Con Game: The Truth About Canada's Prisons

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Con Game is a trenchant and controversial critique of Canada’s prison
system. It describes a “crisis” involving inmates who exercise
inappropriate power over guards, use illegal drugs at astonishingly high
rates, and often act out violently without fear of punishment, while
programs aimed at rehabilitation fail miserably. In his study of
Correctional Services Canada (CSC), Harris discovered “a secretive and
blinkered collection of administrators who ran a system where the
criminal was king after he was sentenced to prison.”

Harris takes us inside such maximum security prisons as the Kingston
Penitentiary, which opened in June 1835, and the nearby Millhaven
Institution, which opened in April 1971, documenting the volatile,
corrosive environments in which guards must work and weaker prisoners
struggle to survive. In the sundry medium- and minimum-security prisons
he looks at, Harris describes unfavorably the relative autonomy and
comfort of prisoners, particularly at women’s prisons. Examining the
history of Canada’s penal system and the changes to it under the reign
of former CSC commissioner Ole Ingstrup, whom the author blames for a
program of inept liberalization, Harris describes a system that has
responded badly to the challenges of managing offenders and has made
every attempt to shield itself from criticism. In his most engaging
chapters, he offers commentary on the prison experiences of Karla
Homolka (whom critics have accused of manipulating the system and
receiving inappropriate privileges) and Tyrone Conn (who was notorious
for escaping from several institutions before committing suicide in May
1999 during a police standoff).

While this book is long on finger-pointing and polemical sallies, it
offers little in terms of clearsighted ideas for reform. Its narrative
strengths lies in the intimate portraits of prison life it proffers and
in the compelling testimony of correctional officers who have suffered
from reduced authority within the prison system and poor public
relations outside it.