Outside The Box: Part 2

Tough: A Ruthless Philosophy

Crime is a menace. Ruthless acts, callous crimes and repeat offenders dominate the daily news. Even when it’s not at our door it still invades our deepest fears, inspiring calls for more laws and tougher penalties. But a growing number of justice workers are starting to say it’s the justice system itself that’s to blame and that in order to fix it we need to start thinking outside the concrete box.

In 1978, about a year into Horace Massan’s life sentence at Stoney Mountain Penitentiary, he watched an 18-year-old man from Winnipeg get locked up for some break and enters.

“When he came into the system he was a happy-go-lucky kid that said ‘please’ and ‘excuse me,’” says Massan.

But as time ground on in jail, says Massan, inmate no. 34*1 became destructive, fighting and stabbing people.

“When he was let go, he came right back, five or six times,” says Massan, who figures that in the end the kid wound up serving as many years as he did – maybe more.

Justice reform advocates say inmate no. 34*1’s story is a classic example of how our justice system takes good people who make bad decisions and turns them into bad people beyond the reach of any rehabilitation program.

It all starts, they say, with the public’s thirst for vengeance.

Politicians then pander to public opinion to get tough on crime, leaving prosecutors with few tools at their disposal besides throwing people in jail.

Once inside, offenders have a very difficult time ever breaking free from the system.

It all starts with a prison system that itself reinforces a criminal self-image and immerses people in a culture saturated with crime.

Once out, the problems compound.

No one wants to hire a criminal or rent them a place to stay.

Former friends, family and associates are either bad influences or unable to relate to what life was like on the inside.

Parole requirements, such as tight curfews and bans on drinking, are easy for people already on the edge to break.

That’s where Sister Carol Peloquin and her Next Step program comes in.

Every week Sister Carol invites five or six recently released convicts into her North End home to talk about their challenges staying on the straight and narrow.

She isn’t critical of the system, but she can attest to how hard it is, even for those committed to staying clean, for people with records to stay out of jail.

What’s more troubling for Sister Carol is how difficult it is to raise money for her program, despite the obvious benefits.

“It’s not a popular charity,” says the Roman Catholic nun.

Graham Stewart can identify with how easily offenders are written off by society, particularly by the term ‘tough on crime.’

“I hear ‘tough on criminals,’” says Stewart, the national director of the John Howard Society. “It dehumanizes them and abandons any social responsibility for what they’ve done. It’s a ruthless philosophy.”

Stewart says we all need to come to terms with the unspoken risks that go along with jail – the drastically increased odds of being assaulted or murdered, committing suicide or contracting HIV/AIDS or hepatitis C.

“We should be using the justice system as a last resort,” says Stewart, who sees alternative programs such as mediation and restorative justice as viable options for any level of crime.

“The most severe crimes, with the most lasting scars, those are the ones with the most potential and are most effective at reducing the chance of re-offending,” says Stewart.

In Manitoba, those are also the crimes that are most ineligible for alternative measures, according to Jacqueline St. Hill, director of Winnipeg prosecutions for Manitoba Justice.

Less than 5 per cent of Manitoba’s 40,000 criminal cases each year get dealt with outside the courts.

Most of those that are eligible amount to property offences by first-time offenders.

“People want to see people held accountable,” says St. Hill.

Despite a grudging respect for the notion of alternative justice, when asked, St. Hill focuses more on the reasons alternative approaches shouldn’t be used than on the reasons why they should.

She says that alternative approaches are still strange to many people, including most defence attorneys and almost all victims who come into the system.

She admits, however, that despite prosecuting cases in Winnipeg for 20 years, she only has a vague notion of what offenders encounter when they reach prison.

Instead, she points to the lack of tools at the disposal of her office and says the current system is simply not equipped to handle the kinds of problems it encounters.

“We’re not geared up to help them get a job. We have a lot of people with substance abuse problems,” says St. Hill. “There’s a lot of stuff to be done on the preventative side.”

That includes rethinking the way we all treat people who make mistakes, says Massan, remembering one of his first jobs after getting out, as a driver for a local trucking company.

“It’s the office workers, the ones with access to your files, that crucify you,” says Massan. “They start the rumours. They run you out of town.”

Next week: Aboriginal justice proposals may hold the key to rethinking how we deal with criminals. Tim Friesen can be reached at Tim.Friesen@CanstarNews.com