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