I walked into court to listen to the judge read my sentence. Immediately after that, I was handcuffed and led away to be transported to a provincial jail and begin my time as a prisoner.
Imprisonment brings many pains beyond loss of liberty. The Supreme Court of Canada has said that deprivation of liberty is the punishment and that prisoners retain all their other rights as citizens, but that is not what actually happens. The costs of being imprisoned also include physical danger or injury, loss of employment, loss of housing, using life savings to pay legal costs, negative effects on family, destruction of reputation, poor health care and the many lifetime effects of a criminal record.
Yet the biggest losses are often psychological. In jail, you have to redefine yourself as being a criminal and a prisoner, a wrenching change for many people.
Even more, imprisonment is a hugely isolating experience, in multiple ways. Being locked up cuts you off from the people who matter to you, both physically and emotionally. In theory, there are multiple ways to stay in touch with family and friends — visits, phone calls and mail. In practice, all of them are limited and unsatisfactory.
Visits
The two visits I had while in the provincial jail happened through glass using a telephone device to hear, and even then the sound was terrible. More recently, provincial jails are limiting visits to video screens where you aren’t even in the same room. Visits are often canceled for various reasons, such as staff shortages and lockdowns that are endemic to provincial jails across Canada.
Federal prisons have more accommodation for visits, since the minimum sentence is two years and the average is about four years. But here, too, the reality is not nearly as open as the policies suggest. Visits turn out to be hard to organize. Federal prisons are often far from where people live. I knew one prisoner, a lifer, whose 85-year-old mother spent more than two hours on a bus each way, followed by a taxi ride, to visit him once a month — and had been doing that for years. Some prisoners do not want loved ones seeing them in that environment. I estimated that even in my minimum security prison about two-thirds of prisoners had no visitors at all; at higher security levels, which is about 80 per cent of federal prisoners, visiting would be even less.
Phone calls
I wrote something about phone calls in an earlier column in this series. Phones are available to prisoners, but in limited ways. In the federal system you can only phone people who have been approved, and only at specific phone numbers. When I arrived in that system, it took eight weeks to get my list approved. During that time, I could not phone anyone. And of course, in no prison can anyone phone you; if there is an urgent need to reach a prisoner, you must go through the prison bureaucracy which is rarely concerned about the welfare of prisoners or their families.
As my previous column indicated, there is no privacy in using a phone in a jail or prison. The phones are in public places where others can overhear. All phone calls in prison may be recorded or monitored by prison authorities.
Phone calls are also extremely expensive for prisoners. In provincial jails, all calls are collect and the person you call may have to pay up to $1 per minute. In federal prisons, prisoners are required to put money in a phone account to cover costs, which are typically at least 10 times as high as they would be “on the street.” I was spending more than $100 per month on phone calls during my time in prison — a level that most prisoners just cannot afford. Jails and prisons make a profit from prisoner phone calls at the cost of denying prisoners the ability to speak with those important to them.
I made enormous use of letters while I was locked up. I was fortunate in having many people who wrote to me, and I wrote many letters myself. After all, there is a lot of time in prison to be “got through” and for me, writing was one important positive way to do that. However, many prisoners have low literacy skills, so they are not going to write a lot.
Letters are also opened and may be read by prison staff, both incoming and outgoing. In theory, prison staff are only supposed to inspect letters for contraband but as usual, the reality is different. Once a letter is opened there is nothing to stop the staff person from reading it in whole or in part.
There were also rules about what could be received or sent in a letter. For example, glitter and sparkles were not allowed, presumably because they might contain drugs. But as usual, the rules were not enforced consistently. I had some letters to me refused because they contained sudoku puzzles cut from the newspaper, while in other cases letters with several enclosures were not touched.
Prison doesn’t just isolate you physically. It also changes your relationship with other people. For many prisoners I met, the harm done to their loved ones, and to their relationship with those loved ones, was much harder to bear than spending months or even years being locked up. I heard of wives who lost their jobs because of the husband’s conviction, or children who faced bullying at school. Many relationships ended for men in prison. Others lost custody of or access to their children. People dear to you died, and you were not allowed to attend the funeral. The longer the time locked up, the more relationships disappeared from your life.
All prisoners dream about release, but if you know that what awaits you on release is much less than you had before, the prospect is a lot less appealing.
It would be so easy to do this better — if we cared.
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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