Line Screw: My Twelve Riotous Years Working Behind Bars in Some of Canada's Toughest Jails

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Michael Yates, a poet and former university teacher, was ensconced at
the CBC as a public relations executive when his car was rear-ended on a
Vancouver street. The memory loss that resulted prompted him to resign
his position and sign up as a prison guard. Thus ensued his
“picaresque journey through three very different corrections
institutions and twelve very educational years.” The institutions were
the Alcatraz-like Oakalla; the hi-tech, maximum-security, and impossibly
bureaucratic (“Tower of Glitches”) Vancouver Pretrial; and the
“prison guard’s dream,” New Haven, a minimum-security facility for
young offenders and, by the author’s account, a rehabilitation success
story.

Yates attacks prison myths (and the media that perpetrate them),
dismissing racism as “a non-issue in prisons” and painting a picture
of guards and inmates as allies more than adversaries, both groups at
the mercy of an inscrutable prison system whose bureaucratic obsessions
are at once idiotic and dangerous.

In keeping with its dedication—“to the guards and inmates who gave
me my most entertaining decade”—the book reads like an extended
popular-magazine piece. There are harrowing events (suicide attempts and
a prison riot), but the author’s tone is for the most part
determinedly upbeat; his book is chock full of prison hi-jinks and short
on introspection. Yates himself comes across as a sympathetic but remote
figure (only the sketchiest of outlines about his life beyond the prison
walls is provided here). His thoughtful postscript demonstrates a
capacity for reflection that could have been applied elsewhere, lending
substance to and grounding the book’s almost nonstop action. Readers
expecting a Heart of Darkness from this oft-published poet will be
disappointed; those with a hankering for a fast-paced yarn will not.