The Prison Within - Inside Corrections | APTN Investigates

foreign I used to live in the moment all the time and that caused me to think well this is it this is the end just lived angrily in prison I knew it was done I just my life was over it was at that point in my perspective too late I was in prison I was going to be there for the rest of my life and those places are dangerous places it's about survival from one day to the next you never know what's going to happen active Rehabilitation doesn't really occur in prison you have to teach people how to live it's almost money that's the sad part of the money runs everything [Music] we don't have to be just down and out you know the poor beaten Indian that's not us Society has to look at what does Justice really mean healing isn't easy it never was but it sure is doable and there is no such thing as impossible there's no excuse for my actions but I've learned that there's reasons [Music] Daryl Kent likes to drive we're gonna go downtown Ottawa it's a road I normally travel the 60 year old takes pride in his deep red Nissan Altima he better he's currently working overnight weekend shifts to pay for it but Kent says it's worth the freedom it brings driving it reminds me of uh when I was in the pen I used to see movies TV shows and I see familiar places and I think of the times that I would have liked to been out there just being in the city so being in the city here everything's new to me so this city so I tried to I just enjoy being out here and before Kent could finish his thought a call from his parole officer interrupts I was just gonna say oh you don't sound pleased Kent learns that due to a parole violation he has about an hour and a half before he needs to go under house arrest the violation driving Beyond his allowed 100 kilometer radius Ken says he went about eight kilometers over to visit a friend I may have broken the law but that doesn't make me a liar last year Daryl Kent was released after 38 years in prison while it's Stony Mountain Prison in 1984 he was one of the masterminds behind a riot he was 21 years old so why recruited a couple of guys to help me one of the guys who whose first language was uh Cree he didn't know what classes meant he thought he might kill so when the the scuffle started he started stabbing two correctional officers Joseph Wendell and Werner Friesen were murdered it's one of the deadliest days in the history of Canadian corrections I know those two guys were were good people they treated everybody with respect and it was just uh it's just that they were there Kent was convicted of first-degree murder and manslaughter for the role he played in their deaths 54 year old window left behind a wife and three children while 33 year old Friesen was married with a young family including a two-year-old daughter and a wife who was six months pregnant there's nothing I can say I understand her anger if they have that anger still with me oh excuse me um but the other part that struck me the most was uh friesen's daughter the little girls so I know it's like to grow grow up with our parents so better that hurt me foreign that was kind of what changed my life when he was five years old Kent lost both of his parents and an older sister in a car accident raised by his grandparents he says it was in school when the troubles began originally from broken her Ojibwe nation in Manitoba he found himself subjected to racist taunts at the nearby mostly white school the School administrators the principal was siding with the the people who would instigate making racial comments or starting fights they'd lose the fights a lot of times and then we'd get the strap the Indian kids would get the strap me right here from there he describes carrying a rage that always simmered near the surface waiting for provocation out of anger I went to the basement of the school there the white school and I was trying to set it on fire there was a little fire started the alarms went off and but it it went out from there Kent's life becomes one institution after another an abusive foster care home Youth detention a life of crime defeated substance abuse which then lands him in provincial jail then Stony Mountain an overcrowded prison with a history that is long and notorious there was a lot of hostility there on the part of between the staff and the inmates there was a lot of assaults Kenta spent the last year living at a halfway house judging from his parole record he's adjusted well but the last thing he wants to be seen as is a Corrections Canada success story prison is a a huge dysfunctional environment not just with prisoners but but staff as well Kent isn't alone when he says the correctional system is broken why is it failing is that we've been looking at the wrong uh we've been asking the wrong questions or in looking at the wrong Solutions Dr Vicki chartran is a criminologist and a professor at Bishops University for 25 years she has been speaking with inmates and visiting prisons I'm not condoning the violence in their hurtful and harmful acts I think that accountability is really important but that the majority of people who do go into prison aren't having their basic needs met whether you know in terms of dealing with post-traumatic stress and his histories of violence and Trauma those basic needs aren't being met and in fact in prison it's actually exacerbating them according to many among the worst is the special handling unit despite its innocuous sounding name people who have been to the Shu or shoe say it's anything but they're okay did a spell there following his murder and manslaughter convictions a prison for prisoners you know it's there's nothing there and judging from some more recent inmates not much has changed I wouldn't wish it on anyone that's a very dangerous place where's the ball hell located about 50 kilometers north of Montreal the shoe is Canada's only super maximum prison it's where they send people who are considered too dangerous for maximum security situated within a larger complex called the regional Reception Center it's a prison within a prison I've been stabbed there I didn't deserve it we're basically walked in ourselves all day it's like psychological abuse nothing but sit there and slowly pick away at your your mental capacity to kind of break you down and just make you lose your your mind Tyler and David are part of a class action lawsuit against the shoe the allegations they're making have not been tested in court at the request of their lawyer we've hidden their identities and changed their names so as not to jeopardize their case is [Music] one of the lawyers behind the class action currently there are 117 plaintiffs the majority of whom are in indigenous they are each asking for five hundred fifty thousand dollars in Damages with an additional eight hundred to one thousand dollars per day spent in the shoe some of the complaints they are bringing to court are at least 20 to 21 hours a day in a cell with little light from a small window no meaningful human contact few programs especially for indigenous inmates like smudging and stuff like this that's once in a while so like you're an animal okay so they put you in a cage and the others on the other side so you have bars in between you and there's a little like cubby with plexigloss until he puts the show through and yeah it's it's very degrading and there's no real you feel like you're so human Corrections Canada declined our requests to go inside the shoe but Senator Kim Pate has been she wasn't impressed she says that because inmates spend long hours in shoe sales isolated from others it's akin to solitary confinement something Canadian courts have made illegal many people with expertise in this area have said if you go into to isolation and you don't already have mental health issues you will have mental health issues fairly quickly you need to recognize that the special handling unit is a temporary solution to a risk Marty Maltby is in charge of indigenous initiatives for the correctional services of Canada while he says there could be potential to provide more services he emphasizes that the shoe exists to minimize the chance of Staff or others being hurt in other lower security prisons while it's important for us to provide service and support at the special handling unit and we do I would argue that we put a lot of also effort a significant amount of effort into actually moving them out of the special handling unit so what we we have seen is a significant decrease in the use of that unit by law every case of the shoe is up for review every four months but many have spent a year or more there while the cutoff for other forms of isolation to prison is now 15 days response back on a bus line during USD please however there are places for indigenous healing in Canada's prison system where offenders can go to not only leave their physical prison but the one within themselves I want to go live a good life make up for my mistakes but who gets the benefit from those places and how is a whole other issue after the break we visit the polar opposite of the supermax it's um it helped me to uh heal some of my traumas from my from my childhood that I kind of hadn't really dealt with as fully as I thought I did foreign to be reallocated from Correctional service of Canada to indigenous communities and groups to try to improve those Correctional outcomes that are so terrible [Music] technically Wisconsin Healing Center is only about 60 kilometers north of the shoe but ideologically they're about as far as you can get what we're trying to do is you know make sure that these guys when they come out they come out with a a toolbox I would say of good medicines healing isn't easy it isn't easy it never was but it sure is doable and there is no such thing as impossible and Dennis Nicholas are part of a spiritual advisory team here every morning a meeting is held in this medicine room with both provincial and federal inmates nearing the end of their sentences it's not a place where you just can't do your time in the last part of your time and just Cruise along I'm sorry it's going to be some some hard work nationally was the skin is one of six independently run Healing Centers but it's also a minimum security prison except here they call the inmates residents Ricky Abram is one of them my stay here has been great it's um it helped me to uh to help heal help heal heal some of my traumas from my from my childhood that I kind of hadn't really dealt with as fully as I thought I did because we were able to deal with it through in like counseling and through ceremonies that the elders provide here that I was that I wasn't getting access to in the regular institutions Abram's story is a familiar one here intergenerational trauma passed along from residential schools absolute parents substance abuse it hurts it hurts too to look back and to see the damage I've caused and I I don't want to do that and I don't want anybody else to do that and learn their lesson after it's too late because there's no where you can't take your mistake back and that like uh there's no excuse for my actions but I've learned that there's reasons Abram has spent 20 years in prison for first degree murder the 47 year old Oneida man spoke to aptn on the condition that we would not go into details about the very serious nature of his crime I had to stop and turn and look in the mirror and do a real deep inventory on what why I think led to needed to do go down this road of negativity and darkness and drug use and alcoholism and finally culminating in you know the ultimate horrendous act of violence I knew it was something I had to I had to fix that I had to heal that Dennis Nicholas is a Milwaukee Elder amongst all the Sweetgrass and sage and Medicine in this room he says one of his favorite items is a cracked wood carving that a former resident made and then he showed me he goes look what happened he goes it cracked and look what happened he says it's spoiled you know he basically just wanted to forget about it I looked at it I said no no the complete opposite I said everything for a reason and and I said it has become a very powerful teacher this is who we are this is where we are I said this is the stuff that we work on for the rest of our days I spent much of the last year here learning ceremony from Nicholas as the possibility of parole draws nearer Abram has a Clear Vision of what he'd like to do when he gets out people say you let go of stuff that's holding us down that's been holding our people down for Generations and that to show them that if I can do it anybody can do it but how many indigenous inmates are getting help at Healing Centers like this Correctional Watchdog Ivan Zinger says vacancy rate is at 40 percent I'm of the view that given the the the track record of Corrections that we should uh consider looking at uh alternative options we need a huge amount of resource to be reallocated from Correctional Services of Canada to indigenous communities and groups to try to improve those Correctional outcomes that are so terrible among the ugly stats indigenous people have a 65 percent or civilism rate meanwhile a recent report shows that independently run healing lodges like Western make a difference specifically offenders who completed indigenous cultural programs at a Healy Lodge had a 54 lower risk to return to prison Corrections Canada run lodges clock in at 29 the star blanket that we brought back from one of our institutions in the prairie region Marty Maltby of Corrections Canada says the pandemic made getting people into healing lodges harder and but he says that's changing over the last few months we've seen an increase a significant increase I would say in most of our healing lodges hopefully I would say by the next year this time next year or I thought earlier we'll see them as full as possible after a career in Corrections Dominic Trombly says she was supposed to retire instead she came back to help run was this gun where she worked earlier in her career among the challenges she's facing is that they are currently running at 50 capacity and since they get funding from Corrections per resident it means they only have half of their ideal budget is [Music] [Applause] [Music] watch this gun is also in need of Renovations large and small they recently had to go to the bank they asked for a loan to fix their roof I call it the Algonquin Majestic traveler that's what I call it meanwhile inmates can be on the waiting list to come here from six months to two years foreign is that in order to go to a healing Lodge they must be classified as minimum risk but in 2018 the Supreme Court ruled that the tool used to decide security classifications discriminated against indigenous people and last year the auditor general released a report stating that the process for assigning security classifications results in disproportionately high numbers of indigenous and black offenders being placed in maximum security institutions and that when the process does determine an indigenous inmate is minimum risk correction staff are 13 more likely to override the risk rating in order to place indigenous men in higher security for indigenous women it was 23 percent higher Corrections Canada says they have put into place an automatic review process for security overrides by staff as for the much maligned security classification tool we engaged with the universal Regina to develop a project that's going to look at that classification process overall the research towards a new classification process began in 2019 and is expected to take five years good morning and welcome Zinger says his office first raised the classification issue in 2002. inertia and inability of the service to reform itself is such that you have to wait decades to see changes and all during that time we have to remember that that indigenous people were probably over classified and sent to higher security than necessary with a budget of nearly 300 billion the heat is on Corrections Canada to address indigenous recidivism recently calls for some of that money to go to other resources have only started to get louder I won't debate whether or not we have significant resources dedicated to this but I will say that I think again part of the challenge we have particularly when it comes to recidivism pieces is also that we need to work with communities and other partners to develop better strategies to keep people in community longer and safer this is a picture of me at 1993 in Edmonton Max Daryl Kent may have spent most of his life behind bars but he has another name now he hopes guides him in his new life it was given to me the ceremony requested by my eldest brother it means North Wind man the north wind is known for being cold often spoken in reference to a shifting of Seasons it is a Wind of Change You Feel The North Wind when it blows right since I've been in prison have developed my voice have learned how to use my voice for at times stupid things to create Havoc or to hurt someone's feelings but I've also gone through that stage where I've learned to use my voice to to to express the positive things in life this is who we are this is where we are I said this is the stuff that we work on as the West assistant graduate if Kent credits Elder Dennis Nicholas for his renewed focus on positivity going forward he's hoping to get into a trade and to visit some family he hasn't seen in decades back on broken head Ojibwe Nation they have developed on their own without me but I gotta catch up to them with them for now The North Wind man will keep on moving driving he'll just need to stay within his 100 kilometer radius for a little while longer [Music] [Music]

Channel: APTN News

Views: 16,446

Keywords: aptn, national, news

Id: 8bTKqmSNCbE

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023