After my experience, what surprised me is not that some people end up going back to prison (though in fact most don’t), but that anyone can live well after serving time. The obstacles are many, the supports are few.
Federal prisons have some services that are supposed to help prisoners upon their release. Education is one, but I have written previously about the many weaknesses of education in prisons. Job training is supposed to occur but rarely does, and much of what is provided does not lead to any credential recognized in the labour market.
Other assistance is intended to be more motivational and psychological. I had experiences with two such aspects — the prison psychologists and the program some prisoners are required to take that aims to help people stay out of crime after release.
The psychologist
The prison I was in employed several psychologists. Not long after my arrival, I was feeling depressed and made an appointment to see one. I came to like and respect this person, who was trying to do a reasonable job in a very difficult situation.
At the start of our first conversation, she told me that I should not make any assumption of confidentiality when we talked, and that anything I said and even my visiting her could be discussed by my “case management team.” I took this to mean that anything I told her could and would be used against me by the prison, including at a parole hearing. That’s not exactly the kind of thing that makes you want to be especially honest. She was right to warn me, but it definitely changed what I was prepared to share with her. Nonetheless, I found our first talk useful and made an appointment for a second.
At our second conversation, she told me that she was not allowed to have continuing connections with clients, and that she could only meet with me two or three times in total. This struck me as a bizarre policy. Almost every prisoner I met had serious psychological issues, either related to whatever brought them to prison, or just by virtue of being there. You would have to be blind to the reality of the world to be in prison and not be worried about many aspects of your life. And you are in a place where exposing weakness to others can create a lot of trouble. Yet the policy of the system was to strictly limit how much assistance you could get from a trained person.
I was fortunate; the chaplain at this prison, a person widely respected and liked, was not under any restriction as to how often she could talk with prisoners. Although I am not religious, I had quite a few conversations with the chaplain that were really helpful to me.
The program
My second experience with “helping” was the program the prison required me to take prior to parole. That requirement was imposed, against standard policy, by a psychologist who met me once, briefly, in assessment. That decision caused serious problems with my parole.
Correctional Service Canada (CSC) has long struggled with what programs it should provide to prisoners and whether such programs actually make a difference in their future behaviour. A book could, and perhaps should, be written about the endless adjustments in these programs. At the time I was there, CSC had recently combined (I believe because of budget cuts) several programs intended for different kinds of crimes into a single program, which they called “integrated.”
This program involved, as I recall, more than 100 hours of sessions. Because of the many breaks and cancelled sessions, it took more than five months. Until it was completed, the nine of us who were in it were told, we could not get paroled. Some (but not all) of us were told we couldn’t even apply for parole until then. I believe that all nine had our paroles delayed because the program first was not available and then took so long.
The program was delivered by a psychologist in the employ of CSC. And again, I grew to like and respect this person, who I think tried hard to do something useful and meaningful. However, the barriers were considerable. First, the program required using a lot of content verbatim and gave the psychologist very little scope to adapt it to the participants. Some sessions had to be video-recorded and sent to HQ so they could be sure that it was being done exactly as prescribed. No professional wants to work in that way.
We also knew that anything we said in the program was not confidential. The psychologist had to file a formal report on each of us, assessing how we did, and it could play an important role in whether we were paroled. So nobody was inclined to rock the boat or dispute any of the ideas presented, whatever our true feelings.
The biggest problem, I thought, was that the program was delivered in the prison, where none of us were actually dealing with the issues of post-release that it was mainly about. We could all firmly assert how well we would do, how we would not return to any bad habits, how we had changed for good — because we were not in an environment where any of those claims were being tested. I remember sitting in sessions where classmates were talking about the businesses they planned to start after release and thinking, “But don’t you realize how hard it will be to get any money for a start-up or any clients when your criminal record is readily available on the internet?” I felt we were being fed a fairy tale about the world we would face after release. But then, some of us were giving a fairy tale back, so perhaps that’s fair enough — even if useless to everyone.
Perhaps the “help” situation in prison is best summed up in a version of the old saying about work under the Soviet system: They pretend to help us, and we pretend to get better.
David Dorson is the pen name of someone who went through arrest, case disposition, imprisonment and parole in Ontario a few years ago. Law360 Canada has granted him anonymity because he offers a unique perspective on a subject that matters deeply to many readers, and revealing the author’s identity would make re-establishment in the community after serving his sentence much more difficult than it already is.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
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