Let’s start by reminding ourselves of why we have parole. Parole exists, says the Parole Board of Canada (PBC), because most prisoners “are serving fixed-length sentences … [and] they will eventually be released back into the community.… Parole contributes to public safety by helping offenders reintegrate into society as law-abiding citizens through a gradual, controlled and supported release with conditions.”
Parole in Canada is highly successful. According to the PBC, over the past 10 years, 93 per cent of those granted parole have not committed a new offence while on parole. Since it costs about $150,000 to keep a prisoner in a federal prison for a year, parole also saves many millions of dollars.
For most federal prisoners who have sentences of five years or less, parole is on your mind from your first day. The law says prisoners are eligible for parole after serving one-third of their sentence. In fact, on average prisoners serve nearly 40 per cent according to the parole board. And almost nobody is granted full parole at the start.
Delay is the norm
A main reason for delays is that the system does everything it can to slow the process down. To start with, prisoners are given no official information about parole. There is no written guide to how it works, what anyone’s rights are or what the timelines are supposed to be. Prisoners have to rely on word of mouth or what they are told by their parole officers.
In my experience, prison parole officers often distorted, if not lied outright about parole procedures. They would urge prisoners to delay their hearing for all kinds of spurious reasons. One friend was told that he should not apply, even though eligible, because he had “not been in prison long enough.” Other applications were somehow held in an office until a key deadline had passed, making them wait for months. Prisoners were told that you could not be paroled without support from your parole officer even though I saw several people paroled without such support. Detailing all the ways in which the prison deliberately delayed parole would require several more columns.
Part of the process was preparing a “relapse prevention plan” (RPP). This is your plan, to be shared with the parole board, for the steps you will take to prevent yourself from committing further crimes. In fact, most people with a conviction never get charged with another crime, but the system works on the opposite assumption — that most people will commit further crimes unless they make major changes.
Like many things in prison, the RPP was partly real but largely theatrical. The system has determined for you — it’s in your extensive files — a set of “criminogenic factors” that are thought to lead you into crime. Your plan has to show the parole board that you are going to fix those factors, thus reducing your risk. In reality the factors may or may not be significant to you because the people writing them down don’t really know you or your situation in any depth. However, to get parole you have to tick all, or at least most, of the boxes.
That can also mean making promises that are unlikely to be fulfilled, such as finding secure employment or leaving behind your former friends. To a large extent, people do not choose to be in bad situations — poor, unhoused, addictive, psychotic. But in the system, the responsibility to resolve these problems rests primarily on the prisoner, not on the community.
Even more, the focus of the parole board was changed some years ago to give primacy to avoiding future crime. Rehabilitation of prisoners comes second — although it would seem evident that better rehabilitation is a way to reduce future crime.
When eventually you do have a hearing, you face a three-person panel. Parole board members are appointed by the federal government through the same political process as any other appointee to a federal government board or commission. During the Harper administration, many were ex-police officers and prosecutors. They were not friendly to prisoners and rates of parole fell.
The hearing starts with a reading of your crimes and the report of the institution, which mostly focused on how bad and potentially dangerous a person you were. The prison parole officer would detail any reasons that paroling you could be a risk to public safety, as well as any misdemeanours you committed while in prison and, to be fair, actions you had taken to comply with your “correctional plan” (such as work, correctional programs and the like).
Parole board members would then ask questions — why should we believe that you won’t do the same horrible thing again if you are released? Many questions are intended to make you say how bad your actions were and how sorry you are for them. Expressing guilt and remorse were a sine qua non of being paroled, even though expressions of remorse do not predict future behaviour at all. They do, however, contribute to the penitence rite of the parole hearing. Admit how bad you are and you might get a reward. People who maintain they are innocent can have a very hard time getting parole at all, putting those wrongly convicted in the terrible position of having to admit to a crime they did not commit in order to get out of prison. Even for a confident, educated and articulate person like me, the hearing was a daunting and demeaning experience.
No surprise that many prisoners chose to forgo parole and wait for the date when they would be automatically released without having to go through any of this. Depending on the length of your sentence, there could be only a few months between parole and release without it; the reward did not seem worth the trouble.
For most prisoners who did apply, the hearing, bad as it was, led to a grant of parole, though it could then take months before you were actually released. For a significant minority, parole was not granted, and they faced two more years of imprisonment before they could apply again.
Parole is an important and successful part of our criminal justice system. It could be better and more successful if it were not so linked to those instincts to denounce and humiliate and was more about giving people the support they need.
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.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
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