A Rock and a Hard Place

Tony Barclay is a retired juvenile corrections probation officer and a
former public-health research associate at the University of Toronto.

Lisa Hobbs Birnie is a journalist who served for eight years on
Canada’s parole board. In this book she has tried to describe her
experience in human terms. In a final chapter she highlights the many
weaknesses of a process that is an integral part of the prison system
badly in need of reform.

Birnie is at her best when she tells human stories, using case
histories to illustrate the problems the board faces. This makes the
book very readable without lessening its value as a thoughtful and
well-researched piece of writing.

The chapters “The Women Who Wait” and “Native Criminal, White
Man’s Law” are particularly timely. Although the overwhelming
preponderance of prisoners are men, the women whose lives are bound up
with them are often forgotten. And where there are large populations of
Native people in Canada the likelihood of a Native man’s being
incarcerated is 37 times that faced by his non-Native fellow citizen.
The figure for Native women is even more shocking: an Indian woman in
Saskatchewan is 131 times more likely to be admitted to prison than a
white woman.

No one who reads this book can be happy with the situation it
describes. Birnie wants us to think about what is happening and how and
why the system works or fails to work. In this she succeeds. Perhaps
because she retains some of the judicial calm necessary to her role as a
board member, she fails to entirely bridge the gap between inmates and
the people who hold such power over them. Still, this book serves as an
excellent introduction to the subject of parole for the general reader.
It would also make an admirable textbook for a high-school course.