieh’s head, causing him to collapse on his right arm. A third officer helps restrain him and the second kicks Sobieh’s side. The third hammers four blows to the butcher’s back, the second kicks him, presses a knee on his back and then pulls Sobieh’s right arm from beneath him. Sobieh is cuffed, the officers stand—and so begins Edmonton’s most contested allegation of police brutality in recent memory.

Sobieh’s defence lawyer, Tom Engel, says the man who called the cops, and whom his client confronted in the alley, had threatened a meat shop employee the day before. He insists that Sobieh cooperated by freeing his hands upon seeing the police, and that he only turned his back to inform co-workers in the other room. He says the officers’ use of force was excessive and they acted like thugs.

The Edmonton Police Service (EPS) members allege that Sobieh was belligerent and rejected their orders, that they had reason to believe he was dangerous, that even after he was face down they had to free his arm to be sure he was weaponless.

Of the agency’s first 140 files, all but 10 exonerated the accused police officers. So just how objective or independent is ASIRT?

Six years ago a case like this might have been investigated internally by the same police agency that employed the accused officers, but in 2008 Alberta’s Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General’s office formed the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team—or ASIRT (pronounced “assert”)—an independent unit to police the police. The unit has jurisdiction over every sworn officer in Alberta. Now, whenever an on-duty officer’s actions cause serious injury or death or whenever an off-duty officer is accused of a sensitive crime such as sexual assault, ASIRT investigates it objectively and independently.

But in the first 140 concluded files between 2008 and 2012, all but 10 exonerated the accused officers, including Sobieh’s case. This makes critics like Engel wonder: Just how objective or independent is ASIRT?

After you’ve entered the office tower in downtown Edmonton, passed a travel agency and a dental office and taken the elevator to the 15th floor, ASIRT’s heavily secured, bulletproof door is unexpected. But if you know the story of Lee Christopher Monrose, who entered the unit’s Calgary office in June 2010 and stabbed an investigator, then the renovations for security make sense. The 27 team members spread across Alberta’s two largest cities must live in two worlds, simultaneously addressing highly sensitive crimes and providing transparent public service.

Monrose—who would eventually be found criminally insane—believed that the ASIRT investigator, an RCMP officer temporarily hired by ASIRT, was delaying a case against the Calgary police officers who had shot Monrose during a 2009 traffic stop. Another high-profile incident involved a St. Albert RCMP officer suing ASIRT for damages after the agency laid six charges that were later withdrawn for lack of evidence, charges which the officer insists were based on rumours spread by his ex-spouse, an EPS officer.

For Clifton Purvis, ASIRT’s founding director and the person to whom all agency staff report, these incidents show it’s impossible to please everybody. “At the end of the day, somebody is going to be unhappy no matter what,” he told me in December, in the agency’s boardroom, two weeks before he would leave the organization he built from scratch for an interim position as assistant deputy minister to the Solicitor General.

A lawyer for two decades, Purvis left the general prosecutions branch in 2003 for special prosecutions related to organized crime. Two years later he was assigned to Project KARE and led investigations about Alberta’s murdered and missing women. In 2007 he successfully applied to be ASIRT’s first civilian director—but there was a catch. “The agency was only a plan,” he said. “There were some documents drafted, some legislation and a budget, and that was it. I went forward and built it.”

Before ASIRT opened on January 1, 2008, the only agency like it in Canada was Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), an outfit so maligned that a 2008 report by that province’s ombudsman titled Oversight Unseen called it a “muzzled watchdog.” But unlike the SIU, the instigation of which was prompted in 1990 after allegations of police racism, Alberta’s agency wasn’t born from a crisis of confidence. Rather it was a proactive decision, said Purvis.

Though this made his job easier, Purvis still went in knowing that failure to earn public trust from the beginning could harm ASIRT. Thus it was important to sever police agencies from investigations at the earliest point.

All ASIRT cases are referred not from a city’s chief of police, but from the Director of Law Enforcement in the province’s Solicitor General’s office. Once a case is received, ASIRT assigns a head investigator, who might be a civilian such as a private detective, an intelligence analyst or, somewhat controversially, a temporarily transferred municipal or RCMP officer (though they can’t lead an investigation involving their home agency). Once the primary and his or her team complete the report, which can take anywhere from six to 12 months, it goes to the civilian director for review. If he or she doesn’t suspect an offence, the case is closed and the accused police officer’s supervisor can decide whether internal discipline is needed. If the director does suspect an offence, however, the case is sent to the Alberta Crown. Should both parties agree, the civilian director lays charges and the justice system proceeds as usual.

Before 2008 an officer would usually have been investigated by a peer in his or her own agency. If they hadn’t collaborated in the past, they’d likely do so in the future. As EPS chief Rod Knecht, who used to handle these cases, put it: “Your kids might play with each other.”

Bob Kells, a retired RCMP officer and president of Calgary’s RCMP Veterans’ Association, told me he saw something like ASIRT coming in 1992, a decade after the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed. Canadians, he said, became more scrutinizing and demanding of law enforcement. “I was concerned at that time that the public wouldn’t stand for police investigating the police, and it was time to do something different to give credibility to investigation.” When officers investigated one another, biases naturally came into play. “They might not have interviewed everyone they should have, or asked the right questions, because they knew something internally,” said Kells.

Maureen Collins, executive director of the John Howard Society of Alberta, which runs victim’s service programs, pointed out that the Director of Law Enforcement acts as a buffer between ASIRT and civilians by deciding which cases the team can investigate. “If I get beat up in the remand centre or I have a complaint, I can’t just phone up as a layperson and get an independent body to look into it,” she said. However, ASIRT is a major step up from the old days, she said, and vetting the cases is necessary to keep the agency from becoming overwhelmed.

Purvis is immensely satisfied with what ASIRT has achieved. In particular, he’s proud of having adopted independent overseers in culturally sensitive cases, for instance appointing a Somali community leader to assist at interviews and help get reluctant witnesses talking. First Nation liaisons have explained the investigative process at town hall meetings on reserves. “It’s not enough for us to conduct an independent, objective investigation if we don’t let the community know that’s what we’re doing,” explained Purvis. “What are they to assume We need to tell them what we’re doing and satisfy them that we’re doing the right thing.”

Other governments are impressed by ASIRT. Several provincial and territorial police forces have hired the team to lead their internal investigations, and in 2011 the Canadian Armed Forces asked the agency to investigate the death of a young soldier in a CFB Edmonton detention cell (the death was ruled not suspicious and the case concluded without charges). On top of the 35 to 45 local cases Purvis sees each year, plus those from other regions, he has helped Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC create nearly identical teams and is working with Quebec on its forthcoming police watchdog.

“ASIRT is probably the most respected model in the country,” said Knecht. “Even talking with my colleagues in the US, it’s considered pretty groundbreaking.”

Richard Roosenthal of BC’s watchdog, the Internal Investigations Office (IIO), agrees. “To my knowledge, there are no programs similar to the [ASIRT] model in the US,” he said. The IIO civilian director would know; he built and led less robust units in Denver and Portland.

What sets ASIRT apart, especially from Ontario’s 23-year-old SIU, is its broad mandate. SIU only investigates “serious” incidents, usually defined by a civilian death or injury requiring hospital attention, but a third of ASIRT’s files are classified as “sensitive”—allegations of sexual assault, corruption, child luring. To that end, Alberta’s watchdog has jurisdiction over all sworn officers in the province, on duty or off, including the RCMP.

“The legislation that created ASIRT is provincial legislation. Arguably it wouldn’t have had force over the RCMP, who are governed by the federal RCMP Act,” explained Purvis. “When I was trying to implement the ASIRT model, a lot of people in Ottawa said the RCMP would not be subject to independent civilian oversight.” With approximately 2,500 Mounties in the province, losing that fight would have undermined ASIRT’s effectiveness. “There was some heated negotiation with the RCMP,” said Purvis. “The leader of K Division [the Alberta unit] showed real vision and courage, and, contrary to the advice he was getting from Ottawa, agreed to [conform] to the jurisdiction of ASIRT.”

Purvis takes responsibility for some challenges. In one of ASIRT’s first files, an EPS officer assigned to the new agency attempted to lead another EPS member to exoneration. When defence lawyer Tom Engel brought this conflict of interest to Purvis’s attention, the investigator was removed.

Tom Engel has lost count of how many cases he’s represented against the actions of police where the officer was eventually exonerated by ASIRT, but he still maintains a good working relationship with Purvis. They’ve met several times to discuss Engel’s misgivings. Few of Engel’s issues have been addressed, largely, he thinks, because ASIRT can’t be truly objective as long as it hires—or “seconds”—active-duty officers.

“What they said is ‘we’re seconding officers,’” Engel told me. “They’re still members of the Edmonton Police Service, and they’re investigating other members of the Edmonton Police Service.” Though it’s not ASIRT practice for seconded officers to head an investigation into someone from their home agency, the latter may be required to assist in an investigation. In one case, an EPS use-of-force expert, Shawna Goodkey, was seconded to help investigate her colleagues’ actions, a decision Purvis stood by. Said Purvis, “She’s a valuable expert that contributed a lot to the organization on issues of use of force, and I found her not to be biased but in fact a very objective independent investigator.”

Gary Creasser was seconded from CPS in 2008, but he never returned to the police. He’s since become the Calgary ASIRT office team commander. According to Creasser, numerous “stopgap measures” ensure objectivity, such as not allowing the primary investigator and suspect to come from the same agency. “The investigation is not steered toward the guilt or the innocence of the officer or officers involved,” he said. “It gathers evidence, puts it in a comprehensive report and then sends that report along with the evidence to our civilian director for review.”

“While [investigators] are seconded to me,” added Purvis, “they report to me and they work in this office.” ASIRT must balance independence with investigative confidence, he said, because the injured citizen, their family and the police officer under investigation are “all entitled to the best investigation.”

Retired University of Alberta criminologist Keith Spencer told me, “Usually the people with the best investigative abilities and experience are people that come from law enforcement backgrounds, and that of course is not acceptable to some citizens.”

But in BC, the IIO is doing things differently. Any investigating officer must have retired from the force, and he or she can’t have worked in the province in the last five years. “The intent,” said the IIO’s Richard Roosenthal, “was to create a level of independence to ensure that an officer has been removed from the culture of policing for a substantial period of time and to ensure that people recognize that the IIO is independent of the police and the province.”

Purvis doesn’t think ASIRT needs such stringency, because it was created proactively. The SIU and the IIO were created reactively, the latter requested by a judge after the tasering death of Robert Dziekański at Vancouver International Airport in 2007. But Edmonton’s police chief goes further and insists the culture of policing is actually an asset. “It’s extremely valuable in doing investigations,” said Knecht. “[Investigators] get the nuances, the dedication to service, how a person identifies with his or her employer or between partners.”

And even the IIO’s civilian director said BC’s system poses challenges. “[The investigator] needs to be made current, so they require a significant amount of training,” said Roosenthal.
Engel would like to see ASIRT—if not remove officers entirely from its staff—adopt something similar to BC’s model. “I’ve looked at particular cases and it’s obvious when you compare them to prosecutions of citizens for assaulting police officers… there’s far less scrutiny, much less of an investigation,” he said. However, he believes ASIRT’s biggest flaw isn’t its use of officer/investigators, but what happens at the end—the fact that ASIRT’s director must seek the Crown’s approval, unlike police, who can lay their own charges.

Because although ASIRT’s headquarters leases public space and is headed by a civilian, the view from the boardroom window doesn’t look to the street but rather to its creator, the Alberta Legislature. That’s who exonerated the three officers in the Sammy Sobieh case. Not Purvis.

When the Sobieh file was concluded in October 2012, more than a year after the video was first shown by CBC, CTV and other media, the mini press conference looked different. Instead of the usual setup that saw Purvis before an ASIRT banner, speaking into a few mics, Alberta Justice assistant deputy minister Greg Lepp was present to explain how he and Purvis, analyzing the same video and same report, came to different conclusions.

Although Purvis suspected excessive force had been used, the prosecution didn’t think a conviction was likely, because it believed police were responding to a man holding a meat hook in a butcher shop. “It’s not like they were responding to a Care Bear manufacturing plant,” Lepp told me when we met in January. “Everyone’s a Monday-morning quarterback in those situations.”

Because the police have training to use force if they suspect there’s a weapon, and because in Sobieh’s case his arm under his torso could have concealed a weapon, Lepp said no judge would likely convict the officers. “It’s not [Purvis’s] job to evaluate the case to determine whether there’s a reasonable likelihood of conviction,” he said. “That’s our job.” Purvis can only evaluate whether there is reasonable suspicion—a small but important difference. “Our standard is somewhat higher,” says Lepp.

“In our legal system there are some checks and balances,” insisted Purvis. “I don’t mind telling you, in that case, I had reasonable and probable grounds to believe that a criminal offence had occurred. I’m not frustrated in the system—the system works well. We conducted an independent investigation, we sought the truth, we did our job, and the Crown has done their job, and that’s the way it is.”

Purvis said it’s not the first time ASIRT and the Crown have disagreed, but this is their first public disagreement, brought on by extensive media coverage.

If ASIRT were as transparent as the IIO, which publishes full reports for every case it completes, we would know how many charges would have been laid if ASIRT’s civilian director had the same power as police officers, who lay the majority of charges in Alberta, or the Crown. But ASIRT only publishes a sample of its completed files, and does so in small, single-page snapshots. However, even a cursory look through these shows several cases Purvis sent to the Crown for review, suspecting an offence, that concluded without charges.

The officers in Sobieh’s case would likely have been prosecuted in Ontario, since the SIU director must lay charges whenever he suspects an offence. Last year alone SIU laid 15 charges from 110 concluded cases.

Security footage from Sammy Sobieh’s butcher shop, Aug 21, 2011.

“Measuring success by the number of cases charged is a very dangerous thing,” said Purvis. He insisted he’s just as proud about the officers he’s helped exonerate. “We must have the courage to say nobody did anything wrong. It’s interesting information for the public, but believe me when I say [charges] are not how we measure our success.”

Ontario doesn’t measure success by charges either. According to a scathing 2008 report by the Ontario ombudsman, that province’s conviction rate was a pitiful 16 per cent. Purvis wouldn’t want to see the same thing happen to the organization he’s since left. The Crown’s review of ASIRT cases, he said, safeguards against misconduct both in policing and prosecution.

But the EPS’s Knecht wouldn’t balk if ASIRT were given equal powers. He’d even like to see its mandate expand beyond all serious matters to everything under the Criminal Code that involves police. “Why even create the perception of bias?” he said. An independent body “makes my job easier because I can say about allegations, ‘ASIRT’s going to investigate them.’”

Spencer, the criminologist, doesn’t think anything will ever totally wash away public distrust. “There is little hope of ever getting a system that is going to satisfy everyone, because either the remedy suggested isn’t harsh enough or the investigation isn’t thorough enough,” he said. “Having an independent body never makes all of it go away.”

However, Engel thinks ASIRT can do better. Not only does he want to see future civilian directors laying their own charges, he thinks the legislation already allows this but just isn’t being enforced. Surprisingly, Purvis doesn’t deny this. But he thinks laying charges would be futile, because the Crown would just withdraw any case it doesn’t think stands a chance in front of a judge. “That’s why there’s this consultative process,” he said.

Engel was pleased when ASIRT was announced five years ago, but he’s since lost faith. He’d like to see a team with Crown prosecutors who charge and indict lawyers, judges, police officers—anyone too close to the law by virtue of their profession. “They have to be insulated from the regular prosecutors, who have to work hand in hand with police officers, and they have to be people who have the stomach for it.”

The irony of the Sobieh case is that just as charges against the officers were dropped, so were those against Sobieh for allegedly threatening the man in the alley with a meat hook. Due to doubt over whether the officers acted lawfully, the Crown also favoured the accused in the charges against Sobieh. It could leave one wondering if justice was done.

But not even Engel will dismiss ASIRT. Though he called it toothless, he also told me, “The investigative quality [of ASIRT] is much higher than what one saw when the police service investigated themselves.” And that’s one thing he, Greg Lepp and EPS chief Rod Knecht can all agree on.

As Purvis eases into the Solicitor General’s office as an assistant deputy minister, he may have more power policing the police than before, and not just because he’s now Lepp’s equal. His new position also encompasses the Director of Law Enforcement, meaning he chooses what ASIRT investigates and he can give the prosecution his opinion on any files his interim replacement, Calgary prosecutor Jane McClellan, sends up the chain.

Though his position at the Solicitor General’s office is just interim, it’s unlikely Purvis will go back to ASIRT. When I followed up with him in January, he told me he was in the process of rewriting his old job description to “[redefine] the reporting structure of the civilian director.” He wouldn’t elaborate on what that could mean, and added, “ASIRT is still in the evolutionary process.”

But he was adamant that the agency works. “The critical reason why ASIRT has been successful is we’ve been careful to consider everyone’s viewpoint,” he said. “Affected people, whether they are families or individuals, their views are important. But theirs aren’t the only views. It’s important that police themselves have confidence in ASIRT, just like people in the justice system, whether they’re judges or the Tom Engels of the world. It’s important they have confidence that their positions are being considered.”

Omar Mouallem is a National Magazine Award nominated writer, Metro News columnist and rapper. He lives in Edmonton.

The post Policing the Police appeared first on Alberta Views.

Say what My first thought was, “Who the (blank) asked that?” After I recovered the power of speech, I mumbled something about being opposed to a punitive approach to a social, psychological and medical problem. Not because I support drug use, obviously, but because punishment often does more harm than good. Yadda yadda…

Of course, even as I did my best with the gaping electoral pitfall suddenly yawning before me, I suspected I knew who asked the question—or at least had it asked. It wasn’t Prime Minister Stephen Harper or one of his Members of Parliament, but it might as well have been. It was someone without access to the polling results our prime minister sees, but who nevertheless paid attention to conversations in the local coffee shop, and perhaps over the proverbial back fence. Someone who’d figured out intuitively what the PM and his Tories have cottoned on to in a more sophisticated way.

First, that there’s an appetite out there to do something about crime—because while the best evidence suggests that crime rates are falling across Canada, fear of crime among the public is still an issue. So easy points are scored by calling for tougher penalties, more arrests, longer prison terms, mandatory sentences and the like. Second, my questioner understood, as our Conservative government clearly does, that “crime” makes a terrific “wedge issue,” a way to divide voters from a candidate they might support on many other issues—if only they didn’t feel so strongly that “something must be done” about not feeling safe in their community.

In the end, I didn’t win the election, but I don’t regret saying what I did—especially now that crime data reporting is the subject of debate in Canada and since two levels of government have made tough-on-crime laws and massive prison-building programs a national and provincial wedge issue.

Statistics Canada monitors crime at all levels—national, provincial/territorial, metropolitan—using data from police and a set of categories and definitions developed with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. The agency is unequivocal: it says crime is falling.

Back in 2007, not long after the election during which I starting thinking about this issue, StatsCan reported that the crime rate had declined 7 per cent from the previous year. Crime was down in most provinces, including Alberta. Most incidents of violent offences—homicides, attempted murders, robberies—were down too. StatsCan’s 2008 and 2009 reports noted the same trend. In 2010 StatsCan announced that the crime rate had fallen another 5 per cent, and Alberta was again no exception. In fact, the 2010 report said that the crime rate and crime severity were declining faster (by 6 and 8 per cent, respectively) in Alberta than in any other province.

Overall, StatsCan says that Canada’s crime rate has plummeted more than 25 per cent over the past two decades. “The crime rate is now at its lowest level since 1973,” StatsCan announced in 2010. Its 1962–2010 crime rate graph looks remarkably like Mount Everest, with its summit back in 1993. We’re on a steep downslope now, with crime at levels not seen since I was at university in the 1970s and Canada seemed about as safe as any country could be.

Not all crimes fall at the same rate, however, and the rate of some even increased in 2010 from the previous year. Some violent crimes, including firearms offences, criminal harassment, sexual assault and abduction, rose slightly in spite of the overall decline. If StatsCan’s reports are selectively quoted, or broader trends aren’t mentioned in a news story, the public can easily reach wrong conclusions. Edmonton in 2011, for example, had one of the highest murder rates in its history. But Calgary in 2011 had its lowest homicide rate in a decade, and Canada had its lowest since 1966.

Not only is the overall crime rate falling, so too is what StatsCan calls the Crime Severity Index, which in 2010 “reached its lowest point (82.7) since 1998, the first year for which Index data are available.” The CSI takes into account the relative gravity of a crime, since more serious offences (e.g., murder) have little impact on the overall crime rate due to their relatively low volume. The decline in crime severity in 2010 was seen virtually across the country, including in Alberta; the exceptions were Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

Some have questioned Statistics Canada’s conclusions. Former Alberta Crown prosecutor Scott Newark, in a 2011 study for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), generated headlines with his suggestion that Canada’s crime rate may actually be rising. In his report, “Why Canadian Crime Statistics Don’t Add Up: Not the Whole Truth,” Newark wrote that statistics are “invaluable” but that StatsCan doesn’t “ask the right questions in the right way.” Newark argued that the 2009 report contained too little data, that crime categories keep getting revised (making comparisons difficult) and that StatsCan doesn’t identify whether crimes were committed by people on bail or parole. His conclusions have been cited by proponents of Canada’s new tough-on-crime laws.

Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan and University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob responded to Newark in the pages of The Globe and Mail. The problems with Newark’s study, they wrote, was that it compared figures that ought not to have been compared, cited incorrect facts and ignored evidence that the crime rate is—just as StatsCan says—declining. “Crime rates have nothing to do with tougher laws or harsher sentencing,” they concluded. “The fact is that crime rates go up and down. In recent years, they’ve gone down.”

StatsCan says that Canada’s crime rate has fallen more than 25 per cent over the past two decades, that crime is at its lowest level since 1973.

That Newark could reach the opposite conclusion based on the same data isn’t totally surprising. Crime is defined and measured and reported in ever-changing ways. Doob and Greenspan, for example, say that Newark included newly defined offences—criminal harassment and uttering threats, which comprised 22 per cent of “violent offences”—as new incidents of crime, and concluded that the crime rate went up, when instead the category had been expanded to include cases formerly not defined as “violent.”

Data—especially unclear data—can be misread. That’s why challenges such as Newark’s are useful: they help StatsCan refine its methodology. Six months after Newark published his MLI report, StatsCan released its newest crime data. The agency again reported that crime had fallen over the previous year. Newark again took issue with some aspects of the data. But he acknowledged that the agency’s reporting had tightened: “There have been improvements in explaining what’s being reported,” he wrote in the National Post. “These changes include information on the practice of youth diversion, on why and how crime data is retroactively revised, on what’s included in the numbers on ‘impaired driving’ and some increased historical data for youth crime. StatsCan is to be congratulated for these changes, which were implemented in a very short time frame.”

SO our national statistical agency concludes that crime is falling, and its methodology for reaching this conclusion seems to be improving. But given these heartening trends, why in Canada and Alberta are we embarking on a multi-billion-dollar spree of prison building, insisting on long mandatory sentences to fill those prisons and creating other punitive measures that have been shown not to work elsewhere Simply put, “tough-on-crime” governments either dispute or ignore the facts.

The federal government puts the cost of its planned five-year prison-building boom at a little over $2-billion, almost certainly underestimating the true cost. And this is just the start. Canada’s parliamentary budget officer, Kevin Page, expects the annual cost of running Canada’s prison system, pegged at about $4.4-billion in 2011, to more than double to $9.5-billion over the life of the Tory prison-building spree, and then to stay that way. He estimates that the elimination of conditional sentences as part of Bill C-10 (The Safe Streets and Communities Act) will raise the average cost per offender from about $2,600 to $41,000 as more cases go to trial.

Nor are federal prisons the only correctional facilities needed now that the Criminal Code has been amended to include longer, mandatory minimum sentences and other punitive approaches to justice. The Alberta government is spending $600-million on a new remand centre on Edmonton’s north side. The centre certainly needed an upgrade—the old one was dangerously overcrowded—but a fourfold expansion (from 734 to 2,808 inmates; now the largest such facility in North America) is harder to justify in an era of falling crime. When the new centre opens in January 2013, roughly a third of its cells are expected to sit empty.

Like its federal counterpart, the Alberta government is also increasing spending on new measures to “get tough” on crime. These will build on efforts such as the Victims Restitution & Compensation Payment Act, which as of 2008 allows the provincial government to seize the property of accused persons found guilty of no crime. Alberta’s 2012–2013 budget projects big spending increases for Alberta Justice (from $500-million to $537-million) and for the Solicitor General’s office (from $685-million to $772-million).

Today more than 1.5 million Americans are in prison (in 1970, fewer than 200,000 Americans were incarcerated). Throw in prisoners in local jails, and more than 2.3 million people—one in every 100 American adults—are behind bars. Are that country’s taxpayers benefiting from its vast prison-industrial gulag Officials in California and Texas are openly discussing closing prisons and releasing inmates because cash-strapped states simply can’t afford the operating costs. California, for example, intends to release 22,000 non-violent convicts early to save $1-billion annually. Between 2008 and 2010, at least 35 correctional facilities in the US were closed to save money.

Last month, a high-profile group of current and former US law enforcement officials including current and former judges, police officers, special agents and drug investigators wrote the Harper government calling America’s so-called “war on drugs”—which filled its prisons—a “costly failure.” Did Harper pay attention It appears not. Under Criminal Code changes passed this year, new mandatory minimum sentences will apply to a number of drug and criminal charges. Critics expect these changes to mean less judicial authority, fewer conditional sentences and longer prison terms. In short, more prisoners and potentially a higher crime rate—just in time for all these new prison cells.

Harper’s changes mean less judicial authority and longer prison terms. In short, more prisoners— just in time for all those new prison cells.

Of course, nothing is easier than “getting tough” on crime. It’s the lazy man’s answer to poverty. It’s less complicated to throw people in jail than to calm citizens’ unwarranted fears about “rising crime” or to address the social causes of crime, even if jailing people costs more in the long run. Plus, it makes for good politics, keeping the public’s mind off more substantive issues. It also makes for profitable journalism; sensationalism sells newspapers. Wanting revenge is human nature—so what if we end up using jail as a crime college that turns troubled young people into hardened criminals?

The former point—that these new crime laws are really about vengeance, not safer societies—is why the Canadian Bar Association and the John Howard and Elizabeth Fry societies opposed Bill C-10, arguing that it favours a failed incarceration model over rehabilitation and reintegration. Even the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which supported the bill, acknowledged a need for both “hard” and “soft” approaches. “The reality is we’re not going to arrest our way out of our troubles,” said chief Dale McFee.

The US spends $200-billion a year on prisons—almost as much as Canada’s entire 2007–2008 budget of $234-billion. Of that sum, an estimated $49-billion is the cost of US mandatory sentencing laws alone. Harper’s new “mandatory-minimum” laws seem destined to likewise drive up the cost of justice in Canada. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty estimates that his province’s new prison costs could top $1-billion.

Put crudely, the more we spend on prisons and prisoners, the less we have for schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, libraries, recreation centres and other infrastructure and services governments provide best (not to mention less money for tax cuts, should that be your thing). If social justice and decency won’t wash with voters, maybe the good old bottom line will.

In the meantime, we’re faced with a government that bases policy decisions on fantasies—dangerous fantasies designed as wedge issues to win elections. Statistics Canada’s data and analysis is as good a measure of crime as we’ve got, and while collection and reporting can always be improved, StatsCan’s conclusions shouldn’t just be ignored. If that’s not enough, the feds seem to want to copy the US’s mistakes, in spite of ample evidence and warnings from high-ranking US officials.

Looking back to that 2007 campaign question, however, I think I might have responded better by appealing to citizens’ basic self interest: their pocketbooks. Even if Stephen Harper doesn’t get it, it’s sinking in south of the border that the prison-industrial complex advocated by the “tough on crime” crowd not only doesn’t work but is too expensive to sustain.

The truth is that wars on crime, like wars in general, seldom work out the way the people who promote them predict. The troops are rarely home by Christmas. Sometimes the enemy wins, as in our never-ending “war on drugs.” And sometimes everybody loses—as likely as not the eventual outcome of Canada’s escalating “war on crime.” #

David Climenhaga is a journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He lives in St. Albert.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Less Crime, More Prisons appeared first on Alberta Views.

His errant gunshot, which struck a two-year-old girl in the chest as she was sitting at her grandparent’s kitchen table, galvanized the Samson Cree First Nation near Hobbema. The child survived, but the shooting was the last straw for members of the community of 12,000 and they came out swinging with plans to eradicate the 13 gangs that terrorized them. The court, keenly aware of the public indignation, sentenced Crane to nine years, reduced on appeal to seven.

But the April 13, 2008, shooting of Asia Saddleback set off alarms around the province and heightened public interest in reining in the gangs that had become more numerous, overt and violent during the Alberta boom. A triple slaying that included an innocent bystander at a southeast Calgary Vietnamese restaurant eight months later served notice that gang violence wasn’t just an Aboriginal community phenomenon. A war between two Calgary gangs, Fresh off the Boat (FOB) and the Fresh off the Boat Killers (FK) had claimed 25 lives since 2002. But the January 1, 2009, slaying of 43-year-old contractor Keni Su’a triggered outrage. It wasn’t just gang members killing gang members anymore. The public wanted something done. Following an investigation involving more than 600 police and civilians, four men were charged with first-degree murder.

“That particular shooting sent shock waves through the community,” says Calgary Police targeted enforcement unit detective Gordon Eiriksson. “When an innocent bystander gets shot and killed, it really galvanizes us as a police service.”

The triple slaying capped off years of killings, shootings, stabbings and beatings by members of a gang that had fallen out of sorts, split into factions and begun trying to eliminate each other. The deaths, deportations, prison sentences and charges against key members on both sides have brought some respite, but Calgary police aren’t counting on lasting peace.

What draws a kid to a gang? Not just the money, but the brotherhood. For many gang members, it’s the first time anyone has cared about them. “With the clients I represent who have gang affiliations, the common thread is a lack of a role model and support at home,” says Edmonton lawyer Harold Brubaker, who represented Crane at his 2010 trial. “The function the gang ends up playing, for better or worse, is to give them a sense of identity and belonging.”

Crane’s own testimony at his sentencing in Wetaskiwin suggested he grew up without a father and was shuffled back and forth between relatives from the age of 3. “I was allowed to do whatever I wanted as a kid,” he testified after pleading guilty to charges of aggravated assault, weapons charges and a home invasion robbery. “It seemed to me like nobody cared.”

By age 11, Crane was smoking marijuana daily. By Grade 7, he’d stopped attending school. A psychologist hired by the defence described him as a severely traumatized, sad and tormented child who became a moody, hot-tempered, bitter and violent teen. He said Crane was sexually abused as a child and suffered from anxiety and depression.

Although the heavily tattooed Crane told the court he wanted to leave gang life to focus on his wife and child, gangster rap lyrics and drawings were found in his remand centre cell. A hand-drawn sign found with his belongings proclaimed: Thug life until the end of time.

Aboriginal gang members are often distinguishable by tattoos and colours and are territorial, frequenting certain areas of specific communities. While they may be among the most visible gangs, they are not the major focus of Alberta police. The province’s law enforcement agencies are more interested in the criminal organizations that control the bulk of the drug trade in the province. They also focus on violent gangs engaged in open warfare on city streets.

What draws kids to gangs A sense of identity. “The common thread is a lack of a role model and support.”

More than 900 gangs operate in Canada, according to police intelligence, and 83 of them operate in Alberta—up from 54 in 2008. (According to the Alberta government, “gangs” include criminal organizations, or “groups of two or more individuals” who conspire within an ongoing network to break the law, and street gangs, defined as “more or less structured groups of adolescents and young adults” who use intimidation and violence to commit criminal acts.) Gang expert Cathy Prowse, a University of Calgary criminologist and former Calgary police officer, says the top criminal organizations have fixed, close-knit memberships, are largely invisible and handle most of the importation and distribution of drugs in Alberta. “The street gangs are one rung below and will always rival one another for affiliation with organized crime,” she explains. “There are only a fixed number of spots. The shooting starts with peripheral associates, each group hoping to destabilize the other. Violence is the way to preferential affiliation.”

Edmonton criminologist Bill Pitt says the Hells Angels still rule the roost in Canadian organized crime while street level gangs fight over the crumbs. For the most part, they fly under local enforcement radar. “There are so many layers of retailers before you get to the Hells Angels and the other biker gangs,” says Pitt, who teaches at Grant MacEwan University.

Many ethnic gangs still exist—Indo-Canadian, Asian, Jamaican, Somalian. Pitt says these are a product of Canadian immigration policy. “Canadians are notorious for marginalizing their immigrants,” he contends. And while Aboriginal gangs are prolific in Western Canada, “they’re at the lower end of the food chain when it comes to sophistication.”

In Edmonton the police gang unit has files on about 50 different groups. “We have 15 to 20 groups we keep track of, who’s associated with them and a bit of their hierarchy, but I’m sure there are a lot we don’t know about,” says Staff Sergeant Darren Derko, who directs the 35-member gang unit out of a small, second-floor office at Edmonton’s downtown police headquarters. In 2007, the unit released the names of 10 street gangs active in the city. The list included, along with the Hells Angels, the Alberta Warriors, the Crazy Dragons, the Crazy Dragon Killers, GTC (Get the Cash), Indian Posse, North End Jamaicans, Redd Alert, Southside Boys, West End Jamaicans and White Boy Posse.

Police in Alberta are reluctant to disclose a list of the gangs in their jurisdiction, and the Calgary Police Service’s Eiriksson won’t even refer to the “criminal organizations” by name, because he doesn’t want to give them credibility in the eyes of Calgary’s youth. “When they’re in our streets killing each other and shooting innocent people, we don’t give them any validation.”

Derko says it’s getting more difficult to tell who’s who because many of the people they arrest don’t identify as belonging to a gang. “They don’t give themselves distinctive names anymore,” says Derko. One explanation may be a federal law that now makes it illegal to belong to a criminal organization. But probably the biggest reason, say police, is that gangs no longer want notoriety. “The groups we deal with are low-key because they don’t want us to know who they are, who they associate with and what activities they’re involved in,” says Eiriksson. “They quite often blend right in and thrive on that anonymity.”

Gang-related homicides are difficult to solve because gang members don’t co-operate with police, and witnesses are often afraid or unwilling to come forward. This came to a head in Edmonton in January when a homicide detective berated the Somali community for not co-operating with police investigating a fatal New Year’s Eve shooting of a Somali youth at a club. The city’s acting police chief apologized to angry community leaders, and vowed to keep detectives working on the unsolved homicides of more than 30 young Somali men in Alberta in the past five years. The low “clearance rate” is not unusual. Out of 77 gang homicides committed in Alberta between 2002 and 2006, more than 60 per cent remain unsolved, according to a 2009 report by the Calgary Police Service. The national clearance rate for gang crimes in 2006 was only 45 per cent, compared to 80 per cent for non-gang killings.

Police say Edmonton and Calgary had the second- and third- highest gang homicide rates in Canada in 2006 and 2007. The cities dropped to seventh and ninth respectively in 2009 when total Alberta gang homicides dropped to 13 (from 35 in 2008), but even then one in five homicides was gang-related.

A government profile of the alleged leader of the Alberta Warriors at the Peace River Correctional Centre. 

While the visible cost of gangs can be tabulated by counting coffins, the economic and social costs are incalculably high. The cost of policing, courts and incarceration is likely trivial compared to the damage done through the sale of illegal drugs—particularly healthcare costs—lost productivity, financial support for abandoned children and dysfunctional families. The U of C’s Prowse says no one has a handle on the cost of mortgage and insurance frauds and credit card scams related to gangs, but the numbers are likely huge. Then there are the psychological costs stemming from intimidation and a culture of fear in communities. “The obvious risk to the public is when these guys decide it’s time to take out a rival,”
Prowse says.

The government says gangs flourish in a community of indifference. “Too many individuals believe gangs are ‘not my problem’ or that gang crime happens ‘somewhere else,’ ” the province announced in a November 2010 report called “Alberta Gang Reduction Strategy.”

Government and police have recently taken initiatives to improve the way they tackle organized crime, including a major restructuring of the law enforcement machinery. The first changes occurred in 1996 when the province formed an independent body called the Criminal Intelligence Service of Alberta (CISA) to collect data on criminal organizations and provide it to municipal police agencies, Canadian Border Services, gaming and liquor officials and federal and provincial corrections agencies. “Before, there wasn’t a clear understanding of what organized crime looked like in the province,” says CISA director David Maze. “There was a need for an agency to look outside its own backyard and get a better understanding of the criminal element across the province.”

In 2006, the province established another independent enforcement initiative, called Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT), complete with its own civilian board of directors, to take action based on intelligence gathered on organized crime groups and other serious criminals such as child abusers, sexual predators and fugitives. With escalating gang violence in Calgary and Edmonton, ALERT was expanded in 2009 to nearly 400 people, most of whom—more than 300—were funded from provincial government initiatives. All members of the unit are seconded from partner agencies for a minimum of two years.

Inspector Jim Kennedy, ALERT’s director of intelligence, says his organization is unique. No other province has a central body for the oversight and governance of integrated provincial policing, although Manitoba is developing a similar agency. Since its inception, ALERT has laid 6,200 drug-related charges against 2,500 people, seized more than $4-million in cash and taken 300 firearms and 700 kg of drugs off the streets. But there have been lots of targets out there.

Maze says gang activity in Alberta spiked in 2006 when the province was rolling in an oil and gas bonanza and the economy was booming. “Basically, criminals outside of Alberta came here for the same reason everybody else did—the ‘Alberta Advantage,’” says Maze. “There was a lot of money to be made and lots of criminal markets.”

Law enforcement officials blame the federal Corrections Service for the spread of gangs across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Maze says CSC officials began to have a problem with large populations of gang members in prisons such as Stony Mountain in Manitoba, and attempted to deal with it by dispersing them to prisons across the country. “What they did was educate other local criminals that were incarcerated… and build new gangs,” he says. Soon police were encountering Alberta Warriors, an offshoot of the Manitoba Warriors.

Maze says some of today’s organized crime groups are sophisticated and others are basically opportunists. But he says there’s been increased involvement in white-collar crimes because the profits are huge and the chances of violence and apprehension are greatly reduced. He says gangs are recruiting tech-savvy teens for identity thefts, credit and debit card scams, and even mortgage and real estate fraud. Sentences for these are not nearly as heavy as for drug crimes.

Poverty is key, but Alberta puts most of its resources into enforcement rather than social programs.

There’s also a boom in counterfeiting—not money, but goods such as appliances. Gangs also enlist people to steal specific items they then sell on the Internet. Other groups operate theft rings that take advance “orders” for specific items—everything from snowmobiles to tractors—and send out operatives to steal them. “The gang members shooting each other and injuring people are just the tip of the iceberg,” says the CISA director.

Police attempt to rein in gangs by monitoring their activities and gathering information to justify charging or, if applicable, deporting members. “We create an environment where these groups don’t feel comfortable and can’t operate,” says Maze. This fall in Calgary, the province will launch TALON, a controversial real-time law enforcement database. Eventually all 12 municipal police services in the province as well as First Nations police will be linked to a database containing records of all public interactions with police. “We’ll make it more difficult for the criminal to move around the province and commit offences, says Maze. “It will be one of the most significant changes in law enforcement in Alberta—a huge benefit to officer safety and public security.”

Ayaaz Janmohamed, executive director of the provincial Solicitor General’s information technology branch, says police currently have to individually contact each municipal police agency in the province to determine if a specific gang member was involved in illegal activities there. TALON enables a police officer stopping a vehicle for a traffic infraction in Edmonton to instantly access information about the driver’s history—everything from traffic tickets to outstanding shoplifting charges. “Information is gold for them,” Janmohamed says. “The concept is to have a single source of the truth.” Unlike the RCMP-operated Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), however, which contains only verified information such as criminal convictions, TALON captures “speculative” information about suspects, including unproven allegations, investigation theories, details of 9-1-1 calls—virtually any of a citizen’s contacts with police—and this has attracted criticism from defence lawyers and civil liberties advocates.

Police have begun working with special prosecutors to increase the likelihood of convictions. This was prompted by a massive drug case that collapsed under its own weight in Edmonton. Police arrested 60 people in a series of raids in September 1999, in a crackdown on an organization known as the Trang gang. About 24 people were convicted on various charges and four were deported, but after the province spent $2.1-million building a special courtroom, charges against 19 people were stayed after the court ruled police failed to adequately disclose evidence. The case cost taxpayers $36-million in policing and legal expenses. To add insult to injury, Trang gang members successfully sued the province in a nine-year-long civil suit over horrific conditions in the remand centre. A judge found they had been subjected to cruel and unusual treatment and their Constitutional rights had been violated, but no monetary damages were awarded.

Tom Engel, an Edmonton lawyer who represented 26 of the accused, says the massive investigation did little to stop the flow of drugs. Younger and more violent criminals took over the drug trade in the city and violence became even worse. “Out of that came a gang called the Crazy Dragons, and those guys didn’t mind violence at all,” he says. Engel questions the value of enforcement and suggests the decriminalization of illegal drugs would remove gangs’ main incentive. “I don’t think there’s any information that any of these specialized units that cost millions of dollars are effective at all in controlling the use of drugs.”

Police concede they will never totally shut down gangs or the drug trade. “You’ll always have gangs,” Derko says. “We’ve laid some pretty serious charges and put gang leaders in jail, but the group gets a new hierarchy and they keep going.” But he says it is necessary for police to keep the pressure on. “If we didn’t, how rampant would this be?” he says. “We might not be able to stop them, but if we keep them down so they can’t grow, that has an impact. The more money they can generate, the more power they have.”

When police arrest and courts convict gang members, it puts a strain on the prison system. Terry Garnett, director of the Alberta Correctional Service intelligence unit, says the province now posts a security intelligence officer in all corrections facilities to keep tabs on gang members, who make up 7 per cent of the prison population. He says more than 200 inmates in 25–30 gangs are in eight provincial facilities at any one time.

Another 250 are in federal institutions in Alberta, and another 100 are in local communities under federal supervision, says April Morris, a spokesperson for the Correctional Service of Canada. She says about 2,000 gang members or associates are in federal jails and 415 of those are identified as affiliated with Aboriginal gangs. Morris says nearly 25 per cent of all incarcerated gang members are serving sentences for drug-related crimes at a cost to taxpayers of more than $300 a day. The average annual cost per inmate in 2008 was $106,583.

Garnett says that when provincial inmates are admitted they’re asked to reveal, for their own safety, whether they’re affiliated with any gangs. “We know who they get along with and try to make sure they don’t cross paths in the corrections facilities,” he says. But gang members sometimes attack gang members. The family of one is suing the province and Alberta Corrections for nearly $11-million for a vicious May 31, 2006, attack at the Edmonton Remand Centre that left the victim severely disabled.

Garnett says the influence of gangs in prison is directly related to how many members of the same gang are in a jail. “The minute they show that they’re trying to control a unit, we take measures to prevent that.” Correctional officers say the increase in the number of gang members in provincial jails brings with it a heightened risk for prison staff as well. Some are concerned that risk will increase in the new 2,000-inmate Edmonton Remand Centre, currently under construction, because guards will be mingling with prisoners rather than watching them from relative safety behind shatterproof glass windows.

Locking kids up ensures an infinite supply of new gangs. Edmonton counsellor Wallis Kendal: “Talk is cheap. If you want to get a kid off gangs, give him an alternative.” (Darcy Henton)

But Alberta’s strategy against gangs is not limited to locking them up in prisons. Premier Ed Stelmach launched a safe communities initiative following his 2008 election victory, and followed up in December 2010 with a comprehensive anti-gang strategy. The four-pronged plan focuses on awareness, prevention, intervention and enforcement. It says the suppression of gangs must be led at the community level. “Traditional law enforcement has a vital role to play in stamping out criminal activity, but more arrests alone will not solve the gang problem,” says the 50-page document. “Instead we must take a comprehensive, long-term approach—one that systematically reduces the ranks of gangs by stopping the recruitment of new gang members.”

With a multi-ministry approach, the province has invested more than $500-million to fund police, prosecutors and community programs, says former justice minister Alison Redford. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve been successful,” she says. “We didn’t just implement policies. We put in a fair amount of money.”

The province also passed a series of anti-crime bills aimed particularly at gangs—legislation that empowers police to remove gang members from bars, seize body armour and impound armoured vehicles. They also passed a bill to establish a witness protection program for gang members who testify for the Crown, and a bill that makes it mandatory for medical personnel to report stabbing and gunshot wounds to police. But the most controversial legislation so far has been a revised Victims Restitution and Compensation Payment Act that enables police to seize cash, property, vehicles and other assets they believe were used in crimes or are linked to the proceeds of crime.

“Police have told us it’s a very successful tool,” says Redford. By the end of 2010, police in Alberta had seized $20.9-million worth of property or proceeds from crime and put more than $2.5-million back into the community for programs to support immigrants, women and at-risk youth.

But this tool comes with a price, say critics, arguing it gives the province too much power. Janet Keeping, president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership and co-founder of the Calgary Civil Liberties Association, says that there’s little evidence from other jurisdictions that “civil forfeiture” laws reduce crime, and she notes that the law violates the provincial Bill of Rights.

Brian Hurley, president of the Edmonton Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, says the government is focusing its energy in the wrong places. He says poverty and child abandonment are key factors in kids joining gangs, but the government still puts the bulk of its resources into enforcement rather than social programs and support systems for at-risk children.

“Upper class suburban kids don’t join gangs,” he notes. “Gang members come from disadvantaged backgrounds. You rarely have a gang member who has even one parent who gives a crap about him. Kids need to be wanted and need at least one parent to take care of them, but none of that makes a good sound bite.”

Chris Hay, executive director of the John Howard Society of Alberta, warns that youth crime is linked closely to demographics, and the number of at-risk youth is expected to increase over the next decade. He says the birthrate was up 5 per cent in 2004 over 2003 and that means more at-risk teens by 2017. He says a strong correlation between fetal alcohol syndrome and delinquency makes it logical to spend money now on counselling for drug- and alcohol-addicted women to reduce the number of FAS births. “If a young person gets into crime and doesn’t get out of it, we’ll spend millions on that person,” he notes. “There’s all that enforcement and the cost of locking them up in jail. But it’s difficult for governments to step up and invest now so we can have a brighter future 20 years from now.” Hay says other strategies aren’t working. “If we think crime is a law enforcement problem, we’re doomed to failure. Gangs are a community problem.” He says, however, the government is on the right track with its investment in community programs that support youth and their families.

Some critics say policies that aim to keep people locked up just ensure an infinite supply of new gangs. Inmates scheme with other inmates with technical skills and contacts to set up new criminal enterprises when they’re released. “The crews today were made up in jail,” says Edmonton youth outreach worker Wallis Kendal. “They meet in jail.” And once in a gang, he says, it’s extremely difficult to get out. “These kids have no other way to make an income,” he says. “I have a lot of guys and gals who would get out of gangs, but they have no way to live.”

The Native Counselling Service of Alberta (NCSA), which operates the minimum-security federal institution in downtown Edmonton known as the Stan Daniels Healing Centre, has run a Warrior program aimed at curbing violence for nearly a decade. Patti LaBoucane-Benson, NCSA’s research director, says it’s possible to help people get out of gangs, but they must be motivated. “We can’t do it for them,” she says. “We facilitate a process where they do what they need to get out of gangs. We can’t make people heal, but we try to create a safe environment where they can begin to contemplate this stuff.”

Solicitor General’s office spokesperson Christine Nardella says the province doesn’t run any programs aimed at getting gang members out of gangs, but it funds several aimed at steering youth away from gangs. In late 2010, the province allocated $8.2-million to 14 agencies with a track record of supporting vulnerable youth. One youth intervention program that received $1.5-million under the Safe Communities Strategy is Pohna: Keepers of the Fire. Pohna director Karen Erickson says the program was launched in 2006 at the request of Edmonton police to reach out to youth aged 11–17 at risk of being involved or already involved in criminal and gang activity. Some teens were wearing gang colours and modelling themselves after Los Angeles gangs with names such as the Bloodz, the Blood Set Soldiers, King Pin Blood and the Blood Tie Family.

Police say gang activity spiked in 2006, when the province was rolling in oil and gas bonanza.

“We build on the strengths of kids, rather than their problems,” she says. A critical component of the program requires youths to bring key adults in their lives—a parent or guardian or relative or teacher—for support. “We try to ensure they don’t fall between the cracks,” she says. “We develop a relationship in which they feel valued, that someone is there for them, that they have somewhere to turn, that they are not alone.”

She says the support system sticks with the youths even if they falter and end up charged with additional criminal offences. It shows them a better way and helps establish a support network to get there. “They want to stay out of trouble and to stop drinking and doing drugs,” she says. “They want to move away from the group that gets them into trouble, but making all these things happen isn’t easy. A 14-year-old can’t do it alone. Will alone can’t make changes occur.”

Kendal, an outreach worker who’s been stabbed and beaten in his line of work, isn’t optimistic such programs will be successful without housing support and employment opportunities for youth. “Talk is cheap,” he says bluntly. “If you want to get a 16-year-old off gangs, you have to give him an alternative that means something.” He says programs to help prepare youth for employment have inflexible hours and pay only $1,000 a month, which nobody can live on.

Jesse (not his real name) is coming to terms with that. A former gang leader in Edmonton, he lived the life of a high roller, pulling in several thousand dollars a day. He had credibility on the street and he had power. He could give an order and people would be beaten. But a few stints in prison for home invasion and drug charges got him thinking. He was tired of always looking over his shoulder for other gangs or the police. He was tired of hurting people to collect drug debts or just because they were from a rival gang.

In jail, he saw 50-year-old gang members trapped in that lifestyle and decided it wasn’t the life he wanted. “The fact that I didn’t have a Christmas, I didn’t have a birthday, was depressing. I didn’t know every day if I would live or die. I was angry. Days were stressful—always living by the drugs and the money. I always wanted to change, but change is so hard.”

He reached for help through a NCSA program called Quest for Success, a predecessor of Pohna. It took two tries before he finally managed to cut all ties to gangs and drugs. Going back to school and finding a job were nearly impossible. Kendal got him into drug rehab and his counsellors helped him get a job. But it was a long process. Jesse had never lived a “normal” life. His mother and other relatives were drug dealers and users. He’d sold drugs since he was 13. He had to turn away from his gang buddies, from the money and the power.

Jesse, now 25, has been clean and sober for two years. He’s still going to school, has a part-time job and works with other young people trying to wean themselves off gangs. He says he would never have got this far without the programs. “Those supports are needed when someone’s trying to get out of that lifestyle,” he says. “It’s almost like teaching a baby how to walk.”

He’s enthusiastic about a new program called Uncensored, run out of the U of A. “It’s outside the box,” explains Jesse. The program enlists youth to counsel counsellors in techniques to help kids like themselves. Similar to Pohna, it gives youth power to change the way things are.

“This program is a groundbreaker,” Kendal adds. “If there’s going to be a change, it will come because the kids themselves will be the driving force.”

Darcy Henton is a veteran journalist who currently covers politics as an Edmonton-based legislature reporter for the Calgary Herald.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Thug Life appeared first on Alberta Views.

Some of the young people I worked with were in treatment for drug problems. Some were “in program” for anger management issues. For the majority of my tenure with the Wood’s Homes organization, I worked with young sex offenders. Many of them were in program as a condition of a sentence imposed by the court. It was either do treatment or do time.

My pastime often sparked the most animated and heated conversations. Civilians who weren’t familiar with the program would inform me that they didn’t know why I bothered with “that sort”—“that sort” being teens in trouble with the law, specifically teens who had committed sexual offences. The prevailing notion was that, young though they were, reforming them wasn’t really an option. Given the serious nature of their crimes, prison was what they needed, and the harder the time the better. Prison would scare them straight.

I’m thinking back to these conversations now because of the echo I detect in the federal government’s recently proposed amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Some of Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson’s goals and procedures are described on the federal government’s website. 

They provided resistance, recriminations, endless objections and surprisingly creative profanity.

“The proposed sentencing amendment,” the site states, “would allow courts to consider deterrence and denunciation as objectives of youth sentences. These objectives are included in a manner consistent with the principle of proportionality, which requires that the punishment fits the crime (i.e., the more serious the crime, the more severe the sentence).” It further describes what some of the deterrent measures might look like: “…As part of its platform commitment, the Government had indicated that it would amend the YCJA to provide for automatic adult provisions for youth found guilty of serious and violent crime and repeat offences.”

It’s clear from this wording that the government believes that by imposing harsher sentences, by shifting young offenders into adult court and by applying the principle of “denunciation,” young offenders will be deterred in greater measure from committing their crimes. Well, maybe that will happen, but I have my doubts. Here’s why.

Let’s consider the young people I worked with. Generally, they’d experienced disruption in their home environments: divorces, separations, multiple guardians, dislocations. Most often, they’d experienced some kind of serious abuse over an extended period. They were—as already noted—all troubled, but that’s too vague a term, so let me try to be more specific. By “troubled” I mean to say that they experienced tremendous difficulty with both decision-making and emotional expression, and these traits impacted upon each other. Their inability to express emotions properly often played out in terrible decisions. They frightened, angered and saddened easily; raged and lashed out at people without warning. An individual in one group felt belittled when someone stole his seat during a group meeting. He responded by bloodying the person’s nose. This kind of irrational, emotional response to small matters was a signature of their behaviour.

They also lacked skills, and by that I mean they lacked both technical and social skills. Frequently they were functionally illiterate. Many of the kids in the program couldn’t construct a simple written sentence. Their grasp of mathematics was limited. Across the board, they operated several grade levels below what might have been expected for their age. Their abilities to negotiate, listen effectively and communicate productively were incomplete and inadequate. 

A writing sample from one of Clem Martini’s theatre and writing classes for youth criminals.

In addition, they frequently experienced exacerbating medical conditions: attention deficit disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, depression or other psychiatric disorders. They sometimes had a surprisingly long criminal record for their age, and when I say surprisingly I mean I found it surprising. They were genuinely young—between the ages of 12 and 18, with a median age of, say, 15—and they were already in possession of lengthy rap sheets.

Wood’s Homes holds a philosophy that maintains that regardless of the nature of their troubles, young people can be helped and their behaviours altered through programs that address their specific issues. These programs don’t come cheap, however, and consequently they tend to be relatively rare. The Phoenix Program, for instance, which offers treatment for teen sexual offenders, is one of a handful of programs of its kind in Canada. It draws upon clients from across the nation, but can only accommodate 12 or 13 young people at a time. Those young people are in residence for between one and two years. Consequently, the program frequently has a long, long waiting list.

So when the new amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act describe an intention to place more emphasis upon denunciation and to provide for automatic “adult provisions” for young people, why do I experience feelings of misgiving?

I have misgivings because if denunciation may be defined as condemnation and criticism, these young people are already extremely familiar with this phenomenon. They have received denunciation at a family level, at school and in the community without any apparent prior deterrent value. 

I have misgivings because the young people in question are, by definition, young. That presents ethical questions. Isn’t it society’s responsibility to guide and instruct minors If an individual isn’t old enough to vote, drink, sign legal documents without guidance or even drive, is it really ethical to turn him over to adult court to receive adult penalties and do adult time

I have misgivings because I’m not certain that society benefits from incarcerating young people. A report released by the John Howard Society had this to say about transferring youths to adult court to face adult sanctions: “A youth committed to an adult penitentiary will experience a violent and destructive environment… will find no special programs or facilities for young offenders, and limited educational, vocational and psychological resources. He will find a facility where he is exposed to violence, where the murder and suicide rates are high and where there is a high probability of becoming a victim of mental, physical or sexual abuse. He will be taught to settle disputes with violence.” I would go on to suggest that there is nothing like having spent time in prison to transform a young, inexperienced criminal into a more knowledgeable, more dangerous criminal. This is, I suppose, where the rationale for even longer sentences comes in, the thinking being, “If we can’t reform the youthful criminal, we can at least keep them out of our backyards. The longer the better.” 

But it should also be pointed out that when it comes to doing “serious jail time” and delivering lengthy sentences, Canadians are already well ahead of the curve. According to an April 1997 report released by the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs entitled “Renewing Youth Justice,” the rate of youth incarceration in Canada was “twice that of the United States and 10 to 15 times the rate per 1,000 youth population in many European countries, Australia and New Zealand.”

Do we really have twice as much serious youth crime as the United States Do we truly have nearly 15 times as much as most European countries And given these statistics, have matters grown to such a degree of urgency that we feel we should be putting even more youths in prison for even longer Certainly no current statistics support the notion that there has been a substantial increase in youth crime over the past decade.

Furthermore, a report written and released by the Canadian Criminal Justice System noted: “The overcrowding of prisons remains a major concern and challenge in Canada. As a result, the safety of inmates and staff alike is threatened and, ultimately, that of the public…” In listing some of the reasons for this overcrowding, the report went on to explain that “the courts, perhaps influenced by public opinion, continue to rely excessively on incarceration as a reaction to crime…” 

A question generally follows this kind of discussion. It goes something like this: “Yes, fine, prisons are awful, not the kind of place where I would want to spend a weekend, but what has any of this got to do with me?”

It’s a good question—good because it’s direct. Good because it comes from a place of self interest, and it’s often from this impulse that people will take genuine action. 

A youth committed to an adult penitentiary will experience a violent and destructive environment…will find no special programs or facilities for young offenders, and limited educational, vocational and psychological resources.

And it’s the question that I think many people pose to themselves as they breeze past any number of articles in newspapers detailing the present conditions in prison. (Another riot. Another inquiry. Another desultory non-revelation—the prisons are overcrowded. Another vague promise to address the situation. And so on and so on until the next riot or murder or whatever.)  What has any of this got to do with me, sitting in my chair in my living room on the outside?

Well, more than you might think. The walls of prison are surprisingly permeable. What happens within those walls can have serious implications and impact for those who live beyond them. Gangs are very well represented in the prison system. Young inmates often feel compelled to hook up to get a measure of protection, but joining a gang isn’t like joining your local health club. There is no “trial membership.” Young people recruited on the inside become lifetime members on the outside. And that holds major consequences for everyone. In fact, in conversations with prison guards I’ve heard that the explosion of gangs among First Nations populations can be directly traced to earlier determined action to destroy Indian Posse and Red Alert. Convicted gang members were separated and sent to prisons in different locations across the country. But where could they find more willing, more receptive converts than in our prisons—already overpopulated by disaffected young indigenous men In a short time, new and larger chapters of these same gangs sprang up in fresh locations across the country. We all live with the increasingly complicated and dangerous environment created by these gangs today. 

The government maintains that the proposed amendments are part of their commitment to get tough on crime, but the approach is already considered obsolete. An article by the Associated Press from November 2007, reflecting upon previously passed “get tough” legislation in the United States, noted that “…[many] states are rethinking and, in some cases, retooling juvenile sentencing laws. They’re responding to new research on the adolescent brain, and studies that indicate teens sent to adult court end up worse off than those who are not: They get in trouble more often, they do it faster and the offenses are more serious.”

From an assignment: What is the biggest challenge you face in groups?

The further irony is that if many of the troubled young people I’ve met were to be polled, they’d probably agree that they should be punished. And why wouldn’t they agree It’s what they understand best, and pretty much what they’ve come to expect. Their formative years have been punctuated with recurrent, abrupt episodes of brutal and arbitrary punishment. Before he was 10 years old, one young man in program had been stuffed into a sleeping bag, tied in and beaten with a bat by his grandfather. Another individual had been strapped to a wood-burning stove by his father and whipped with a leather belt. 

If we genuinely wish to change these young people, we’ll first have to challenge those assumptions they’ve committed to memory about punishment. And to do that, we have to begin truly working with them. 

This was clarified for me a few summers back when a group I was preparing for a performance was engaged in an exercise as research for a new script. As part of their homework, the kids had been asked to create a clay model of the kinds of skills they possessed. Several complained bitterly but then proceeded to work. One fellow didn’t, though. Instead, he stared blankly at the clay, then began cursing. When his profanity grew louder, I asked him to move away from the table and let the other guys do their work. He stood up abruptly, knocking over his chair. He swept a handful of the tools from the table, cursed me some more and left for his room. The bedroom door slamming shut behind him seemed to put an end to the outburst, but moments later we heard the startling sound of something breaking. I glanced up and saw him leaning against the sill of the front door, the thick protective glass of the entrance way, shattered. The arm that had punched through the pane hung by his side and was streaming blood. 

Regardless of the nature of their troubles, young people can be helped and their behaviours altered.

When a staff member approached him, he seized a long, jagged shard and held it in front of him. The class was quickly terminated, the other participants escorted to the far end of the facility and locked in for their safety. The young man rushed out and loped up a hill, where he stopped, stood his ground and quietly dripped blood onto the lawn. The police and an ambulance were summoned. We called to him, but he didn’t reply. 

Since there seemed to be no way of repairing the class or resolving the situation, I packed up the art materials and prepared to leave. As I returned to my car, I heard my name called. I turned and was alarmed to see him racing toward me. I stood, frozen, and asked what he wanted. He told me he wanted to apologize. He said he’d looked at the clay, considered his skills, and realized that he didn’t have any. “I’m empty,” he told me. “There’s nothing there.” 

But he came to back to class the next day, arm stitched up, sat down and returned to work.

 For the most part, young offenders are damaged. Incarceration won’t fix that. Burdening an already overwhelmed prison system won’t fix that either. But no one ever lost votes by promising to get tough on crime.

So let’s be clear. We can put more young people in prison than we currently do, and we can put them in earlier. We can give them longer sentences. The fact is, though, that our jails are already bursting and no one is interested in spending the millions needed to construct new ones or fix the old ones. All that can possibly occur is that the kids we send to prison today will be released early to make room for the next crop that is inevitably coming round the bend on the very same criminal justice conveyor belt. They will be returned to the streets in good time, and this time they’ll be honed hard from their experience. 

Discovery, early intervention, treatment and rehabilitation sound soft, vague and risky and probably won’t get a single politician elected to office—but they may in the end be the only genuine solution. In the meantime, by all means, let’s get on with the denunciation.

Award-winning playwright Clem Martini taught theatre classes to young offenders for two decades. He is an associate professor of drama at the University of Calgary. 

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Scared Straight? appeared first on Alberta Views.

To passing motorists on Highway 15, the low-slung red brick complex, when glimpsed through the morning ice fog, could pass for a college or school. But parallel perimeter fences topped with razor wire and anchored at the corners with armed sentry towers give away its true purpose. A pool of blood on the sidewalk of the inner courtyard reinforces the message to visitors. This is no school.

The “Max,” as it is known, is one of seven federal penitentiaries in Alberta. Nine other prisons, plus assorted prison camps and young offender facilities, are operated by the province for prisoners serving less than two years. Together they hold more than 4,000 men and women and about 170 juveniles.

Alberta has the distinction of having the sixth highest incarceration rate in Canada after the three territories and the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, according to Statistics Canada information for 2003/04. Though the province locks up 90 people for every 100,000 Alberta adults, this is still well under the national incarceration rate of 134. About 32,000 men and women are behind bars in Canada on any given day, at a cost to taxpayers of about $2.7-billion annually.

Many of the prisoners are poorly educated or illiterate. One in 10 men and one in five women in federal prisons suffer from a mental illness. About 80 per cent of federal inmates have less than a Grade 10 education and 65 per cent have less than Grade 8. The illiteracy rate among prisoners is about seven times that of mainstream society, according to Maureen Collins of the Edmonton John Howard Society. Although most federal prisons offer schooling, the programs, according to staff, are underfunded and the waiting lists to get into them are long.

Too many of the people in Canada’s jails are Aboriginal. Although they represent only 3 per cent of the national population, nationally Aboriginals account for 20 per cent of all admissions to federal and provincial prisons. Almost 40 per cent of sentenced Alberta prisoners are Aboriginal. It’s twice that proportion in Saskatchewan and 70 per cent in Manitoba. Currently, about 90 of the 240 prisoners at Edmonton Institution, or 37.5 per cent of the population, are Aboriginal. It’s enough to make a Cree elder weep. “They are throwing away their own identity,” laments Cecil Nepoose, who runs Aboriginal programs at the Max. “They don’t want to know who they are. They don’t want to know they have a rich culture, a rich, rich history to better their lives. That hurts me sometimes.”

How did it get this way Although many Aboriginal offenders have a predilection for booze and drugs, they say that’s just a symptom. They blame the loss of culture and forced attendance at residential schools. The schools separated children from parents for long periods of time and prevented the passing on of parenting skills through subsequent generations. Without a proper upbringing in their homes or a sense of family, many Aboriginal children ended up in foster homes and reform schools.

“It’s daycare that’s raising young people these days and TVs that are babysitting them,” says Nepoose, who wears his waist- length hair in long black braids. “I had to chop wood and haul water with a pail and if I needed to go someplace I had to get on a horse. We were poor materially, but we were happy.”

Aboriginal offenders are vulnerable to gangs. They are looking for a sense of belonging and they get that from like-minded criminals who use prisons as recruiting centres. It is hard, in a dangerous and confined space, to turn down a forceful invitation. “They don’t go in there as gang members, but they come out as gang members,” says Rochelle Knibb of Native Counsel- ling Services of Alberta. “At least half of gang members join gangs while incarcerated.” Knibb laments that no programs are specifically aimed at helping gang members.

Barry Fry, serving 12 years for a home invasion and other offences, turned to a gang in prison and now it is his life. “My gang is my family. It’s a brotherhood,” he explains. “When you have nothing, your friends are your family. I joined up in 2000 because we had the same beliefs. We look out for each other. We have each other’s backs.”

With no other role models, children in Aboriginal communities look to gang members as heroes and follow them on the path to self-destruction. Fry has seen kids as young as nine high on crystal meth. He fears for their fate. He wonders what chance they have. “Go to any reserve and take down the names of the kids under 18 and I guarantee you in six years 90 per cent of those kids will have been in jail at least once. I’ve got little cousins. I don’t want them to come in here. I want them to get an education and stay out of trouble, but a lot of them don’t have that opportunity. They are on their own.”

In a general population unit at the Max, an emotional Clayton Berard speaks earnestly in staccato bursts, periodically pounding his chest for emphasis. A young, passionate Aboriginal man, his clothes—an orange-red football jersey and a Denver Broncos ball cap—are as colourful as his way of speaking. Two silver-capped lower teeth flash when he talks and his tattooed arms are in constant motion.

His voice quakes when he describes his childhood, bouncing from one foster home to the next. Feeling alone since age nine. Put up for adoption. Twice the featured child for adoption on a local television station. Somewhere along the way his feelings of worthlessness turned to rage. “Nobody wanted me,” he recalls. “What did I do wrong to deserve that To this day, it’s still frustrating to me because I am still dealing with it. People say it’s in the past, but me, I still hold that pain like a chip on my shoulder.”

Mohawk Richard Squires says talking to elders in prison “helped me deal with my anger. It made me look at myself.”

Berard’s mother was only 17 when he was born. She gave him up. “I don’t think no kid should have to go through that. That really gets to me, man. What are we supposed to do Teach ourselves on the street Using needles, smoking crack?”

The young Buffalo Lake man was high on crack when, in December 2000, he and his cousin, armed with a gun and a knife, went on a tear. They forced their way into several homes and terrorized the occupants, including Edmonton radio gardening show host Stan Thomson and his wife. Just 25 years old, Berard is serving nine years in prison. His wife tried to drag him off the street at one point, he says, but the lure of the drugs was too strong. Now he has a three-year-old baby girl and the cycle of hopelessness seems to have spiralled into another generation.

Why isn’t the justice system working for Aboriginal people Provincial and federal governments have struggled to come up with answers and solutions. They’ve embarked on a number of innovative programs ranging from hiring Aboriginal police officers, prison guards and court workers to establishing Aboriginal healing lodges, courts and prisons. Cultural training is given to Crown prosecutors; there are appointments of Aboriginal judges and justices of the peace, not to mention the creation of sentencing circles for Aboriginal adult and youth offenders. Addiction treatment programs aimed specificially at Aboriginals have also been established.

Native elders were introduced into federal penitentiaries in the mid-1980s to assist Aboriginal inmates in practising cultural ceremonies. Programs at the Max, which are open to natives and non-natives alike, include “smudging” with the smoke of smouldering sage or “sweet grass,” and spiritual experiences in the dark, sweltering, womblike confines of the sweat lodge. There are emotional, heart-purging healing circles as well as traditional pipe ceremonies and fasts.

Sadly, it’s in prison where many Aboriginal inmates discover their heritage. Correctional Services Canada officials hope this knowledge will instill in the inmates the self-worth they have been lacking and wrench them from the path of self-destruction. So far, the only evidence for that result is anecdotal.

In the cafeteria of the Stan Daniels Healing Centre, an Aboriginal treatment centre for released federal inmates in down- town Edmonton, Richard Squires says he never really knew or cared about his Aboriginal heritage until he got to prison.  “I never knew nothing and I didn’t have an interest to learn,” admits the hulking, broad-shouldered, 51-year-old Mohawk. “I was seven years old when I was taken away from my family and I ended up in foster homes and group homes and I grew up angry. I couldn’t read or write until I was 23 years old. I learned in prison. The thing about being illiterate is it brings on all kinds of other illnesses with it. Everybody else is always right and you’re always wrong.”

Why there are so many Aboriginal people in prison is no mystery to Squires, who is on the back end of a life sentence for murder. “We come from a dysfunctional background. Society has put us on the back burner and we’ve isolated ourselves. It’s not so much that the government puts us in prisons. We put ourselves in prisons. For some Aboriginal people—I hate to say it—prison is home.”

After 30 violent years of prison life marked by riots and hostage-takings, Squires doesn’t have a lot of accolades for the corrections system. But he applauds the move to bring in Native elders. “For me personally, talking to elders has helped me deal with my anger. It has given me an understanding of myself. It got me in touch with who I am and who I want to be. We all put on masks. We want to be the tough guy. But I have learned. I discovered I did fit in. I do belong. It gave me a sense of purpose. It made me look at myself and make changes to be a better person.”

Although there’s no evidence in the form of lower incarceration or recidivism rates to back it up, Aboriginal programs seem to have a genuine positive impact on hard-core cons like Squires, says Rochelle Knibb. “I have seen people come here who have been very, very resistant to correctional programs. When they can practise their spirituality they are more likely to stay in the programs and see them through,” she says. “I think healing centres like ours give Aboriginal offenders some feeling that they can succeed, that they are more than just a number.”

Back at the Max, Berard turns to Nepoose for spiritual help. “He’s probably the best thing that ever happened to this place. He opened my eyes. He showed me that I have to get control of myself and learn the tools I need to help me get out and stay out. I keep my strength by praying every day.”

Nepoose has seen hardened killers brought to tears inside the sanctity of the sharing circle. Like the confessional in a Roman Catholic church, it’s a place where cons can admit their failings, their sins and their fears and not have to worry about it getting back to fellow inmates and guards.

At a recent circle, a street-hardened gang member in prison for violent offences wept over his crimes. “He was crying for what he had done,” says Nepoose. “It was so painful. He has a long way to go in terms of healing before he can get his foot in the door, but he made a sacrifice by exposing himself. There’s a lot of remorse that comes out of those sharing circles. They are dealing with a lot of anger and a lot of hurt.”

Nepoose tells stories and teaches inmates how to prepare the sweat lodge, instructing them in the traditional names for the rocks and the wood and the order of things. They sing the traditional songs and they pray. “It’s teaching them a way of life, a way of looking, a way of living, a way of being,” he explains. “It’s a comfort zone for them when they come into a ceremony, a sweat lodge especially. They can relate to God, they talk to the spirit world. Most of their prayers are answered in some way, some form. Some take time, some responses are almost instant.”

A tough childhood can be a cop-out for some people who don’t do well, Cardinal says, “but we all choose our path.”

Alberta Corrections supervisor Cecil Cardinal, 44, has seen the issue from both sides. A Cree who grew up poor in northern Alberta on the Sucker Creek Reserve, he recalls travelling with his family to Peace River to visit his own father in a provincial prison. “I had to talk to him on a phone through the glass, but at Christmas I remember we had dinner with the offenders in the gym.” Four of Cardinal’s nine brothers and sisters have also served time in prisons. The veteran jail guard says a tough childhood “can be a cop-out for some First Nations people who don’t do very well, but we all choose our path.”  Cardinal was inspired by his late uncle, Harold Cardinal, one of the province’s most prominent Indian leaders. “Everyone has obstacles and it is a matter of overcoming them and progressing from there,” he observes.

Kevin Meetoos overcame a significant hurdle when he turned a six-year prison sentence into something positive. It was very sobering to see up close the fate of so many men he had known in prison.

“Some of them are now serving life sentences, some of them have death sentences from HIV and the majority have passed away on the street,” says Meetoos.

When his sentence ended in 1990, he returned to prison as a Correctional Services Canada employee to help his former prison mates. The dry-witted 40-year-old credits an Aboriginal elder he met at Drumheller Institution for putting him on the right path, but he says the drive to change had to come from within. Now Kevin Meetoos works in the Max with Cecil Nepoose helping Aboriginal inmates find the tools they need to change their ways.

The Remand Centre

Fugitive murder suspect Miroslav Woronkiewicz was so determined to avoid being locked up in an Alberta remand centre that he tried to negotiate a deal with Calgary police to go straight to a maximum-security federal prison.  He vowed to pull an armed robbery before surrendering so he could plead guilty to it and go directly to a penitentiary to await his murder trial. “I don’t want to do no remand time, man,” he told a Calgary homicide detective in a taped cellphone call. “That’s torture, man. Like, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy to do time there, okay I can’t handle it psychologically. I will kill myself in there, man.”

Woronkiewicz feared he would be stuck in deplorable conditions in a crowded remand centre for up to three years waiting for a trial in today’s bogged-down justice system. He had previously spent seven months in the Edmonton Remand Centre where prisoners are sometimes stacked three to a cell in a space designed to hold two. Woronkiewicz had also done four months at the overcrowded Calgary Remand Centre. He was adamant he wasn’t going back.

“Try sitting in a cell 23 hours every day,” he told the detective. “I’d rather do 20 years in the pen than do five months in the remand centre.” He complained of having to wear a coarse, one-piece, tear-proof gown known in prison jargon as a “baby doll” and being fed only skimpy bag lunches that left him so famished he became enraged and had to be restrained.

The burly, head-shaven 23-year-old called the detective nine times over the course of several days trying to arrange his surrender, but he didn’t really trust the police to live up to their end, especially after his lawyer advised him that he had never heard of such an arrangement. “If you guys lie to me I swear to God I will kill somebody in jail, man. I will take somebody’s life and I’ll kill myself too. I don’t care, man. Just tell me honestly if you can’t do it and I still might turn myself in. It just might take a few days because I am planning to do a couple of robberies so I can get some pen time. Like, if that is what it takes, I’ll do it.”

Woronkiewicz never did work out a deal. After a couple of aborted surrenders, Calgary police eventually caught up with him and arrested him for the January 2004 stabbing death of 23-year-old Tibor Dvorak. Woronkiewicz immediately told police he wanted to plead guilty to robbing a video store so he could get sentenced to a federal prison. But it didn’t work out that way. His robbery trial was delayed when the Crown prosecutor fell ill, and Woronkiewicz’s bizarre scheme to avoid being remanded in a provincial facility fell apart. Much to his dismay he ended up serving substantial time in the Calgary Remand Centre before he was shipped to a Manitoba prison to begin serving a three-year sentence for robbery.

His lawyer, Allan Fay, says many of his clients complain about conditions at the Calgary Remand Centre, but he was shocked Woronkiewicz would go to such extremes to try to avoid the overcrowding, poor food and 23-hour-a-day lockup. “The very concept that people would commit crimes just to stay out of the remand centre is mind-boggling,” Fay says.

Another of his clients has spent five months in the Calgary Remand Centre, locked in a cell 23 hours of the day and often sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough bunks. “They have to build bigger jails or stop sending people there, one or the other,” Fay states. “In the present political climate I don’t see much sign that they are going to stop sending people there, so the provincial government must treat them in a humane fashion. At the moment, it does not appear that they are.”

Built in 1993 to hold 361 prisoners, the Calgary Remand Centre often holds more than 500 men and women. Prisoners, lawyers and guards say conditions in the Edmonton Remand Centre are even worse. Constructed in 1979 to hold 332, the Edmonton facility is bulging at the seams with 700-plus inmates.

The Solicitor General boasts that Alberta has the second-lowest cost per prisoner of any jurisdiction in Canada. At $101.51 per prisoner per day, the cost of running Alberta jails is second only to Nova Scotia and far cheaper than the federal prisons at $234 per inmate per day. But conditions are so bad at both of Alberta’s major remand centres that many remanded prisoners regularly earn reductions in their sentences of two or three days for every day served in remand. The practice has become so commonplace that the Alberta Court of Appeal recently chastised judges for awarding credits to remand centre prisoners without requiring proof of the vile conditions they claim to have endured.

Some remand prisoners have successfully argued that their confinement violated their human rights, and have had their sentences reduced. Nicholas Chan had a seven-year conviction for heroin trafficking reduced to just under a year last August after a court ruled his rights were violated when he was denied Buddhist reading materials and vegetarian meals in the Calgary Remand Centre. He spent 26 months in remand.

Twenty-seven former Edmonton Remand Centre inmates have launched a massive lawsuit against the province for treatment they claim was inhumane and degrading. In a statement of claim filed in Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench they contend “the accommodation is psychologically oppressive and harmful to physical health.” The inmates, who have since been released when charges were stayed, say they had to sleep on filthy, bloodstained, insect-infested mattresses in freezing, poorly ventilated cells. One Aboriginal inmate swore out an affidavit in the suit describing conditions in the medical unit. “The walls were dirty and disgusting,” said Bernard Bearhead, who spent time in the centre in 2001. “They looked like there was some kind of goo on them [caused by] bodily fluids.”

Another inmate signed an affidavit describing his difficulty getting clean clothes or clean towels at the remand centre. “There was a laundry parade daily and on many occasions inmates would line up for clean clothes but not get any.” He said larger inmates wore their coveralls until they were filthy and torn because they knew if they turned them in, they wouldn’t find another pair to fit them. He complained that the underwear he received to wear was stained with feces.

Despite the complaints and court challenges, inmates say conditions have worsened rather than improved  at the Edmonton Remand Centre. One inmate who spent time in the centre in 1992 and again in 2000, said in an affidavit that prisoners are now locked up more, receive fewer privileges, are treated worse by guards and medical staff and have to contend with more violence. He said the unit he was on in 2000 had 20 cases of lice.

Gerry Naud, another inmate who spent nine months in the Edmonton Remand Centre, complained constantly about conditions, to little avail. “I have never seen anything like it in my life,” he says. “It’s outright inhumane.” Naud observes that when three inmates are put in one cell, the third man has to sleep on a mattress on the floor alongside the toilet. There is no fresh air and dust and dirt blows out of the air vents. “When I was in there in the winter, you could scrape the frost off the walls.”

But he saves most of his contempt for the quality and quantity of the food. “Meals are being served with mould on them, undercooked meals, cold meals, food that is aging.” He filed an official complaint about mould in his food, but is not aware of any changes being made to address the problem.

Edmonton Remand Centre inmate Jason Dix, whose murder charges were eventually dropped, lost 60 pounds during his 22- month stay, on a diet of meatless chili with rice, tuna casserole and processed meat and potatoes. “You get no fresh fruit or vegetables,” according to Naud. One inmate signed an affidavit that he ate so many “poor quality” mashed potatoes in the remand centre he now gets uncomfortable at the sight of them. Most inmates supplement their diet with junk food from the prison canteen, which opens once a week for a couple of hours to sell candy, chocolate and potato chips. “If you don’t have money when you go into that place, you starve,” says Naud.

He says there’s nothing to do when you are locked in your cell for 20 or more hours a day, with no courses available to study or improve yourself, no training or counselling. Inmates say there is an inadequate stock of newspapers, magazines and books for the prisoners. Guards get first dibs on the papers.

Health care is also a major source of complaint. When a 24- year-old female inmate died from dehydration at the Edmonton Remand Centre in 2003, a doctor testified at her fatality inquiry that inmates have been getting sicker as the overcrowding has grown worse. Dr. Harry Jaglalsingh said he quit his post after the inquiry into the death of Jody Umpherville because he felt he didn’t have the authority to make the necessary changes to prevent another inmate from dying the same way. Umpherville, a mother of five, never saw a doctor during the two days between her admission into the remand centre and her death. Although she was vomiting excessively and her vital signs deteriorated, the nurse in the medical unit made a judgment call not to summon a doctor or send her to a hospital.

Fatality inquiry judge M.G. Stevens-Guille noted in his report that while Umpherville was under observation in the medical unit “the quality of that observation was questionable.” He made 10 recommendations to prevent similar deaths, but his call for a doctor to see all medical unit patients within 12 hours of admission and his urging that the jail hire experienced registered nurses trained in diagnosis were both rejected. The solicitor general’s department also didn’t see an immediate need to give the medical officer the authority to oversee all medical care in the facility. Jaglalsingh testified at the inquiry that his directives for the care of inmates were being changed by clerical staff.

Now in private practice, the frustrated doctor is not optimistic that the provincial government will learn anything from Umpherville’s death. “I doubt the place will change,” he says. “I have been through a lot of recommendations, and in Alberta nothing will happen to you if you refuse to carry out a judge’s recommendations.” Umpherville should have been sent to a hospital and there’s nothing to convince Jaglalsingh that the next dying inmate will be. “I left because I didn’t want to be a part of a reoccurrence of that fatality.”

Inmates complain that it is difficult to get attention for routine medical problems or to receive prescribed medication on time. According to Shaughn Mulholland, 35, who suffers from a brain injury sustained in a car accident, it was a battle to get his prescribed medication during the four months he spent in the Edmonton Remand Centre awaiting an assault trial last winter. His mother, Stacie Welch, called everybody, from the remand centre nurses and the centre’s director to the deputy prime minister to beg them to ensure her son got his mild anti- depressant so he could function. When that didn’t work, she even asked a judge for a court order.

“Granted, this isn’t the Hotel Ritz and these guys are overworked and the jail is overcrowded, but even when they were given direction from the judge they just laughed at us,” Welch recalls. She kept a detailed log of all the times staff said they forgot or couldn’t find him. “It was a constant problem all the time he was there,” she said. “It’s not as if he went out for a walk and they missed him.”

At the remand centre the treatment for her son’s injury consisted of being locked in a room for 24 hours a day. “I was on the medical unit for a week and all they did was put me in a room and tell me to shut up and take my pills,” Mulholland says. “I needed physiotherapy, but all they did was make me lie down. They just lock you in a closet and forget about you. I was worse when I got out.”

Mulholland said he pleaded guilty to the assault so he could seek medical attention for a neck injury he suffered during his arrest. “I just wanted to get out so I could see a doctor,” he said. He was sentenced to the time he had already served.

Ban coffee, colour TVs and candy I can’t think of a more stupid way to treat prisoners,” says Tom Engel.

Safety is also a growing concern for inmates and guards. With inmates packed practically on top of each other, the place is a powder keg, says Naud. “If you don’t know how to fight and you are not a strong individual, you will get picked on, you will get pounded on and you will get taken for what you have,” he says. “There’s a lot of turmoil and tension. There’s constant fighting over the phone, the TV, food and clothing.”

There are also sexual attacks. A sex offender raped two Edmonton Remand Centre inmates who had the misfortune of having to share his cell on separate occasions. A year after the first rape, guards made the mistake of double-bunking the sex offender with a second inmate, whom he also raped. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to both attacks. His four-and-a-half-year sentence was then reduced to one year because he had spent a year at the remand centre awaiting trial.

Edmonton lawyer Tom Engel, who has been leading a legal campaign to improve conditions in remand centres, says the overcrowding is part of a nationwide trend that hit between 1986 and 1992, when admissions to remand centres nearly doubled from 68,000 to 110,000. “It’s just a huge explosion of people being held without bail,” says Engel. The explosion has continued. In 2003/04, the number of people in remand centres jumped 72 per cent over a decade earlier. Engel blames the hike on the fact that more people are being denied bail and on the growing length of time to finish cases because of a shortage of judges, prosecutors, courtrooms and infrastructure.

Concern about the problem was expressed at a federal/ provincial meeting of justice ministers and solicitors general in Whitehorse last winter. The Ontario Association of Corrections and Criminology has called for major bail reforms, including electronic monitoring, intensive supervision in the community and the use of bail residences instead of remand centres.

Engel says the appalling conditions in Alberta’s remand centres have prevailed because the government doesn’t see any political currency in addressing the situation. He says the government has “a mean-spirited attitude” toward inmates and has no desire to improve conditions until it is forced to do so. “This government has demonstrated it will not effect changes because it is the right thing to do. It will only effect change when ordered to by a higher authority.” Engel cites as an example the since-rescinded decision by former Solicitor General Steve West to remove colour TVs from jails and replace them with small black-and-white sets. He also points to current Solicitor General Harvey Cenaiko’s plan, reversed almost immediately by Premier Ralph Klein, to ban coffee and sweets from jails. Engel says that if Albertans want prisoners to be reintegrated into society as productive, law-abiding citizens, they must not treat them unjustly. “I can’t think of a more stupid way to treat prisoners. How can you expect them to respect authority?”

Guards, who are prohibited from speaking on the record, say the smoking ban in provincial jails now has made their job even more dangerous because inmates are smoking scrapings off nicotine patches rolled up in dried orange peels. They light the material by short-circuiting electrical outlets. “It’s only a matter of time until we have a big fire,” says one guard. The volatility generated by the overcrowding has added an unacceptable level of danger and stress to an already hos- tile environment. “Sick time among guards is unbelievable,” says one 20-year veteran. “The violence is getting even more vicious.” With the proliferation of gangs in remand centres, the movement of every inmate through the facility must be checked to ensure incompatible gang members are kept apart.

Alberta Ombudsman Gord Button, a former Mountie, says about 25 per cent of the complaints he fields come from prisoners and most are from remand centres. However, he believes that ratio of prisoner complaints is similar to other parts of Canada. “The number of complaints that are supported or founded isn’t any higher than any other jurisdiction,” he said. “Our situation in Alberta is probably no worse or no better than other provinces or other countries.”

Dan MacLennan, a former provincial jail guard who now heads the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, says the situation isn’t likely to improve soon, since provincial politicians aren’t motivated to spend money building jails when the public is clamouring for more schools and hospitals. Infrastructure Minister Lyle Oberg observes that Alberta could construct 25 schools for the cost of a new remand centre. One does have to be built he says. “The question is when, and the [second] question is where can we find the money to do it?”

Remand centres are self-fulfilling prophecies. “If we had 2,000 beds, we’d have 2,000 inmates,” says one lawyer

Solicitor General Cenaikosays replacing Edmonton’s Remand Centre and building a new wing onto the Calgary Remand Centre are top priorities. Preliminary plans have been drawn up for construction of a 1,500-inmate facility in Edmonton, but Cenaiko has to get his cabinet colleagues to approve the $250- million capital plan. Even if he gets approval this spring, it will be at least five years before construction is completed. In the meantime Cenaiko is worried overcrowding is putting corrections officers and inmates at risk. The former Calgary police officer has hired additional guards at a cost of $3.5-million to help them deal with the burgeoning jail populations. He has also ordered stab-resistant vests for 1,100 guards at a cost of $610,000. Until a new remand centre is built in Edmonton, his department is transferring some prisoners to Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre to alleviate some of the pressure.

Building and expanding remand centres may temporarily relieve overcrowding, but long-term solutions must be found. Edmonton criminal trial lawyer Peter Royal says the city didn’t even have a remand centre when he started practising law in 1976. He recalls there were only 40 prisoners awaiting trial in custody and they were held at the Fort Saskatchewan jail, just northeast of Edmonton. “They were dangerous and really did need to be locked up, but the vast majority of people facing criminal charges were all released pending their trials.” How- ever, when the Edmonton Remand Centre opened, it filled up quickly. “Remand centres are self-fulfilling prophecies,” says Royal. “If we had 2,000 beds, we’d have 2,000 remand inmates.”

On any given day, the province has about 1,200 people awaiting trial in the two major centres as well as in Red Deer, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat. That accounts for more than half of the total of 2,335 prisoners in provincial custody. Royal says remand centres were never designed to hold people for years on end. While the average stay is still only 13 days, Royal says some of his clients facing trial on serious charges of murder or attempted murder have been housed there for as long as three years as lawyers prepare for preliminary hearings and trials in the backlogged court system.

Maureen Collins, executive director of the Edmonton John Howard Society, says that while it is necessary to replace the remand centre, the province must find a solution that doesn’t involve incarcerating more people before trial. If they aren’t at risk to flee, they shouldn’t be in custody, she says. Valerie Meaney, executive director of the Edmonton Elizabeth Fry Society, also believes a new building is not a panacea. “While a new remand centre will ease the overcrowding, will it address other remand issues Does it just mean more space for everybody or does it mean better food and greater access to programs, lawyers, community support and families?”

Guards fear it will take a disaster—a fire or riot or hostage- taking—to move the politicians to act. “I just know something bad is going to happen,” says one veteran corrections officer. “I just hope a fellow guard doesn’t get hurt.”

Darcy Henton is an award-winning journalist who has masqueraded as both a guard and an inmate for stories.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Behind Bars: Maximum Security + The Remand Centre appeared first on Alberta Views.