A LOST RESOURCE?

Most prison inmates who have community support, people ‘at home’ they can call, people who make them feel missed, and loved, are women.  Wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters.  Speaking to these women on the phone, despite the occasional moment of domestic tension, or seeing them in on-line and in-person visits are bright spots in an inmate’s otherwise grey day, something that lifts them, a plus to counter the drudging monotony and suffocating and often hostile bureaucracy that is life for offenders in the prison industry.

This lines up with Correctional Service of Canada’s mandate to rehabilitate and safely return offenders to the community, doesn’t it.  The connections make reintegration more likely to succeed, won’t they.    Constructive influences make for positive outcomes, right?  All to the good.  However, there’s an uneasy reality at play here that can undo the apparent positive influences of familial intimacies.  Most of these inmates don’t want to intentionally say anything to upset or worry the women in their lives and with few exceptions they are left out of the real world of prison life and the negative impact it has.

A few years ago, this writer spoke with an inmate’s sister who lived in New Brunswick.  She was his only contact, they didn’t speak often, and he didn’t know how to be honest with her about his life behind bars and to tell her how much he appreciated her support.  He had lost the ability to be open to another person but wanted her to know the truth of his circumstances, not something many prisoners want to do.  He asked me to speak for him.  I was a stranger, but as I talked with her, she understood why he wanted her to know what life was like for him and why he had difficulty speaking for himself.

A Black mother in Ontario kept in close touch with her son who, after his conviction, was sent to Renous, a maximum-security prison in the Maritimes.  The man spent five years there before a transfer back to an Ontario institution.  He kept a positive slant to their conversations and the mother didn’t know he would have spent far less time there if he was white.  The prison industry’s own statistics underscore that non-white inmates spend more time in higher classification confinement.  The mother didn’t know until we told her.

Only two examples, but they represent how people who could play a role in bringing prison conditions to the public’s attention are purposely kept in the dark ‘for their own good.’  Are prisoners who don’t want to upset their wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, etc., helping themselves and their families?  Or, would the raised voices of hundreds of angry women bouncing off the walls of Correctional Service of Canada’s head office on Laurier Avenue in Ottawa do more?

More postings on Brennan Guigue’s challenge to prison practices (see July 20) are in the works…lots to wade through.