John Howard Society of Canada National Staff Conference
Calgary, Alberta
March 10, 2011
9:35am – 10:20am
[CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY]
We live in a society obsessed with waiting.
If we were to look past the words and examine the actions of the minority Conservative Government of Canada, where they talk a good accountability and transparency game but in practice have arguably concealed the people’s information more than any government in our country’s history, one could argue that they’re waiting for a majority to reveal their full agenda.
If we were to look to the opposition parties, who in one breath are quick to claim that the Conservatives have a hidden agenda, yet in the next breath don’t offer a full platform so that Canadians could actually have a viable choice come the next election, they seem to be waiting too.
But waiting is not just a political game – it’s a way of life.
When I was in Grade 9, probably like many other kids, I had a friend who I spoke to on the phone everyday after school. I was crushing on this girl something fierce and I never had the guts to tell her how I felt. I made the calculation at the time that it would be better to have her as a friend than to tell her how I felt and potentially make things awkward if she didn’t feel the same way. I waited and as the days turned into weeks, months and years, she got a boyfriend, stopped talking to me, finished high school, got a job, got married, had kids and life went on.
Years later, I was told by one of her friends that this girl was crushing on me too during that time where we spent hours on the phone together both waiting. While I got over this a long time ago, the example for me highlights the sheer ridiculousness of this phenomenon – a phenomenon that has played itself out more than once in my life and probably in most of your lives as well.
So “what does this all have to do with prisons?” you’re probably wondering right now.
I would argue that individuals have been so scared of the ‘soft on crime’ label these days – a hollow and meaningless tagline if I’ve ever heard one – that many voices that should be out there on the front lines in opposition to the Conservatives punishment agenda remain muted or understated. They choose to just wait it out with the expectation of better days to come.
But can we afford to wait?
Will we wait until our prisons become dumping grounds for individuals suffering from mental health and drug addiction issues, the poor and other marginalized groups?
Will we wait until our prisons become dumping grounds for colonized Aboriginal peoples who are more likely to be incarcerated and represent 3 percent of Canada’s total population, while representing 18 percent of our federal and 27 percent of our provincial-territorial prison populations?
Will we wait until the rate of federal imprisonment for women jumps by more than 50 percent in the span of a decade?
Will we wait until our prisons are used to warehouse individuals seeking refuge from war torn countries?
Will we wait until we build special prisons to criminalize and punish dissent manifesting against a capitalist mode of production that sees, according to some estimates, 85 percent of the world’s finances and resources controlled by 15 percent of the world’s population?
Will we wait until more than half of the prisoners warehoused in our provincial-territorial prisons on a given day are either awaiting trial or sentencing?
Will we wait until a significant number of prisoners in our provincial-territorial prisons are double- or triple-bunked in cells the size of an average household washroom?
Will we wait until our Minister of Public Safety publicly states that double-bunking is not inappropriate or does not violate international standards when he must be familiar with the UN Standards for the Minimum Treatment of Prisoners that strongly discourages this practice?
Will we wait until our Minister of Public Safety publicly states that double-bunking is not inappropriate or is not in conflict with good prison practice when he must be familiar with CSC Commissioners Directive 550 which states that “single occupancy accommodation is the most desirable and correctionally appropriate method of housing offenders”?
Will we wait until CSC’s Senior Deputy Commissioner sends a briefing note to the Minister of Public Safety stating that “Further expansion of double bunking increases the risk to staff and offender safety in an institution”, which is subsequently ignored?
Will we wait until CSC suspends Commissioners Directive 550 in order to prepare for the projected increase in the federal prison population that is likely to occur as a result of federal legislation?
Will we wait until the federal government drops the charade that they believe people can change and take the Correctional Service of Canada’s so-called Transformation Agenda, or perpetuation agenda as I like to call it, to its illogical conclusion by altering the agency’s name to the Detention Service of Canada?
Will we wait until we equate the pain and suffering of victims to the length of prison sentences – a measure which will never leave any of the parties involved satisfied with the process or outcome of the ‘just us’ process?
Will we wait until the role of victims is reduced to that of a witness of the Crown and the role of the accused is reduced to that of a spectator in the state’s pursuit of ‘just us’ which is little more than a pissing contest between lawyers?
Will we wait until the federal monies invested in victims is around $20 million – which admittedly is an improvement – versus $3 billion for the federal penitentiary system?
Will we wait until the first Federal Ombudsman for the Victims of Crime publicly states that “the needs of victims are very complex. They’re not easy solutions. It’s not about a tagline about building more prisons or getting tougher on criminals. Their needs are complex and they’re very in-depth and they’re long-term. I guess what I would be telling the government is, if you have a pot of money and you have a choice to build more prisons or help more victims, to help more victims” - a statement which is also ignored by the government of the day?
Will we wait until more children will not have a mother or father at home to help raise them because they are now more likely to find themselves incarcerated for the worst thing – not the only thing – they’ve done in their lives?
Will we wait until we are in the process of establishing 23 new prisons and 16 additions to existing facilities at the provincial-territorial level in the name of institutional security, rehabilitation and managing persistent overcrowding that will add over 7,000 new prisoners beds at a construction cost of $3 billion and counting, and hundreds of millions more in operational and management costs associated with prison expansion?
Will we wait until we are in the process of establishing the equivalent of 34 new units on the grounds of existing federal penitentiaries that will add over 2,500 new prisoners beds at a construction cost of $601 million, and hundreds of millions more in operational and management costs associated with prison expansion?
Will we wait until CSC’s budget goes up 86 percent in the span of six fiscal years when the best available independent and peer-reviewed scholarly evidence has shown that such a diversion of expenditures will likely have a negligible impact on ‘crime’?
Will we wait until we keep open aging institutions that are long past their life-cycles and are unfit for animals, let alone human beings because our government seems to have an ideological addiction to incarceration which they are unable or unwilling to kick despite the known harms of institutionalized punishment?
Will we wait until a teenager gets thrown into prison for throwing crab apples at a postman, is subjected to diesel therapy as she’s shipped across the country and hangs herself with a ligature in front of prison staff?
Will we wait until there are long waiting lists for programs in our penitentiaries that prisoners may need to take in order to safely reintegrate into society because under five percent of CSC’s budget is dedicated towards the provision of programming, and the Harper government decides it wants to go on a carceral binge that will only exacerbate the crisis in our federal prisons and undermine safety in our communities?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards new penal infrastructure, like they did in the United States, that reintegration services will invariably be impacted, causing massive hikes in recidivism rates?
Will we wait until we have had our own bad experience with increasing our reliance on incarceration and eventually decide to reverse course as many countries have, wasting vast amounts of financial and human capital in the process?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards building new prison beds that we see patients being treated in a Tim Horton’s instead of a hospital bed?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards building new prison beds that our kids will have to pay higher tuition rates and take-out small mortgage-sized loans to go to university and get a job they’re likely to be vastly overqualified for and doesn’t pay the bills?
Will we wait until the day that the quickest work that has been done by all political parties on our pension system – in a context where many Canadians who worked hard their whole lives to build their households, communities and country are living below the poverty line – involves removing pension benefits and entitlements from prisoners in the name of Clifford Olson?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and NDP lead an all-party charge to further restrict pardon eligibility in the names of Karla Homolka and Graham James, only to watch pardon prices spike as a result of related processing complications which will lead some to argue that pardons should not be subsidized by taxpayers, and should be paid fully by individuals who have served their time and need a pardon to obtain gainful employment so that they can move away from ‘crime’ and on with their lives?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and the Bloc Québecois form a ‘coalition’ and get rid of accelerated parole review for first-time, non-violent prisoners – a practice that was put into place for evidence-based reasons – in order to score political points in the belle province in the names of Earl Jones and Vincent Lacroix who took advantage of laissez-faire financial regulations?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and Liberals effectively usher in a sanitized version of the death penalty for individuals who have been convicted of committing homicides by getting rid of the faint hope clause when we already have some of the longest sentences for such acts in the world?
Will we wait until we focus so much attention on incarceration that we don’t maximize the potential of prevention as a viable alternative that could save taxpayers $7 in imprisonment costs for every $1 spent on initiatives that reduce victimization from happening in the first place?
Will we wait until jurisdictions like Texas are diverting significant taxpayer monies and resources away from building new prisons towards justice reinvestment schemes that aim to address some of the contributing factors to 'crime' such as mental health and drug addiction issues in the community in a manner that makes Canada look like a punitive outlier in a context where most governments elsewhere recognize that increasing our reliance on incarceration is expensive and does not contribute to enhancing safety in our communities in the long-term?
Will we wait until the penal policy debate in this country is focused on whether ‘crime’ – reported or unreported – is going up or down, instead of focusing on how we can allocate scarce ‘criminal justice’ resources to prevent the complex conflicts and harms in our communities that we call ‘crime’, and to meet the needs of the victimized and criminalized in a manner that is effective and provides the best value-for-money for taxpayers?
Will we wait until our government doesn’t feel the need to share the costs of their ‘justice’ or just us who can know bills?
Will we wait until our government is found in contempt of the Parliament of Canada for not allowing MPs to fulfill their obligations of holding those in power in check by refusing to disclose the full costs of their punishment agenda to Canadian taxpayers who will ultimately foot the bill for all federal and provincial-territorial expenditures related to their carceral binge?
It has been four years since the CSC Review Panel recommended the construction of new regional complexes, or McPrisons as some like to call them, and we’re still waiting for the government to make public the long-term accommodation strategy of the federal penitentiary system.
While Michael Ignatieff – like him or not – may be “just visiting”, putting himself out there to have his choices in life attacked and his motivations questioned in order to have the chance to represent a country that he left but came back to – no doubt because of his love for Canada, we’re just waiting.
I think we’ve waited long enough.
While people in the Middle East and North Africa take their destiny into their own hands, risking life and limb for a better life, we’re busy here waiting and shutting the fuck up, undercutting ourselves by cutting deals and building our own little empires – to get our own piece of the pie so to speak. And for what?
In my life, I’ve been told to wait.
Wait until you finish your PhD to speak out.
Wait until you get a job.
Wait until you get tenure.
Wait until you retire.
There is always something to wait for – so many things in fact, that we could live our entire lives waiting.
Wait until the right moment to promote penal abolitionism I’ve been told, as if one can work towards it by engaging in the same cowardice and gamesmanship exhibited by all political parties that we’re so quick to denounce, yet feel the need to wait and emulate to win.
This is said to me as if winning what will likely prove to be unwinnable in this lifetime, especially if we wait, was ever the point.
This is said to me as if putting an idea out there for debate like a heavy bag to get punched often and hard is not better than waiting and walking through life with a shadow hanging over you, like the one hanging over the Prime Minister Harper, that makes people suspect what you’re really all about.
In my life, there are times where I’ve waited – where I’ve waited so long that I either forgot what it was that I was waiting for or what I was waiting for was gone.
When I turned twenty-two my grandfather called me from a hospital bed in Windsor, Ontario to wish me a happy birthday. I missed the call and waited to call him back because when I spoke to him a few days before he sounded well and I had taken for granted that, just like every time before, he would still be here among the living the next day. I waited and I never talked to my Opa again. The man who gave so much of his time and invested it in me. The man who taught me how to read. I waited and seven years later as I wrote this I realized that I still haven’t forgiven myself for waiting, and I’m not sure if I ever can or ever will. It may seem like a trivial thing, but if there is one thing I regret in this life, above all else, it is the phone call that I waited to make and the conversation I subsequently never had the opportunity to have.
Life is not to be lived for regret – the regret of waiting.
Today, I choose to live life. How about you?
Thank you for your time. I hope this didn’t leave you waiting to move on with your day.
We live in a society obsessed with waiting.
If we were to look past the words and examine the actions of the minority Conservative Government of Canada, where they talk a good accountability and transparency game but in practice have arguably concealed the people’s information more than any government in our country’s history, one could argue that they’re waiting for a majority to reveal their full agenda.
If we were to look to the opposition parties, who in one breath are quick to claim that the Conservatives have a hidden agenda, yet in the next breath don’t offer a full platform so that Canadians could actually have a viable choice come the next election, they seem to be waiting too.
But waiting is not just a political game – it’s a way of life.
When I was in Grade 9, probably like many other kids, I had a friend who I spoke to on the phone everyday after school. I was crushing on this girl something fierce and I never had the guts to tell her how I felt. I made the calculation at the time that it would be better to have her as a friend than to tell her how I felt and potentially make things awkward if she didn’t feel the same way. I waited and as the days turned into weeks, months and years, she got a boyfriend, stopped talking to me, finished high school, got a job, got married, had kids and life went on.
Years later, I was told by one of her friends that this girl was crushing on me too during that time where we spent hours on the phone together both waiting. While I got over this a long time ago, the example for me highlights the sheer ridiculousness of this phenomenon – a phenomenon that has played itself out more than once in my life and probably in most of your lives as well.
So “what does this all have to do with prisons?” you’re probably wondering right now.
I would argue that individuals have been so scared of the ‘soft on crime’ label these days – a hollow and meaningless tagline if I’ve ever heard one – that many voices that should be out there on the front lines in opposition to the Conservatives punishment agenda remain muted or understated. They choose to just wait it out with the expectation of better days to come.
But can we afford to wait?
Will we wait until our prisons become dumping grounds for individuals suffering from mental health and drug addiction issues, the poor and other marginalized groups?
Will we wait until our prisons become dumping grounds for colonized Aboriginal peoples who are more likely to be incarcerated and represent 3 percent of Canada’s total population, while representing 18 percent of our federal and 27 percent of our provincial-territorial prison populations?
Will we wait until the rate of federal imprisonment for women jumps by more than 50 percent in the span of a decade?
Will we wait until our penitentiaries essentially serve as securitized geriatric units to accommodate the nearly 1 in 5 federal prisoners that are above the age of 50?
Will we wait until our prisons are used to warehouse individuals seeking refuge from war torn countries?
Will we wait until we build special prisons to criminalize and punish dissent manifesting against a capitalist mode of production that sees, according to some estimates, 85 percent of the world’s finances and resources controlled by 15 percent of the world’s population?
Will we wait until more than half of the prisoners warehoused in our provincial-territorial prisons on a given day are either awaiting trial or sentencing?
Will we wait until a significant number of prisoners in our provincial-territorial prisons are double- or triple-bunked in cells the size of an average household washroom?
Will we wait until our Minister of Public Safety publicly states that double-bunking is not inappropriate or does not violate international standards when he must be familiar with the UN Standards for the Minimum Treatment of Prisoners that strongly discourages this practice?
Will we wait until our Minister of Public Safety publicly states that double-bunking is not inappropriate or is not in conflict with good prison practice when he must be familiar with CSC Commissioners Directive 550 which states that “single occupancy accommodation is the most desirable and correctionally appropriate method of housing offenders”?
Will we wait until CSC’s Senior Deputy Commissioner sends a briefing note to the Minister of Public Safety stating that “Further expansion of double bunking increases the risk to staff and offender safety in an institution”, which is subsequently ignored?
Will we wait until CSC suspends Commissioners Directive 550 in order to prepare for the projected increase in the federal prison population that is likely to occur as a result of federal legislation?
Will we wait until the federal government drops the charade that they believe people can change and take the Correctional Service of Canada’s so-called Transformation Agenda, or perpetuation agenda as I like to call it, to its illogical conclusion by altering the agency’s name to the Detention Service of Canada?
Will we wait until we equate the pain and suffering of victims to the length of prison sentences – a measure which will never leave any of the parties involved satisfied with the process or outcome of the ‘just us’ process?
Will we wait until the role of victims is reduced to that of a witness of the Crown and the role of the accused is reduced to that of a spectator in the state’s pursuit of ‘just us’ which is little more than a pissing contest between lawyers?
Will we wait until the federal monies invested in victims is around $20 million – which admittedly is an improvement – versus $3 billion for the federal penitentiary system?
Will we wait until the first Federal Ombudsman for the Victims of Crime publicly states that “the needs of victims are very complex. They’re not easy solutions. It’s not about a tagline about building more prisons or getting tougher on criminals. Their needs are complex and they’re very in-depth and they’re long-term. I guess what I would be telling the government is, if you have a pot of money and you have a choice to build more prisons or help more victims, to help more victims” - a statement which is also ignored by the government of the day?
Will we wait until more children will not have a mother or father at home to help raise them because they are now more likely to find themselves incarcerated for the worst thing – not the only thing – they’ve done in their lives?
Will we wait until we are in the process of establishing 23 new prisons and 16 additions to existing facilities at the provincial-territorial level in the name of institutional security, rehabilitation and managing persistent overcrowding that will add over 7,000 new prisoners beds at a construction cost of $3 billion and counting, and hundreds of millions more in operational and management costs associated with prison expansion?
Will we wait until we are in the process of establishing the equivalent of 34 new units on the grounds of existing federal penitentiaries that will add over 2,500 new prisoners beds at a construction cost of $601 million, and hundreds of millions more in operational and management costs associated with prison expansion?
Will we wait until CSC’s budget goes up 86 percent in the span of six fiscal years when the best available independent and peer-reviewed scholarly evidence has shown that such a diversion of expenditures will likely have a negligible impact on ‘crime’?
Will we wait until we keep open aging institutions that are long past their life-cycles and are unfit for animals, let alone human beings because our government seems to have an ideological addiction to incarceration which they are unable or unwilling to kick despite the known harms of institutionalized punishment?
Will we wait until a teenager gets thrown into prison for throwing crab apples at a postman, is subjected to diesel therapy as she’s shipped across the country and hangs herself with a ligature in front of prison staff?
Will we wait until there are long waiting lists for programs in our penitentiaries that prisoners may need to take in order to safely reintegrate into society because under five percent of CSC’s budget is dedicated towards the provision of programming, and the Harper government decides it wants to go on a carceral binge that will only exacerbate the crisis in our federal prisons and undermine safety in our communities?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards new penal infrastructure, like they did in the United States, that reintegration services will invariably be impacted, causing massive hikes in recidivism rates?
Will we wait until we have had our own bad experience with increasing our reliance on incarceration and eventually decide to reverse course as many countries have, wasting vast amounts of financial and human capital in the process?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards building new prison beds that we see patients being treated in a Tim Horton’s instead of a hospital bed?
Will we wait until we divert so much taxpayer money towards building new prison beds that our kids will have to pay higher tuition rates and take-out small mortgage-sized loans to go to university and get a job they’re likely to be vastly overqualified for and doesn’t pay the bills?
Will we wait until the day that the quickest work that has been done by all political parties on our pension system – in a context where many Canadians who worked hard their whole lives to build their households, communities and country are living below the poverty line – involves removing pension benefits and entitlements from prisoners in the name of Clifford Olson?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and NDP lead an all-party charge to further restrict pardon eligibility in the names of Karla Homolka and Graham James, only to watch pardon prices spike as a result of related processing complications which will lead some to argue that pardons should not be subsidized by taxpayers, and should be paid fully by individuals who have served their time and need a pardon to obtain gainful employment so that they can move away from ‘crime’ and on with their lives?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and the Bloc Québecois form a ‘coalition’ and get rid of accelerated parole review for first-time, non-violent prisoners – a practice that was put into place for evidence-based reasons – in order to score political points in the belle province in the names of Earl Jones and Vincent Lacroix who took advantage of laissez-faire financial regulations?
Will we wait until the Conservatives and Liberals effectively usher in a sanitized version of the death penalty for individuals who have been convicted of committing homicides by getting rid of the faint hope clause when we already have some of the longest sentences for such acts in the world?
Will we wait until we focus so much attention on incarceration that we don’t maximize the potential of prevention as a viable alternative that could save taxpayers $7 in imprisonment costs for every $1 spent on initiatives that reduce victimization from happening in the first place?
Will we wait until jurisdictions like Texas are diverting significant taxpayer monies and resources away from building new prisons towards justice reinvestment schemes that aim to address some of the contributing factors to 'crime' such as mental health and drug addiction issues in the community in a manner that makes Canada look like a punitive outlier in a context where most governments elsewhere recognize that increasing our reliance on incarceration is expensive and does not contribute to enhancing safety in our communities in the long-term?
Will we wait until the penal policy debate in this country is focused on whether ‘crime’ – reported or unreported – is going up or down, instead of focusing on how we can allocate scarce ‘criminal justice’ resources to prevent the complex conflicts and harms in our communities that we call ‘crime’, and to meet the needs of the victimized and criminalized in a manner that is effective and provides the best value-for-money for taxpayers?
Will we wait until our government doesn’t feel the need to share the costs of their ‘justice’ or just us who can know bills?
Will we wait until our government is found in contempt of the Parliament of Canada for not allowing MPs to fulfill their obligations of holding those in power in check by refusing to disclose the full costs of their punishment agenda to Canadian taxpayers who will ultimately foot the bill for all federal and provincial-territorial expenditures related to their carceral binge?
It has been four years since the CSC Review Panel recommended the construction of new regional complexes, or McPrisons as some like to call them, and we’re still waiting for the government to make public the long-term accommodation strategy of the federal penitentiary system.
While Michael Ignatieff – like him or not – may be “just visiting”, putting himself out there to have his choices in life attacked and his motivations questioned in order to have the chance to represent a country that he left but came back to – no doubt because of his love for Canada, we’re just waiting.
I think we’ve waited long enough.
While people in the Middle East and North Africa take their destiny into their own hands, risking life and limb for a better life, we’re busy here waiting and shutting the fuck up, undercutting ourselves by cutting deals and building our own little empires – to get our own piece of the pie so to speak. And for what?
In my life, I’ve been told to wait.
Wait until you finish your PhD to speak out.
Wait until you get a job.
Wait until you get tenure.
Wait until you retire.
There is always something to wait for – so many things in fact, that we could live our entire lives waiting.
Wait until the right moment to promote penal abolitionism I’ve been told, as if one can work towards it by engaging in the same cowardice and gamesmanship exhibited by all political parties that we’re so quick to denounce, yet feel the need to wait and emulate to win.
This is said to me as if winning what will likely prove to be unwinnable in this lifetime, especially if we wait, was ever the point.
This is said to me as if putting an idea out there for debate like a heavy bag to get punched often and hard is not better than waiting and walking through life with a shadow hanging over you, like the one hanging over the Prime Minister Harper, that makes people suspect what you’re really all about.
In my life, there are times where I’ve waited – where I’ve waited so long that I either forgot what it was that I was waiting for or what I was waiting for was gone.
When I turned twenty-two my grandfather called me from a hospital bed in Windsor, Ontario to wish me a happy birthday. I missed the call and waited to call him back because when I spoke to him a few days before he sounded well and I had taken for granted that, just like every time before, he would still be here among the living the next day. I waited and I never talked to my Opa again. The man who gave so much of his time and invested it in me. The man who taught me how to read. I waited and seven years later as I wrote this I realized that I still haven’t forgiven myself for waiting, and I’m not sure if I ever can or ever will. It may seem like a trivial thing, but if there is one thing I regret in this life, above all else, it is the phone call that I waited to make and the conversation I subsequently never had the opportunity to have.
Life is not to be lived for regret – the regret of waiting.
Today, I choose to live life. How about you?
Thank you for your time. I hope this didn’t leave you waiting to move on with your day.
Really fabulous, inspiring speech. Enjoy the conference!
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