For a long time I have been meaning to do some research on the Canadian prison system (industry). I picked up a few books, some of which look very good indeed. Claire Culhane has a whole series of books written over decades – she has led a very honorable life of activism as far as I can tell from her books.
For a long time I have been meaning to do some research on the Canadian prison system (industry). I picked up a few books, some of which look very good indeed. Claire Culhane has a whole series of books written over decades – she has led a very honorable life of activism as far as I can tell from her books.
I picked up a book by Ross Gordon Green and Kearney F. Healy called “Tough on Kids” about how Canada locks up youth. Apparently Canada locks up more youth per capita than the United States (although the US might escape from this statistic by a loophole – its penchant for trying youth as adults in adult court). They point to statistical evidence that shows that crime rates are not affected by punishment, and that recidivism is correlated with the severity of punishment (in other words, punishment has the perverse effect of making things worse). Culhane’s work is more heartfelt and she argues in 1991 for prison abolition (though when people say abolition I am not 100% sure that they mean abolition – the details are sketchy – to be fair I have yet to finish Culhane’s book).
But from “Tough on Kids” I learned the following:
By 1999, the US had 682 per 100,000 people (adults) in jail. Canada had 106 per 100,000.
The US had 2.3 police officers per 1000 citizens, Canada 1.8 per thousand.
Over the period 1991-1999, during which Canadian police and jail rates went down and US rates went up, crime rates declined equally in both countries.
According to my own mental calculations, that means Canada has about 30,000 prisoners compared to the US’s approximately 2 million. But in addition Canada jails some 25,000 youth. In the United States, blacks are some half the prison population despite being only some 13% of the overall population. In Canada, the race lines are drawn against the indigenous, who are about 3% of the population and 12% of the prison population, but the statistics for youth and by province are far worse. Saskatchewan’s aboriginal section of the youth population is 15% but 75% of youth in prisons are aboriginal. In Manitoba it’s 16% of youth aboriginal and 79% of youth prisoners, in Alberta it’s 5% of youth aboriginal and 35% of youth prisoners. It’s estimated that 75% of youth prisoners have some kind of disability.
When I’m looking into something I usually pick up a bunch of books, peruse them all, and then choose which ones I’m going to read through first. One of the books I’d seen in stores that I’d wanted was a book by Michael Harris called (rather ironically, as we’ll see) ‘Con Game: The Truth About Canada’s Prisons’. So far, so good. Canada’s prison system isn’t working, Harris argues. So far, so good.
So here I am flipping through it when I get a glimpse of Harris’s statistics. It seems that the parole rules are too generous: “Canadian criminals currently serve an average of just 32% of their sentences before receiving day parole, and only 39.8% of their time before getting full parole.” Geez. That’s awful. But even worse, there was a bill in 1999 that “allowed fraud artists, thieves, money launderers, and drug traffickers to be released… after serving just one sixth of their sentences.” Look carefully at that list. If you’re thinking that there are some value judgements in the labels applied to the people he’s listed, that’s fair, but what I noted was that none of the people he lists have committed violent crimes.
He points out that advocates of alternatives to prisons cite the high costs of locking people up, and cites statistics that show them right (it costs $66,381 to keep a man in prison a year, $110,473 to keep a woman in prison). “But,” he says, “here is the irony. After remaining fairly constant for most of the 1990s, Canada’s corrections system actually had fewer offenders in it by 1999-2000, yet costs to taxpayers rose by 11.4% over the previous year.”
Hard to assess whether he is manipulating the statistics here. But it is clear on the face of it that this is a guy who wants people to be locked up for longer, and preferably for cheaper.
But he gets more disingenuous as he goes on: “The inmate profile shows that Canada’s federal felons” (Nice turn of phrase, Michael) “are young and violent, regardless of gender. Nearly 55% are aged twenty to thirty-four. 5% of the men are serving sentences for first degree murder, 13% for second degree. 18% of male federal inmates were sentenced for sexual offences.”
In other words, 36% of men are in prison for murder or sexual offences.
And 64% are not.
And yet the profile shows them to be violent.
For women, Harris’s own figures show that 17% of women are in prison for murder, 3% for sexual offences.
Which means 80% are not.
He doesn’t include assault, which might add substantial numbers. But he does say that 50% of the women have committed ‘acts of violence’.
Which, again, means that 50% have not.
And yet he uses these figures to claim that Canada’s prisoners are ‘violent, regardless of gender.’
He cites statistics that show that 50% of prisoners had family problems, 75% unstable job histories, 70% drug and alcohol abuse histories, 17% mental health problems – but he doesn’t think, apparently, that a community could try to solve these problems at a community level, before things reach the point of crime and violence.
Harris is all about “victim’s rights”, which is why he thinks that in Canada the “criminal was king after he was sentenced to prison.”
Never mind that if preventive and restorative approaches were adopted, social problems and nonviolent offences dealt with as such, drugs decriminalized, there would be far fewer victims whose rights people like Harris would be able to advocate for. That is, after all, just a hypothesis with only the experiences of about a dozen countries over decades as well as hundreds of more local experiences to back it up. So if you don’t believe that, fine. Still, you should not be the least bit surprised at his solution (which I skipped to, I admit, for after seeing someone handle statistics and logic so poorly I usually lose most of my respect for the writer’s accuracy and integrity).
Privatization, of course. “Some of Ontario’s more controversial prison reforms have been inspired by experiments south of the border.” Boot camps, private prisons, super-prisons, electronic surveillance and implants – “to save money and improve security”, of course. Of course, Harris doesn’t look at the whole system in the US, nor of crime rates, nor of society, nor of the gigantic multifaceted horrors of the world’s biggest and most expensive prison industrial complex. And really, why should he? His stated agenda is to take a terrible system and make it immeasurably worse. I suspect that he has done some honest work and reporting (though there are, as I showed above, reasons to be suspicious of everything he’s done) so I will read the book.
But after even a brief perusal, I can’t help but think how appropriate the title of the book is.
Con Game, indeed.
