Back to sermon archive
Prison
An Abolitionist’s View
When a guy goes to jail, and it is mostly males who do, many things are lost. You may often be moved a considerable distance from your community. You are going to lose the constant company of all your friends and loved ones. If you have the luck to have a significant other, you will lose his or her companionship and the privilege of enjoying your partner in tenderness and sexual expression.
These things are lost the minute you enter jail, and you have good reason to fear that they may well be lost forever, because during your absence, especially if it will be a long one, her loyalty to you may very well wither and die, and from jail, there is nothing you can do about it, "your hands are tied."
If you own a home, you will likely not be able to make the mortgage payments or even the city property tax, so you will lose that. For a similar reason, you will lose your car and many other possessions, perhaps virtually all of them.
If you have a profession or marketable skill, you may well never be able to go back to it. At the very least, there is going to be a huge hole in your resume, and one that is going to be difficult to explain. You may have to lie to get a job, if you can get a job at all.
And, you will lose your security of person. There is one principle paramount in prison, “might makes right.”
It is an unenviable situation. Many prisoners commit suicide. Murray Poole hanged himself at the Edmonton Max. yesterday. He was only 23. But strange to tell, there is little sympathy for the plight of prisoners, and I think I know why. We harbour a terrible prejudice against the convicted.
You may well say, it is certainly wrong to be prejudiced against Jews or Blacks, or teenagers, because it is simply not true that they are all grasping or stupid or wild, but criminals are all demonstrably bad. They are in jail because all of them have done something bad. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t be there. Because of what they have done, they deserve, not only to be thought badly of, but also to be punished.
Humm. Let us examine just who is in jail.
Some of them are Heroes.
Arguably the most admired man on earth, Nelson Mandela is so well thought of because in part he struggled so bravely during the 28 years he spent in jail for opposing apartheid.
The Catholic activist Dorothy Day, author of our opening words, was imprisoned many times for her uncompromising crusades for peace and for the poor.
Boxing Champion Mohammed Ali chose jail, rather than help his country assault the people of Vietnam, leaving two million dead.
Brave, diminutive Dr. Henry Morganthaler was jailed countless times in our country, as he selflessly sought for women the right to choose whether and when they would become mothers.
And all of these martyrs were absolutely guilty of breaking laws enacted by duly elected governments.
And there is farmer Robert Latimer, who God knows, if the government doesn’t, deserves to be with his family.
I am sure there are other heroes in jail, ones we never hear of, but there nonetheless, imprisoned, paradoxically enough, because of their idealism, not their depravity.
And then there is another group in prison, those who are not guilty as charged, The Innocent.
In this country, we have the famous three M’s David Milgaard, Donald Marshall and Guy Paul Morin. In Alberta, Willie Nepoose. All of them were charged and convicted not just of any crime, but of murder. Every murder case attracts great scrutiny, evidence is weighed meticulously, the trials are long, the accused always has counsel, and appeals are the rule, not the exception.
And yet, though innocent, they were convicted. Why? Well, for starters, Donald Marshall and Willie Nepoose were aboriginal, and poor. David Milgaard was young and poor and worst, a “hippie.” Guy Paul Morin lived “alone with his mother” and was a French Canadian tried by a jury of his peers who were not.
The innocent are convicted by an adversary system. It is far from perfect.
Often the innocent are mistakenly identified as guilty by eyewitnesses, usually picked from line-ups where you see those possibly at fault all at once, perhaps thinking, “It must be one of them.” One-at-a-time viewing has been shown by science to create far fewer false positive IDs, but they are not much used or even known.
Medicine today is science-driven. So is Education. But the Criminal Justice System is still driven by custom, and beholden to power.
How many innocent men and women do we have behind bars? I do not know. But I am sure it is far more than ever come to light.
Then there are the Addicts.
Decades ago, the Le Dain Commission recommended sweeping changes in our drug laws. Very few changes have been made.
Something like 60-80% of the inmates in our jails is there because of their problems with drugs or alcohol. Many became addicts because they were poor unemployed, are illiterate or nearly so, are chronically ill or have been abused or ignored since infancy.
Then, there are the Robbers.
When we think of convicts, we automatically think of violent criminals. But the vast majority of prison inmates are there for non-violent acts, most of them property offences.
It is not a coincidence that the poorer the country and the less what riches it has are equitably distributed, the more robberies there are. If the economic system precludes you from making an honest living, you have only a choice, which is not a choice: make a “dishonest” living or die.
Let us not forget the Intellectually Challenged:
I have at home a newspaper clipping regarding an incident in a prison in eastern Canada. An inmate in solitary confinement was beaten to death by guards. The prisoner had the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old.
It is not fair to punish people for breaking the rules, when they do not know what the rules are.
Prisons are places where you learn to survive by keeping your wits about you. The witless do not fare well in such a situation. They are terribly abused. It could be that more than half of prison inmates are developmentally handicapped.
Many of these are victims of fetal alcohol syndrome. A figure of up to 40% of those confined is attributed to this alone.
These inmates were messed up before they were born, in many ways, which make them prime candidates for jail, but they are no more able to behave differently than those who might be called simply “simple.”
Also developmentally handicapped, obviously, are children: If it is true that an adult with the mental age of ten should not be in jail, then it is likewise true if not truer, that a ten-year-old child has no business being there either. But Her Majesty’s loyal opposition insists ten-year-olds should at times be tried as adults.
Also imprisoned are the Guards.
Ordinarily we do not think of the correctional officers as persons incarcerated in jail, but they are nonetheless. Many currently serving are going to be there longer than any of the inmates they are guarding.
There is a famous study that made psychological profiles of both prisoners and guards. The result was an absolutely beautiful curve, identical for both groups, except for one thing. The guards were more prone to violence.
Consider what the cardinal rule among inmates. It is: “Thou shall not rat on your fellow inmates.” No snitching. If you are a prisoner and you witness an unlawful act by another inmate, no matter heinous, you are never to tell the guards or the warden, even if you are the victim.
Now let us consider the cardinal rule among correctional officers: It is: “Thou shall not rat (they use the same term) on your buddy.” No snitching. Because prison is a scary place for them, they believe they have to stick together to survive. So if a guard witnesses an unlawful act by another guard, no matter cruel, or sometimes if an inmate attacks another inmate (rape comes to mind) he is never to tell the warden who may well not want to know anyway.
If you don’t believe me, consider Karl Toft.
He was a guard at the Youth Training Centre at Kingsclear, New Brunswick. By his own estimate, Karl Toft sexually molested 150 boys there. It’s not possible the other guards didn’t know this, but nobody squealed. And so this went on over a period of thirty years. These victims were children, but no one told.
The atmosphere in prison is toxic. It poisons all within.
Of course there are in jail, Violent Offenders
Those inmates, a small minority remember, you might think surely belong in jail.
Violent prisoners fall into a number of sub-groups. First, something like half of them, approximately, are in for having committed property crimes, during the commission of which, they used violence or the threat of violence, incidentally, as a means to that end. In a more generous, more egalitarian country with good addiction policies, they would be deemed harmless.
Second, there are folk we might call the common garden-variety murderers: Each of these prisoners have committed a very violent act, but these perpetrators are often not by nature particularly violent. They are victims of circumstance: put in jail because of an unlikely combination of events mostly beyond their control. Given such a set of circumstances, I could become a murderer, almost did once, and so could you.
Of all classes of prisoners, you might be surprised to learn, murderers are the least likely be convicted of any felony again. As such, most would be good candidates for release into the community if public safety were the only issue.
Inevitably, we must come to the group that is hardest to explain away. These are the guys we unfairly think of when we hear the word “convict.”
I once asked a few ex-convict acquaintances this question: “On a given day, 100 men are incarcerated, representing a fair sample of offences. How many of them clearly should be there because it is not safe to have them roaming the streets? One guy said “five.” The others shook their heads in agreement. Something is fundamentally wrong with this 5%.
Of course, there are two types of seriously disturbed men here.
The first sub-group is suffering from one of a number of clearly recognized mental disorders for which there are well-established regimens for treatment. They are treatable, but they are almost certainly not going to get this treatment in jail, which is not fair to them. It is not fair to us either, as nearly every Canadian prisoner is sentenced to a finite term, so almost all are coming out some day, treated or untreated.
Lastly, there are in jail, the untreatable. Some are psychopaths. There is a deficit in their brains you can see on brain wave machines. You can see there that they have little regard for the sensibilities of others, or for their own well-being. They rarely live beyond forty. Not all become violent, but some do, and may commit horrific crimes. I would lump in with them, those sexual offenders who are almost certain to re-offend no matter what treatment is given.
There, I think that’s the lot.
Let us step back from the atypical, the worst of the lot, to a Typical Criminal and a Typical Crime.
Allow me to introduce you to a young man; we’ll call him Bret Bridges. He got into my apartment using the building manager’s passkey at Christmas-time when he knew I’d be away. Among the articles he took was a book of blank cheques for my account in the credit union across the street.
He filled out one cheque, to the Order of Bret Bridges for $200, signed my name to it and presented it for payment.
The teller said, “Do you have any identification?
Well, Bret looked down the road into the future as far as he could, which was one week, and he saw a Christmas with no present for his mother, none for his girl friend, and a Christmas party with only coffee as a stimulant. Naturally, he produced his driver’s license. It worked like a charm too, no problem, cash on the barrelhead. Christmas was great.
Then, on Boxing Day, again without funds, he contemplated a dismally abstemious New Year’s Eve, so he went and did it again, just in case the Credit Union had lost their piece of paper with his real name and real address on it.
Inevitably, when the Edmonton City police asked their traditional question of me, “Do you have any idea who might have done this?” I was able to answer, “Yes, it was Bret Bridges, who resides at 10123 123 St.” With a clue like that, Edmonton’s finest couldn’t miss.
The reason Bret should not go to jail is the first thing he would be told there would be the proper disposition of stolen cheques. It is the school for crime. The proposition that he might be taught this lesson, which we certainly do not want him to learn, at the taxpayer’s expense, is an insult to our intelligence.
Should any of the other categories of prisoner I’ve described go to jail?
I say no, and I’ll tell you why.
Jails are thought to usefully serve, at the most, three purposes: These are deterrence, correction, and perhaps: curbing insurrection.
First: Deterrence: Ah yes, good old deterrence, so beloved by persons of uncommon faith.
The last time there was a public execution in Canada was a double hanging staged in the yard of the Kingston Penitentiary. It was crowded with an excited mob of men and boys. Many citizens went home that night without their wallets, having been relieved of them by pickpockets, who were undeterred by the fact that the men hanged were also pickpockets.
The perpetual cry of unscrupulous or ignorant politicians in every election is that their promise to get tough on crime. Put enough criminals in jail and others leaning toward crime will “get the message” and will choose to lead honest lives. That is the theory of deterrence.
By that measure, Finland is soft on crime. It incarcerates only 54/100,000 of its population. In Norway, the figure is 56. It is 85 in the Netherlands, 90 in France and Germany, and 125 in the UK.
I am ashamed to say it is 129 here in Canada. And, God help the ever-punitive Americans, the number of men and women languishing in their jails is not 56 or our 129 per hundred thousand, it is 709! That's getting tough on crime with a vengeance. They jail nearly six times as many people as we do, proportionally.
If the theory of deterrence is valid, then their murder rate should be 1/6 what ours is, shouldn’t it? But you know it is not. Their murder rate is six times the murder rate that we have. And they have capital punishment going for them too. Or, like their incarceration rate, against them. If the state embraces violence to solve its problems, who can blame citizens by following its example?
Jail’s deterrence doesn’t work. Now I know you say, “it deters me.” True, but in the profession of criminology, this is axiomatic: “only those who are farsighted enough not to commit crimes anyway are deterred. It is the prospect of getting caught, not the severity of punishment you would receive if you did, that deters.”
The second useful purpose usually attributed to prison is Correction:
Whenever a Canadian ex-convict on parole commits a crime, there is a great hue and cry from the Reform Alliance and others of that ilk that this would never have happened if only the criminal had been kept in jail long enough to serve his full sentence.
True, that crime would not have occurred at that time. But there is a good likelihood that then a worse crime would have happened at a later time.
Being immersed in an atmosphere of hate and fear is not good for a person’s character.
Motivation generally involves either rewards or punishment. You would think by now that everyone knows that rewards or more effective than punishment every time.
There is relatively little research in this matter of correction and jails for something of such importance, but there is the famous case of Gideon vs. Wainwright.
Gideon liked to hang around this Georgia pool hall, and the owner didn’t like it. Then, somebody broke into the Coke machine, the owner fingered Gideon, and he was found to have a number of quarters in his pocket.
He was convicted without benefit of legal advice, but eventually, thanks to the ACLU, the US Supreme Count found in 1963 that he’d been jailed without due process and it ordered he be released, immediately, and he was.
And by the same order, so was everyone else in the state’s prisons who had been convicted of anything without benefit of a lawyer; all of them out, free as birds, one thousand two hundred and fifty two of them. no nosy parole officers, no halfway houses, no pre-release programs, out on the streets to do as they pleased -. a lot of them years before they otherwise would have been let go. Of course, many of them, maybe even Gideon for all I know, had been guilty as sin.
Now, did these men, so incompletely corrected, cause a crime wave? Were there riots in the streets? To find out, the American Bar Association tracked them for two years to see, and guess what? They re-offended at a rate 25% less than they would have if they had completed their sentences with the usual paroles.
In the name of “correction,” some jails do have programs for drug and alcohol addiction. Good idea, if they worked, for that alone would keep up to 80% of released inmates from ever coming back. But addiction is a disease of dependency. In jail, someone else tells you what time to get up, what you have for breakfast, what you can do and when all day, all the way to “lights out.” Is this good preparation for responsible independent living? Obviously not. And that is why jail is the last place in the world where you could ever learn to stay off drugs, which I must add are, amazingly enough, available in copious quantities there.
There is a judge in Minnesota named Dennis Chaleen who is one of the few who understands correction. He never sends anyone to jail if the law permits him not to. Instead, he carefully interviews them and then sentences them to periods of community service in projects that he thinks will enhance the perpetrator’s self-esteem.
Well, does this work? There is a bitter saying among convicts, “Judges like to hand out years like candy.” Sixty five per cent of the persons that judges sentence to jail, come back to jail. Of Judge Chaleen’s clients, who don’t go to jail, only 4% re-offend. He is 96% successful. With results like that, you have to believe he is on to something.
What is the secret of his success? Judge Chaleen says: “the one thing you must avoid in sentencing, at all costs is punishment.
They can call it the “correctional service” if they want to, but our jails are not in the correction business, they are in the punishment business, and punishment doesn’t work.
Do you remember the group of ex-cons who told me that five of a hundred new inmates where not safe to let roam the street? Well, at the same time I also asked them “It is a year later, given the benefit of one year in a correctional institution, now how many of 100 cannot safely be out on the street? Without hesitation, they said “15.” So much for correction.
Obviously, not only does jail not provide deterrence to crime, it is counter-productive to correction for most inmates. Those whom society punishes will often punish it back when they get a chance.
There is a third, albeit dubious use for jails, and that is as an antidote to Insurrection.
In Quebec City last week, some 460 protesters were jailed on suspicion of this crime.
But there is a better way to quell incipient insurrection. As a rule, the more democratic the regime, the more peaceful the demonstration, if indeed, demonstrations are required at all. If a dictator knows he has a bunch of jails always readily at hand, it must be a comfort to him, but it is not a good reason to having them there.
The CBC’s three-hour TV documentary that aired recently concluded that jails must strive to maintain “a good balance between punishment and rehabilitation.” It sounds reasonable but it is not. What you get if you use punishment is a result that is the opposite of rehabilitation.
What we must strive for in treating lawbreakers is 0% punishment. That means no jails.
Imprisonment is an act of violence. Violence begets violence.
Well, if jails were abolished, you may ask, what would be do with all those people we used to jail?
In the first place, you have to step back from the question.
Think, Prevention, not reaction. Find a way to keep pregnant women from drinking alcohol. Waiting for the victims to be born and grow big enough to hurt people is not the way to go. It’s too late then. And prevention early is far cheaper to say nothing of far less painful, than incarceration later.
Improve education and social services and health services and employment opportunity and then alcoholism will fall. So will crime rates.
Educate parents without a clue how to deal with their children, (this can be done and is being done right here in Edmonton) and many a problem child will have a dramatically better chance to become a model student instead of the juvenile delinquent.
The alternatives to jail are not difficult to imagine.
What we once called retarded people would be much better off in small group homes where they can be supported in those ways that they cannot reliably manage for themselves. The number of shelters for FAS victims in Canada currently is zero.
For crimes of property: use community service. or fines, preferably a percentage of net taxable income, not flat tax fines that are trifles to the rich and impossibilities for the poor, “can’t pay, 30 days.”
Those who are so seriously disturbed as to be a menace to society should be hospitalized until and if ever they are well. The staff should have keys and the patients should not. The apparently incurable psychopaths should be cared for in different places than those who can be helped now, in fairness to the treatable.
Much more research should be done on how to help both groups, and how to evaluate that it is safe to release, and who should not be. Some men probably would be hospitalized for life. So be it. That would be much better than punishing them in jail for up to 25 years and then letting them loose, which is what we do now.
This would cost a lot of money, but we are squandering 2 billion dollars a year right now on jails that only make things worse.
Abolition is a hard sell though, and I think I know why. Abolition would seem to do nothing for the victims of crime.
It is absolutely true that we must do something for the victims. Right now almost all we offer them is to give them the dubious satisfaction, long after the crime is committed, of seeing the miscreant sentenced to the place of punishment.
Of course, today, a victim can write and read a victim impact statement in court, just before sentencing. I think of these as “odes to eternal bitterness” and I believe they have to be counter-productive to ever finding inner peace. Sentencing criminals is supposed to bring “closure” to victims. I doubt it. There isn’t a sentence long enough or a jail cruel enough to bring back the dead, or give peace and serenity to someone who has been badly hurt.
What might, pray tell? Coming to a state of forgiveness would do it. But how do we forgive? By becoming aware of why someone has hurt you, and coming to accept it. But how? We need science here. We need more studies. How do we heal?
The Mennonites do have a good program, which they operate for governments in a number of places, which does seem to work, called Restitution and Reconciliation. It might seem counter-intuitive to reunite victim and culprit. The “bad guy” might be the last person you would think you would want to see if he has harmed you or a loved one.
And yet, if you don’t, how can you expect to forgive someone. It makes sense to give him a chance to explain how it happened, and to say if he can, “I’m sorry.”
If you don’t, it is your life that will be poisoned with bitterness.
I welcome a similar approach that has recently been embraced by the RCMP itself. They call their program Restorative Justice and they say it is very successful.
I believe them. It is my experience that that things like this do work:
After the Edmonton City Police arrested Bret, I asked the manager of my Credit Union, “Would you rather have your $400 back, or see Bret go to jail? Not surprisingly he chose to get the money back.
The day of the trial, I arrived in the courtroom well before court was gaveled into session.
I spotted the credit union manager, and asked him if it was all set, restitution not incarceration. “Nobody has said anything to me about it since you did,” he said.
Uh oh. I went over to the counsel for the defense. She told me not only that she had done nothing to make this happen, but for the defense to try to pressure the victims to forgo the pleasure of seeing the accused go to jail, is actually an offence against the law. “You have to talk to the prosecution,” she said. I talked to the prosecutor. “Oh, that is an entirely civil matter,” he said unconcernedly, “It’s got nothing to do with me.”
Uh oh. Have I unwittingly helped to send a young man to jail? It began to look that way.
Desperate situations call for desperate measures.
“You’re not responsible,” I accused the credit union manager.
“You’re not responsible,” I shouted at the defense lawyer.
“You’re not responsible,” I yelled at the prosecutor.
“Why do I have to take all the responsibility around here? I’m just the god-damned victim.”
The prosecutor immediately went over to the credit union manager and they went out into the hall. Pretty soon they had the defense lawyer out there too, and the accused. They weren’t there long. Soon they were back in court and so was the judge.
The prosecutor almost immediately announced the prosecution was staying the charges, and if the purloined sum reappeared at the credit union, the charges would stay stayed.
“Okay by me,” said the judge, in so many legal words, and that was that.
I was very much pleased with myself as I headed back to work.
Out in that hallway, I found three persons blocking my way.
Bret shook my hand as earnestly as ever it has been shaken. And unless I am the most gullible man who ever lived, I was being thanked from what was the very bottom of his heart.
His mother, and his girlfriend, both most presentable, (when they could bring themselves to stop crying) thanked me also and as effusively.
We had a lovely chat, all four of us as happy as clams and thicker than, umm, thieves.
If I had been pleased before I left the court room, that was nothing compared to the euphoria I felt when at length I left the courthouse building
I thought, “Hey, this restitution and reconciliation stuff really works.”
Just by meeting Bret there, I realized I had absolutely no bitterness toward the man who after all had trespassed on the sanctity of my home, and I think he had none now toward the man who after all, was the one who had sicked the cops on him.
And then I was ashamed. I realized that what I had done, I had not done out of the goodness of my heart. It was only from intellectual motivation.
It had never occurred to me that Bret might be a perfectly nice person, and a person who was possessed of a wonderful mother and a charming girl friend, both of which loved him very much.
I was ashamed because I was a Unitarian, and as such I am supposed to believe first and foremost in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
I should have known better.
It was only after meeting Bret and his mother and his girl friend that I did. I’ll never forget them. It is my hope that you won’t either.
I’ll end with a somewhat abridged quotation from a very familiar reading:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
Give us this day this daily bread,
and forgive us our sins, just as we must forgive
those who trespass against us. Amen
The Rev. Robert J. Wrigley delivered this sermon at Westwood Unitarian Congregation, Edmonton, Alberta, on April 29, 2001.
Mr. Wrigley formerly served First Unitarian Congregation, Toronto, and The First Unitarian Church of Edmonton. He is retired.
He now attends the Edmonton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.)