About 20 per cent of all federal prisoners are in minimum security prisons. Meanwhile, all provincial jails, which hold more prisoners on any given day than do federal prisons, are high security institutions even though the vast majority of provincial prisoners — up to 80 per cent — have not been convicted and are awaiting trial or some other resolution of the charges against them.
In federal minimum security, many prisoners — perhaps a third to a half — are lifers. It takes a lifer 20 years or more to get to minimum; of the many I met during my time, only one had served less than 20 years, and quite a few others had been in prison for 30 or more years.
The second-biggest group in minimum is people like me, who had relatively short sentences and are seen from the start as low risk for violence or for re-offending. After some time in an “assessment unit” they are sent to a minimum-security prison. Others are not lifers but started in a higher security level before eventually being moved to minimum.
One thing prisoners in minimum have in common is a desire to stay there and not to be sent back to higher security; conditions for prisoners in minimum are much, much better. That makes minimums places where there is virtually no violence; I only heard of one fight, and not a severe one, in my year there. The instigator was immediately sent back to a higher security place. As a prisoner this means you do not have to be watching your back all the time, as is typically required in higher security prisons. That applies even to prisoners who are at the greatest risk of violence, such as sex offenders.
In the minimum where I served time, prisoners lived in two-story houses; six to eight men in a house with three or four bedrooms, so for at least your first few months, you shared a bedroom with another prisoner. Each house also had a kitchen, a living room, and two full bathrooms, one on each level. The houses were old and not particularly well maintained, but you also had a reasonable amount of privacy aside from your roommate.
Another important feature was that you were only required to be in your room or even in your house a few times a day, when guards came in to count the number of prisoners. A fourth count, in the morning, required prisoners to go to where guards were to check in. Other than that, guards were rarely in the houses, and prisoners could be anywhere on the prison site, including sitting outside or being in the library or just walking around the grounds.
Every prisoner was required to have some kind of work assignment. I wrote about the bizarre nature of work in prisons in an early column. Meaningful work was very hard to come by and many jobs had little meaning, such as cleaning a very small area every day, something that realistically took one hour rather than five. I was fortunate to have one of the meaningful jobs — working in the prison school. But I also wrote earlier about how ridiculous education was in the prison. A lot of my time in that job was also just sitting around, talking with other prisoners.
Like most things prisoners did — and indeed the attitudes of most staff — work was about fulfilling a requirement set by the institution, not about trying to accomplish anything meaningful for oneself or anyone else. This general attitude of apathy and laziness pervaded the entire institution, and as one would expect, did not yield good consequences. Nor were prisoners learning meaningful skills in that place; nothing much was offered that would help a prisoner with meaningful employment, for example. You were just there, doing your time as best you could.
This prison had decent recreation for prisoners. Though any group that gathered regularly was supposed to get clearance first, this was not enforced and so did not necessarily happen. There were some officially recognized prisoner groups — for example, Black prisoners or Indigenous prisoners had official “clubs” — but many other groups met informally, such as a writing group I was part of for a while. There were a few spaces in the prison where groups could meet after work hours.
Quite a few prisoners also enjoyed doing art; some of them were very talented, though they had to buy all their own materials. Others were involved in music. Some did music for Sunday church services but other times prisoners would get together to make music. The prison had a couple of keyboards and prisoners in minimum were allowed to have a guitar or similar. As in most prisons, there was also a gym, a weight room and a library and these were used more because prisoners were not locked up all the time.
All these activities, including being outside and walking around the grounds, made the prison a much more livable space. Anyone could have walked away at any time; there was no fence. But escaping would lead to an increased sentence, served in higher security, so people stayed put. In my year there only one person was reported missing at the end of the day — and as usual we were never told what happened with him or why.
The mystery to me was why people were kept in this prison for extended periods at all. Anyone there was living peaceably with others and not offending the authorities. There was a lot of surveillance from cameras and all the guards, so it would not be easy to get away with anything. There were still random drug tests, strip searches and many restrictions on where prisoners could go and what they could do.
But to what end? Presumably anyone who could manage in that environment would be reasonably able to manage in a community setting, with support and if necessary with supervision. The annual cost of keeping someone in that setting is about $125,000, compared to about a third of that for community supervision. It makes no sense that anybody would spend more than a year or two in minimum before being released on parole.
Yet many people had been in minimum for years, sometimes for decades.
David Dorson is the pen name of someone who went through arrest, case disposition, imprisonment and parole in Ontario a few years ago. Law360 Canada has granted him 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.
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