Work, pay in Canadian prisons, part one | David Dorson

Editor’s note: David Dorson is the pen name of someone who went through arrest, case disposition, imprisonment and parole in Ontario a few years ago. The Lawyer’s Daily has granted 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 completely serving his sentence much more difficult than it already is.
 
Every two weeks prisoners in federal prisons get their pay and financial statements. And every two weeks, starting even in my first few weeks in the Assessment Unit (where all federal prisoners are sent for two or three months before being assigned to a “home” prison), some prisoner would be saying to me, “I hear you understand these things.”

Yes, many prisoners have a pretty low level of financial literacy, not to mention literacy generally. At the same time, I’ve read a lot of financial statements in my day, and it took me quite a bit of time to decipher the ones the prison gives you — two pages with hundreds of numbers in a format that can only be described as bewildering.This chart shows a part of such a statement. 

At times, I thought this report must have been designed deliberately to make it impenetrable. Prisoners are generally told little or nothing about anything that matters to them, so it would not be out of character to try to confuse prisoners even about how much money they had. Very few prisoners had more than a few hundred dollars in their account anyway, so it must be rare that so much financial reporting gets done for so little money.

$6 per day: Gross

Let’s start with how little money prisoners have. Prisoners get from $5 to $7 per day if they have a job, $2.50 per day if they do not, and $1 a day if they are rated as “not complying with their correctional plan” — for example by refusing to work. This rate of pay has not changed since the rates were set, linked to the minimum wage — in 1981. Imagine if your pay were still the same as in 1981!  Any other money prisoners have must be sent in from outside.

And just as most of us have deductions from our wages when we get our pay, so do prisoners — up to 30 per cent of what they earn is clawed back for “room and board,” costs of the prison phone system, and for the inmate committee in each prison that pays for things like turkeys at Christmas, the television system or toys and games for children in the visiting area in each prison. While pay rates have not changed, the deductions were substantially increased in 2012 by the Harper government. 

So a prisoner who has a regular job in an institution will typically end up with about $33 every two weeks in his account — $3.30 a day. Less than the price of a latte. Yet that somehow requires two pages of financial reports.

Also, as the photo shows, prisoners’ money may be in one of several different accounts, with strict but completely arbitrary rules about how money gets into each, how it can be transferred between them and, most importantly, what each account can be used for. You can only transfer certain amounts, at certain times, with specific (but changing) deadlines. If that weren’t enough, the statements are always two weeks behind, while it can take weeks for money sent in from outside to show on your account. The result is that prisoners often run out of money for, say, canteen items while they still have money in their overall account. The whole thing seems made to be difficult and annoying. In which case it’s highly successful!

Why pay prisoners?

Some might ask why a prisoner should get any pay. Why should taxpayers fork out money to people convicted of crimes? There are several compelling reasons, all having to do with allowing prisoners to lead a life that keeps them away from further crime.

First, prisoners have to pay for many very basic items. Your “pay” is what allows you to phone your family, at grossly inflated rates that nobody outside of a jail would ever pay. The phone companies make big profits on prisoner calls and prisoners believe that some of this is kicked back to the prison budgets. Long distance calls within Canada cost 60 cents a minute, whereas most Canadians make them at no cost at all. I spent more than $100 per month on phone calls to my family. Phone costs alone were often more than my total pay. Pay Is what allows you to buy paper, pens and stamps to write letters or send birthday cards — which you also have to pay for. A private weekend visit with a spouse in a prison trailer — not easy to obtain — can cost $100 just for food.

Beyond that, think about what it would be like to be able to acquire nothing new at all — absolutely nothing — for year after year after year. You would have prison-provided clothing and you would not starve, but you would have none of the small treats that make life tolerable in a setting that is already very difficult — things like snacks or some item of clothing that you could call your own. Or vitamins. Or books. Or anything else that costs money.

And then there is the issue of money upon release. Imagine being in a prison for eight or 10 years, then being released with no possessions, nowhere to live and $80 to your name — the minimum each prisoner must keep in a “savings” account. Or having that happen after being in a cell for 20 or 25 years, back to a time before the Internet and smartphones. If we want former prisoners to have any chance of a reasonable life, then a little start up money would seem an essential. 

I saw these things happen regularly. I was fortunate to have a family that could provide me with enough money that I could get most of what I needed, at least within the narrow bounds of what the prison allowed us to buy; many things are simply not available to prisoners at all. But I saw many men who did not have those supports, or whose family were suffering deprivation in order to pay for phone calls. The current approach to paying prisoners just injects more gratuitous cruelty into a world that already has more than enough of it. 

Yes, I could help prisoners read their financial reports and that felt good, but I could not help them deal with the challenges that lack of money created for them and for those who cared for them.

This is part one of a two-part series.

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