Recently, I dragged out a box of papers I kept from my time in prison. There is less than there used to be; I culled some of it a few years ago when I moved into a smaller place. It’s been several years since I opened the box. Most of what is in these columns I report from memory, or from the many dozens of letters I wrote while locked up, which I was able to take with me on a CD when I was paroled.
(As an aside, before I left the prison, which is now more than a few years ago, there were plans to allow controlled access to the internet for federal prisoners, but this has still not happened. One result is that long-time prisoners have no idea what the internet is or how to use it — a huge obstacle for reintegration and rehabilitation.)
The eight-inch-thick pile of paper I still have contains a few different kinds of things. There are some small notebooks I used to write down things I had to do or remember. There’s the diary I kept over my 465 days of being locked up. There are some papers I kept to remind me of how bizarre the place was — for example, the impenetrable financial statements we would get every two weeks, which I wrote about here. There are some pieces I wrote for a writing group organized by another prisoner and the “relapse prevention plan” I prepared for parole purposes despite thinking that exercise was of very limited value. There’s the list I kept of the many people with whom I exchanged letters, which were a key aspect for me in surviving the experience.
Official documents
More than half the box is official documents: the “agreed statement of facts” required for my guilty plea; my initial “criminal assessment”; my initial “psychological assessment”; the statement of reasons for requiring me to take a program that delayed my parole even though a person in my situation would not normally have to do so; my “correctional plan” while in the prison; the formal assessment prior to my parole; my parole application and the board’s decision granting parole; and a couple more assessments from my parole officers. The prison system thrives on documents.
Reading these documents is painful, even years later. I can hardly bear to read them in detail; they evoke shame, anger, dismay. They describe a person who I don’t believe was ever me but is a product of the way the system works.
Documents prepared by Correctional Service staff are written in what one might call “intense bureaucratese.” Many sentences and even entire paragraphs are repeated in multiple documents.
Once you are arrested, and even more if you plead or are found guilty, you are officially defined as someone “bad,” so every document begins by describing how bad and untrustworthy you are and how important it is for you to be policed in various ways. Although the intent of corrections is supposedly to lead to improvement, the focus in these documents is always on weaknesses, limitations and risk. In these many, many pages, there is not a single sentence that contains words like “has potential” or “with support could…” Rereading them makes me feel sad about how much time and effort is spent on making people look and feel bad — and how little on trying to help prisoners build better lives.
The diary
From my very first day after being sentenced, I tried to keep some daily notes. I knew I would want to be able to recall the experience — even as I would also want not to remember it at all! A lot of what happened or what I saw I recorded in all the letters I wrote, though letters had to be written carefully as they might be read by prison staff before being mailed.
My diary entries are short bits of text, not complete sentences. They note how I slept, what I ate, any interesting events, tasks, who I wrote letters to or spoke with on the phone, what I was reading. Ny notes reveal how much time I spent managing bureaucratic tasks in the prison, such as organizing visits, managing money or managing food. Also, I often jotted down notes about dreams — a topic for another column.
Here’s one entry from a week or so after I arrived in minimum, after I got over my initial shock at how much less bad it was than my previous place. This was they day I moved from the newcomers’ house in the minimum prison to one of the regular houses where I would live more permanently (the original has been modified slightly to make it comprehensible):
Day 9 (minimum)/104 (being imprisoned). Cooler, sunny. Up before 6. No breakfast. Move to new house at 8 a.m. Workplace health session at 9, dull. Got 2 letters. Read newspaper in library. Lunch at new house – sandwich. Afternoon talking to C, librarian. Sent letter home. Phone call to A. Borrowed food to make dinner [until I was able to buy my own]. Evening – phone call to X. Dream – worrying about criminal record being exposed.
Here’s another, from several months later:
Day 204/299. Slept badly, wakened by guards coming through at 5:30 a.m. [Teacher in the classroom where I tutored] is away. Bad weather, some activities cancelled. Discussion about possibly changing houses. House chief [every house had a prisoner, often a lifer, who was “in charge”] doing private family visit [with spouse]. Did food shopping [for the house I was in]. Letters from X and Y, to A and B. Walk with J and G. Friend’s parole application postponed.
This was the daily round of life built for all those months.
Opening the box brings back many memories. In minimum security you can have a kind of life, so many of these memories are often OK, or even pleasant. But everything was and is suffused with the feelings of anxiety, shame and loss that are always in one’s mind in prison. And the utter waste of time that imprisonment is, when there are so many other ways we could be helping to reduce crime and make our communities safer. I’ve put the box away now, and probably won’t open it again for years, but the feelings will never leave me.
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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