Human on the Inside

Gary Garrison

• Publisher: U of R Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780889773783
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Human on the Inside Gary Garrison takes readers out of their comfort zones and into some of Canada's most notorious and violent prisons, introducing us to a menacing yet vibrant subculture of inmates, guards, and staff. Through personal stories, Garrison illuminates a criminal justice system that ignores poverty, racism, mental illness, and addiction and deals instead with society's problems with razor wire and harsh treatment. It is a system that degrades the individual and sees inmates as less than human. Providing a counterbalance to fear-mongering about criminals, he argues that a dehumanizing system generates more crime, not less, and perpetuates another injustice, this time committed on behalf of all Canadians.

Human on the inside

Human on the inside

unlocking the truth
about canada's prisons

gary garrison

© 2014 Gary Garrison

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means —graphic, electronic, or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or placement in information storage and retrieval systems of any sort shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright.

Printed and bound in Canada at Marquis.

Cover design: Duncan Campbell, University of Regina Press.

Copy editor: Anne James.

Text design: John van der Woude Designs.

Cover photo: "Prisoner in old Jail" by Lou Oates / iStockphoto

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

University of Regina Press, University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S 0A2
tel: [phone] fax: [phone]
web: www.uofrpress.ca

The University of Regina Press acknowledges the support of the Creative Industry Growth and Sustainability program, made possible through funding provided to the Saskatchewan Arts Board by the Government of Saskatchewan through the Ministry of Parks, Culture, and Sport. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This publication was made possible through Culture on the Go funding provided to Creative Saskatchewan by the Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport.

This book is dedicated to the staff and volunteers of Mennonite Central Committee Alberta and its affiliates, mcc Canada and mcc usa.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Prison Break-In

Chapter 2 A Visit to the Max

Chapter 3 Early Intimations of Hell

Chapter 4 In Canada We Have Life after Death

Chapter 5 Victim Impact: Cracking the Shell

Chapter 6 How to Love a Dead Murderer

Chapter 7 The Role Play’s the Thing to Out My Inner Thug

Chapter 8 Forty-Six Years on Death Row, Married to a Corpse

Chapter 9 Prisons, Matrimony, and Other Institutions

Chapter 10 Drugs and Scanners and Kangaroo Courts

Chapter 11 Doin’ Time

Chapter 12 The People in the Tory Blue Uniforms

Chapter 13 From Crackhead-Murderer to Chef

Chapter 14 But, Judge, I Didn’t Do It

Chapter 15 The Pariah Factor: Sex Offenders Inside and Out

Chapter 16 A Sex Addict’s Daily Battles

Conclusion: What Does “Human” Really Mean?

Bibliography

Endnotes

acknolwedgements

To staff of Mennonite Central Committee Alberta: Gord Hutchinson, Tom Brownlee, Moira Brownlee, Elly Klumpenhouwer, Janet Anderson, Kae Neufeld, Don Stoesz, Ken From, Abe Janzen, Suzanne Gross, Melanie Weaver, and Peter Worsley. I am grateful to all of you for your friendship, camaraderie, collegiality, and support. I am grateful as well to all other mcc Alberta staff, volunteers, and donors and to the Mennonite community that nurtures and lives the Mennonite culture of social justice and peacemaking.

Chaplain Sr. Elizabeth Coulombe and I started this book during a conversation over lunch at Edmonton Institution, the Max. I am grateful to her and to other chaplains at the Max and at Bowden Institution who supported me at various stages of my prison work, even if their help wasn’t directly related to this book: Oliver Johnson, Paul Vanderham, Don Stoesz, Hardy Engler, Thelma Pelletier, and Teresa Kellendonk.

Three people I interviewed and can thank by name are Roy Chudek, Sarah Salter-Kelly, and Moira Brownlee. I am also deeply grateful to everyone else I interviewed and cannot name, and to all prisoners, staff, victims, and their families, and to everyone involved in the criminal justice system who does his or her best to make our communities safer.

The volunteers I met and worked with could have easily chosen to spend their time at home with their families, taking in sports or cultural events, dancing, or walking in the park instead of going into prisons. I honour you for your choice to befriend prisoners you had never met, even though you might never know what impact your visits had on the prisoners.

To Linda Goyette, Jocelyn Brown, Margaret Macpherson, and Jason Lee Norman, writers-in-residence who helped me at various stages of the project, from the book’s early stages to finding a publisher. To Alice Major, the Living Room Poetry Collective, the Edmonton Stroll of Poets Society, and all my other friends who helped me become a better writer.

To David McLennan and everyone at the University of Regina Press who read the manuscript, decided to publish it, and worked with me to get it into its final form.

To my mother and all the other members of my family, especially Sara, who encourage me to keep moving forward.

abbreviations

avp: Alternatives to Violence Project

cosa: Circles of Support and Accountability

csc: Correctional Service of Canada (also referred to as Corrections Canada)

d&s: Detention and Segregation, the part of a prison where prisoners are kept in isolation from others, either for punishment or for their own protection; sometimes referred to by people outside the system as solitary confinement

fasd: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

m2w2: Man-to-Man, Woman-to-Woman; a prison visitation program, operated in Alberta by the Mennonite Central Committee

mcc: Mennonite Central Committee

p2p: Person-to-Person, a prison visitation program in Saskatchewan, operated by mcc Saskatchewan

Pop: General population, all of the prisoners in a prison except for those in Detention and Segregation, or Protective Custody

shu: Special Handling Unit or super max unit, one security level higher than a max

tru: Transfer and Release Unit (at the Max, this refers to Protective Custody units, since the Max has had no bona fide Transfer and Release Unit for many years)

introduction

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

— Marie Curie

C stumbles across the scene of an accident: a crumpled van, blood, and bodies strewn across the highway. C has basic first aid, but he’s frozen and helpless in the middle of all the twisted metal, gore, screams, and agony. His best friend dies in his arms. Two other friends are dead too. Five others he knows lie there with broken necks, arms, and legs. For a week C drinks to blot out the memory. He doesn’t even know he’s killed somebody until the police come to arrest him.

K’s parents are always drunk. K sees them throw chairs, tables, bottles, and each other through the windows of their house so often he thinks that’s how relationships work. When he’s eight, he sees his aunt back a car over his mother in the driveway. He remembers watching her shift into drive and run over his mother again to make sure she’s dead.

S’s mother is a drug addict. He’s beaten and sexually assaulted by his mother’s boyfriends. Starting at age seven, he frequently runs away from home, lives on the street, and parties with older friends. He’s in and out of the young offenders’ centre and group homes. Once he’s out of elementary school, he does break and enters and steals cars to support himself and to buy drugs and booze. After he gets his first federal sentence, he slashes his arms, not to kill himself but for the high the pain gives him.

H holds off taking drugs until grade nine, despite pressure from friends. Once he’s into the drug scene, he experiments with lsd when his depression becomes extreme. He kills his sister instead of himself simply because she happens to be there.

P’s father teaches him how to mainline heroin at age six. He assaults another boy at school with a stick, and his mother turns him over to a group home. He holds the group home staff hostage at knifepoint for three hours. His principal demand is for a gun so he can shoot himself. P is in and out of prisons, group homes, and psychiatric hospitals for sixteen years, from the age of ten.

Prisoners’ stories like these are not usually part of the public debate about crime, punishment, justice, and public safety. They rarely get told in newspapers or on television. Politicians who hear stories like these are careful about what they say because their opponents will twist their words to make it look like they’re on the side of murderers and pedophiles. Nothing, it seems, is a more effective vote-getter these days than fear: of terrorism, public debt, taxes, poverty, cancer, death, crime, criminals, and a host of other things.

When I visited prisoners in Edmonton Institution (the Max) and Bowden Institution, I met many people who wondered why people like me were taking the prisoners’ side — so they claimed — instead of the victims’ side. Sometimes prison staff obstructed prison visitors like me for supporting murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug dealers. They saw the brutality of the crimes and put roadblocks between us and the prisoners. They would decline to circulate official memos that authorized our visits. They’d violate the system’s rules about testing us for traces of drugs on our clothing and delay us at the front gate or even turn us away. They’d give prisoners too little time to gather for t...

Table of contents

• Human on the Inside interiors-for epub