Work, pay in Canadian prisons, part two | 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.

“We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” This was the joke about the Soviet system but it applies quite nicely to Canadian prisons. The previous piece described what is laughably called “pay” for prisoners. This one talks about the work, often equally ridiculous.

In the minimum-security prison where I landed all prisoners were expected to have a job unless medically exempt. That applied to people of all ages; 75-year-olds were also expected to work. Your work assignment had to be approved by your assigned correctional officer (guard).

Finding a job

Available jobs for prisoners were supposed to be posted on a bulletin board but very few actually were. Also, the jobs that were posted never had a date on them, and since the bulletin boards were rarely updated, you never knew if a job posting there was real, or was from six months, or perhaps six years ago. Some of the jobs posted when I arrived were still posted when I left a year later. 

As a new prisoner you found out about jobs in the same way you did about everything else — by talking to various people, mainly other prisoners, learning what they did and how they had found that position. Of course the result was a huge amount of misinformation (“fake news” anyone?) because nobody, including the staff, knew anything with reliability. And nobody could or would tell you if you asked. Or you got contradictory stories from different people.

Kinds of jobs

Where I was, new prisoners were invariably urged by staff to take a job in one of the commercial enterprises the prison ran, which made things for the federal government. I later learned that these jobs were suggested to new prisoners because these places had contracts to fulfil yet were invariably short of workers. And they were short of workers because the work was harder, the hours longer and the pay the same. It had been higher at one time but that, too, was rolled back by the Conservatives.

Very few jobs — perhaps 10 per cent — were actually interesting. These were main things like working in the school or the library or in other prisoner services. These jobs were coveted and hard to get, often held by lifers who would stay in them for many years. 

I was lucky; on one of my first days in the prison I happened to meet, in the library, a guy who was working in the school as a tutor. He introduced me to one of the teachers, and that teacher hired me — even though the person in charge of work assignments told me that they had a long list of people wanting to be tutors. When I was released, several teachers asked me to try to find a replacement for myself and I discovered that the long list of tutor applicants was mostly people who were no longer even in the prison. None of this surprised me; it was very much how the whole place operated.

Easy jobs

In the absence of something worth doing, most prisoners tried to find a job that made as few demands as possible. The most common jobs were cleaners, grounds workers, caregivers who looked after prisoners who required assistance with daily living and prisoners who worked in the contract services mentioned earlier. The first three of these could often be done in an hour or two per day even though the formal workday was about five hours — and longer in the commercial enterprises. 

This situation of do-nothing jobs existed because the prison had to provide enough jobs for all prisoners who wanted one, while many tasks were not allowed to be performed by prisoners either because of security concerns or because prisoners had very limited skills. As a result, many jobs had to be created which had minimal actual duties. A cleaner might have the task of cleaning a single room or hallway in one of the main buildings, something that could be done to a high standard in a couple of hours — and standards of performance in any job were not high! A prisoner whose job was to help someone with a wheelchair move around the prison might only be needed a few times a day for a few minutes at a time.

As a tutor in the school, I worked the regular hours, except that the classroom where I worked, or the school as a whole, was closed a ridiculous number of days, something I will write about in a future column. I actually liked the job. The atmosphere in the school was pretty positive and people were treated with respect, which was often not the case in other kinds of work. On the other hand, a lot of my work time consisted of sitting there waiting for a student to ask for assistance. And since many students were not exactly pushing themselves, requests weren’t frequent. Going to school also counted as a job, so there was always a lineup of students wanting to enrol, but few were in a hurry to finish. 

Could have been so much better

Sadly, there was little or no effort to make jobs more interesting or to create better jobs even though it would have been easy to do so. For example, prisoners with skills could have taught them to other prisoners. Prisoners could have helped with many needs inside the prison, such as assisting with visits, or helping younger or newer prisoners. Even more, the prison could have sought ways to help prisoners, most of whom had little education and not much useful work experience, to develop some real skills that might help them in the labour market after release. That didn’t happen either; there was virtually no useful training or work opportunity, even here with minimum security prisoners. 

In this, as in every aspect of its operation, the institution showed little concern about whether its policies yielded any benefits to prisoners. 
  
This is part two of a two-part series. Part one: Work, pay in Canadian prisons, part one.

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