Prison as a temporary refuge

[Music]

imagine the place

where you feel most safe now let me

share the story of adam

whose safest place is probably somewhere

quite different

than what you just had in mind two years

ago

i met adam adam had crooked teeth

some were missing his nose looked like

it had been broken

many times he had tattoos on his face

adam never met his biological mom or dad

his adoptive parents told him that he

had been left in an

alley after birth and soon got adopted

his adoptive parents provided him

shelter but not at home

they were embarrassed to be seen with an

indigenous kid so when family friends

came over

adam was sent to the basement when his

adoptive parents went to church

adam had to stay home supposedly to

babysit

the family’s dog adam’s adoptive dad

and his neighbor physically and sexually

abused him

many many times when he finally confided

in his adoptive mom

she kicked him out she did not want to

as she put it

live with a [ __ ] in her home adam

was nine at the time he wandered the

streets until he was brought to social

services

from there he was passed from one foster

home

to the next when i asked him

what he remembers about the foster homes

he told me

about alcohol drugs beatings

and sexual violence birthdays and

christmas were not celebrated

adam has never had a playdate in his

life

in total adam was in 17 foster homes

adam started breaking into cars and

homes when he was a teenager

he got involved in fights but most often

he got beat up

sometimes he even got into fights with

police and prison guards

he told me about one instance where he

lost two of his teeth

after a prison guard slammed his head

and pushed him down a staircase

despite this adam also told me

that the place where we were meeting was

the safest place

he had ever lived we were in prison

adam was a prisoner

with my team of researchers i have spent

the last three years talking to

over 800 men and women who are housed in

provincial

and federal prisons both those who are

remanded

which means they are waiting for their

trial and are not sentenced

and those who are already sentenced this

is by far

the largest interview based study that

has ever been conducted on canadian

prisons and quite possibly

in the world some of the people who

volunteered to speak with us

were in prison because they had

accumulated too many fines they could

not afford to pay

many were in prison because they had

committed some drug related offenses

some were gang members some sex

offenders

and some were murderers in other words

we talked to everyone

those incarcerated for a short time and

those who were sentenced to life

people on minimum security and on

maximum security units

in general population units and on

solitary confinement

adam was not unique among the people we

met in prison

95 of all the men we talked to and 97

of all the women we talked to in the

federal system had been physically or

sexually victimized

long before they have ever been charged

with a crime

95 of the men 97 percent of the women

it is worth emphasizing this finding

because too often

the criminal justice system but also

society at large

thinks of people in prison as just

offenders

that is people who have committed crime

and deserve

punishment more often than not however

those who are housed in our prisons

are themselves victims and where for a

long

long time before ever being convicted of

a crime

as criminologists we call this the

victim offender

overlap the great majority of our

participants however have

never reported their victimization to

police

those who did report often told us that

police social workers

or family and child welfare services did

not believe them

or did not care many of our participants

moved through multiple foster homes and

caregiver situations

the great majority of them were

introduced to drugs

at some point in their lives often using

in order to deal with and numb the

trauma

experienced throughout their childhood

and teenager years

many lived on the streets on and off

as they told us about their life stories

they did not

use these experiences as excuses for the

crimes they have committed

in fact i remember talking to sean a big

muscular gang member who told me his

earliest memories were of his dad

beating him up with a bloom when he was

sitting in a high chair as a toddler

and another situation where he pushed

him through a glass window and shawn’s

face got all cut up when he was just

four he said i don’t want your sympathy

it made me a tough [ __ ] i’ve had

to live with it my whole life so it’s

just kind of normal wait

perhaps surprisingly of the more than

800 people in our aesthetic study

we have not met one single person

who tried to use their own life

experiences

as an excuse for their criminal activity

in stark contrast they generally told us

i did the crime i’ll do the time

it became clear that their often

traumatic and horrific circumstances

seem normal to them

before we started our project we had

expected

to hear an overwhelming outpour of

negative stories about prison the

academic literature on presents

especially in canada is dominated by

scholars who

emphasize the pains of imprisonment

discuss human rights violations

talk about violence between guards and

prisoners and about

many other inherently negative things

many punishment scholars both in canada

and abroad

argue that prisons should ultimately be

abolished

it is also true that many scholars

writing about punishments in prisons

have spent

little or no time actually conducting

research

inside these places so this literature

is dominated

by theoretical ideas about how society

should and should not punish and assumes

that people who are incarcerated

think about their incarceration

experiences

only in negative terms

in contrast to these dominant

representations of prison

it was far more common for our

participants to tell us

about how prison provides them with a

space of

temporary refuge this was not true for

all of the people we talked to

some of the people we met in prison did

mostly focus on the negative

and often inhumane conditions however

the great majority of the people we met

in prison

lived lives characterized by abusive

relationships

addictions and homelessness

for them prison served as a place where

they could potentially sleep

relatively safely in a long time because

shelters

as they told us are not necessarily safe

for them

it served as a place where they could

escape their abusive partners

could finally get meals on a regular

basis or where they could take

steps to get sober from the potentially

lethal drugs they were using on the

streets

with some using prison as a place to

start a drug substitution program

many found that the medical and dental

attention they could

get inside the prisons was more

accessible for them

than in their communities on the outside

let me introduce you to elizabeth

elizabeth was another person i met in

prison

she was an elderly woman and told me she

had worked at a job in the same store

for 25 years growing up

elizabeth lived in 27 foster homes and

in residential school

she has been physically and sexually

abused throughout her entire life

having been assaulted by foster parents

foster siblings

residential school teachers family

friends and her spouse

twice she told family and social welfare

services

about the abuse she experienced twice

she was dismissed she committed a crime

when she reached a breaking point

not being able to take the abuse from

her spouse anymore

but as a first-time offender her

sentence was rather

short and she was nearing the end of it

when we spoke

as we talked elizabeth had a hard time

making eye contact with me

the only time she lit up was when i

asked her

whether she was looking forward to her

upcoming release date

she looked me straight into my eyes and

said

i will punch a guard out to be able to

stay longer

elizabeth has nothing on the outside to

look forward to

for her prison may not be desirable

but elizabeth was like so many of our

participants who told

us prison was better than the

alternative

now i want to be crystal clear

i am not telling a story about prison as

a good place

the living conditions in the prison we

visited are hard

and sometimes horrendous we have been on

units where three people have to sleep

in a cell designed for two

with one of them on the floor the only

decision you can make when sleeping on

the floor is whether your head

or your feet touch the toilet there’s no

room to move around

on some units people were locked up in

those cells with no access to common

areas showers

phones or simply room to move around for

23 hours a day

we heard about overdoses heard about and

witnessed

violence so i am not talking about

prison

as a pleasant place what i am suggesting

is that our participants experiences

point to the failures and limitations of

canada’s

often celebrated social welfare system

the stories we heard in prison represent

the cumulative weight of structural

violence in our participants lives

and for our indigenous participants

these represent the lingering effects of

colonialism

the lived reality of many of our

participants

is one where perversely

prison starts to look like a place of

temporary refuge

from otherwise intolerable

dangerous and unhealthy situations

elizabeth adam shawn and other prisoners

speak about prison as a place of

temporary refuge

only because the other institutions in

our society such as schools

police child welfare services the court

system

shelters medical and counseling services

and a government

that ultimately placed them in abusive

foster homes

or residential schools have so

dramatically

failed them our participants are not

adequately protected from predation on

the outside

they turn to drugs to numb their trauma

because counselling such as

psychological or psychiatric services

are financially or pragmatically out of

reach

they risk their lives performing sex for

survival because they have no

other financial means to support

themselves adequate housing is so

scarce that a subset actually turned to

prison

because the alternative is potentially

freezing or going hungry on the streets

in essence for a subset of canadians

living extremely

marginal lives prison provides an

opportunity to connect

often for the first time with the social

and material benefits of our social

safety net

what we need to ask ourselves is what

sort of society do we live in

when these people say that the most

comprehensive care they have ever

received is found in prison a place

that is meant to be a last resort a last

stop and not a first stop

there are too many atoms out there who

have never talked to anyone

about their traumas often experienced in

government care

only very few of our participants have

ever had

long-term one-on-one counseling the

reality of incarceration

in many prisons in canada is to lock

people away

in a human warehouse without addressing

any

of the underlying issues that led to the

incarceration

considering a year in federal prison in

canada

costs taxpayers about a hundred fifteen

thousand dollars per prisoner

these financial resources could be

better used

to address the underlying traumas that

contributed

to getting them into prison in the first

place and potentially help them

to not return on average

our participants have been incarcerated

14 times

meaning they return over and again

using these financial resources to

address underlying traumas does

not deny the fact that our participants

have

later on in their lives themselves

inflicted harms on other people

how are deeply marginalized and

traumatized people who have

often experienced their traumas while in

government care in

foster homes in group homes in church

homes

supposed to cope with their traumatic

histories and not reoffend

when they receive little and sometimes

no help

to actually address those deeply

traumatic experiences

police education social services and

health institutions

need to learn about the background

stories of their clients

start recognizing trauma early and

actually get serious

about supporting trauma services most

importantly

as a society we need to start

concentrating

on the underlying social conditions that

constantly

reproduce trauma among our most

marginalized citizens

i am hopeful that some small change is

on its way

we have seen our own data being used by

the local police service to train new

officers about who they will interact

with on a daily basis

we have also been able to push for

victim services

in some reman centers however we still

have a long way to go

to become truly trauma-informed

our findings show that until we find a

way to address

underlying social conditions that

produce trauma

build communities that stop constantly

reproducing trauma

instead of putting people in cages in a

human warehouse

and address some of the challenges faced

by incarcerated people

looking at them as human beings as

victims

and not only as offenders our

participants may continue to tell us

that prison is the safest place we have

to offer for some of our most

vulnerable citizens and that is

probably the biggest tragedy of our

research findings