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| Kurt F. Suss |
The main gate of the prison is where all visits to the prison are processed, documented and subject to a non-intrusive search. Generally, it was a quick search, unless we received prior intel that someone was bringing in contraband … or you were a prison lawyer!
“Make sure you give that guy a hard time. Check him good and twice!” Being fresh out of the academy, you wanted to do what you were told, and you better make damn sure you follow the direction of the old screws! I was led to believe that all prison lawyers were “con lovers” and contraband smugglers. This, of course, wasn’t true. When I first started in corrections, I didn’t know what a prison lawyer was, let alone what they did. But one thing was for sure, it seemed like a lot of people hated prison lawyers!
Yutthana Gaetgeaw: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
Some lawyers seemed to get treated differently — the lawyers working for high-profile inmates. These were the lawyers who drove into the prison parking lots in Ferraris and Porsches. These were the mob lawyers working for established Canadian crime families.
I was in uniform picking up coffees for the shift one day in a small town close to the prison and commented on a beautiful car I was admiring, a high-end BMW. The fella commented, “It was a gift from one of your inmates.”
“Who would that be?” I asked.
“Julias,” he proudly replied. I chuckled. I knew exactly who he was talking about — Julias was in fact a lawyer himself!
As time went on, I learned that the idea of lawyers smuggling prison contraband was for the most part nonsense, and I can’t remember any lawyer ever smuggling in anything.
Today is different, albeit there are more tools to use against the prison lawyer when entering the prison. There are the ion scanners and dogs that are frequently “altered” and manipulated to produce false positives, resulting in a great amount of inconvenience for anyone attempting to enter a prison.
‘Send more shoes!’
But why? Why on earth become a prison lawyer when so many people hated you? This was always my question. Why come into a prison at all? Are there not enough clients needing help outside of prison?!
To me, this was clearly a case of the “African shoe salesmen”: Two shoe salesmen go to a small remote town in Africa selling shoes. The one salesman tells his boss: “I’m coming home, they don’t wear shoes here!” The other said to his boss: “Send me 1,000 pairs of shoes quick, they don’t have any shoes here!”
There is no doubt that there is plenty of opportunity for the right individual to become successful. Legal issues involving abuse, corruption, malfeasance, breach of fiduciary responsibilities and Charter rights became clearly evident over time. Today these issues are rampant and run amok both for inmates and staff — “a lot of people need shoes!”
My naivety was, why would anyone serving a prison sentence need a lawyer? As time went on, it became very clear, and it was like every inmate had a lawyer — and no doubt needed one! The opportunities were endless for prison lawyers; I started to see many of them.
Conundrum
Here’s my conundrum. I have seen so many injustices, Charter violations and harassment throughout my 36 years of corrections, and it has gotten progressively worse. Prison lawyers are commonplace through our prison system now. Seriously, there should be a law office in every prison, for staff as well as residents. It has been hard for me over the years to even reason how the corrections system stays operating sometimes.
“What is wrong with people?” I continue to ask. Is it the management style? Is it coming right down from the top? What on earth is this management style? Surely it’s not trained at Canadian correctional colleges and government management courses?
A toxic workplace
A Dec. 1 article by Daniel Otis clearly outlines a severe toxic workplace that has been occurring for some time. This was also addressed in the Correctional Service of Canada’s first annual report addressing wrongdoing and misconduct.
Corrections Canada disciplined employees for 400 misconduct cases, and 12 were fired for things ranging from misconduct to harassment. There is no doubt that none or very few of these employees were managers. It has always been my experience that managers are promoted and removed from many serious situations to avoid accountability or exposure of wrongdoing.
Over the years, I attempted to understand this management style that just didn’t seem to fit with any school or method taught at business schools.
Then suddenly, my moment of epiphany… That’s it!
It was my Christoph Waltz moment in Inglourious Basterds: “Ooooooh, that’s a beeeeengo!”
To me, it was a pure Machiavellian management style. It was the never-ending struggle for ultimate control over others — ruthless techniques of intimidation, bullying, threats for power, position, money and even sex. There were endless injustices being committed daily throughout all the levels of this Machiavellian hierarchy, except there were never any of the players from within the oak-clad offices of middle and upper management walked out, disciplined, charged or fired.
Seriously, my thoughts now are, if it wasn’t for prison lawyers, our correctional system surely would not be held to account and would quickly resemble third-world prison systems — or maybe it already does?
Kurt F. Suss was a corrections officer with Correctional Service of Canada and a dog handler and trainer consultant. He is the author of Dogman: The Trials and Tribulations. He is currently at work on his second book Why Dogs Bite. He can be reached at isiscanine@hotmail.com.
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