Phone calls in prison | 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 serving his sentence much more difficult than it already is.

It’s quite an experience hearing someone having a ferocious argument on the phone with his spouse or partner. Or crying because a visit can’t take place, or because his parole hearing has been pushed back — again. Yet it’s a common experience for prisoners — not because you want to eavesdrop, but because you can’t help it. That’s the way the telephone system works in prison. There is no privacy.

Take the federal assessment unit where I spent about 11 weeks early in my sentence. The “range” consisted of a long and badly lit hallway — perhaps 100 or 125 feet, with cells on either side. The cells had barred doors (in some prisons the doors are solid so you can’t see out). The whole place felt decrepit — for example the floor tile, which appeared to be at least 40 years old, had been repaired in many places with tiles of different colours. It seems likely that the original tiles had gone out of production decades ago. There was a low ceiling with pipes and electrical conduits; prisoners would sometimes use these for pull-ups or other physical exercise in the six to eight hours a day when we weren’t locked in our cells. The whole impression was of squalor.

Phone out in the open

At one end of the corridor was another barred door that was the only entry and exit to the range. The guards were stationed outside this door; they only came into the range for specific purposes like counting us four or five times a day, or if they were conducting a search. 

In the main corridor just inside the main door were two telephones, much like the pay phones that used to be common in Canada. (Pay phones play an important role for parolees also, as while on parole you have to phone in regularly, and it must be from a landline, which means that you have to learn where you can find pay phones.)

In the assessment unit, as in every prison setting, the phones were just there in the open, each with a metal round backless seat or stool bolted to the floor. Above each phone was a sign reminding prisoners that your calls were subject to recording or other monitoring by the prison, so you could not expect privacy. There were rumours among prisoners that the system used a kind of automated surveillance that would detect words or phrases in phone calls that might indicate some kind of risk.

No privacy

Anything you said on the phone could also be overheard by other prisoners, and when we weren’t locked in our cells there were always others in the hallway — including next to you talking on the other phone or waiting to make their own call. But even those in nearby cells could easily overhear a phone conversation. 

This created a very dicey situation, since phone calls were often very personal. For prisoners the phone is the main form of communication with the people who matter in your life. And if you are a prisoner, chances are these relationships are already pretty stressed, both for you and for them. Yet talking to your partner, or your children, or your parents always took place in public.

But then there is essentially no privacy for prisoners of any kind. Your phone calls can be monitored. Your mail is monitored. Your visits are monitored. Your possessions are controlled. You are watched constantly — prisons have many security cameras — and counted several times a day. You are subject to search, including body cavity search, at any time with or without a reason. The normal guarantees that Canadians take for granted of privacy and safety from arbitrary search and seizure don’t apply in prisons — despite Supreme Court rulings saying that prisoners retain their civil rights.

Tough moments

I had some tough moments on the phone myself, moments of deep emotion that had to be navigated with other prisoners a few feet away, talking on other phones or just standing around. But at least I didn’t have a long-time partner break up with me on the phone, or tell me that she didn’t have enough money to send me any so that I could continue to call her, or to hear through a phone call that someone close to me had died knowing I could not even attend a funeral — all things that happened to other prisoners I knew. 

We depended on the phones as a lifeline to those we loved, yet it was a two-edged sword. A phone call could bring great comfort, or great sorrow or anger. It was not uncommon to hear people yelling and swearing, and then the abrupt termination as one person or the other hung up — or the phone system terminated the call for no apparent reason, which also happened fairly often. And there was almost always a line-up of prisoners waiting to use the phones — I never understood why the system couldn’t just install more, since apparently prisons made money on the phones — so you had to observe the 30-minute time limits or get in trouble with other prisoners.

In so many ways the situation with telephones mirrored the whole prison experience; badly designed and organized, with arbitrary rules not always enforced, and with little or no consideration for anything that might help prisoners be better people. It could easily be better, but nobody seemed interested. You soon learned to accept these things as the way it is in prison. As more than one staff person said to me or other prisoners around such issues, “If you don’t like it you shouldn’t have landed in prison.”   
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