From December 3rd, 2019 until April 26, 2022, I was in Federal Prison in Canada. The story of how I ended up there is well documented, but what I saw during my time inside inspired me to write about it. What follows was written during my last 365 days in jail, typed out on an old computer in the shared neighbourhood space. I posted these as a newsletter service called Revue, which Elon shut down upon purchasing Twitter.

Enjoy!

1: Toronto South Detention Center

I thought the worst of it was over in 17 days. Entering Toronto South Detention Center on December 3rd was a dehumanizing experience marked by a rotation of kits comprised of orange garments and meals served in what resembled an adult version of lunchables. Since I came in without the burden of politics that most inherit because of growing up in a certain pocket of the city, I was placed on a range full of Weston and Flemo Park denizens. I quickly got used to the concept of “doing time,” in which you simultaneously count up from how long you’ve been incarcerated and countdown to your parole date. Safety was prioritized to a point that felt like punishment as we were locked down often for infractions that took place on other ranges.

Toronto South is built like a maze, the hallways sectioned using alphanumeric codes and colors that can make moving through them feel repetitive and purposefully disorienting. The whole thing would have been impressive had it not been constructed with the intention of containing souls. I spent most of those 17 days either doing push-ups or working on my jump shot on a bizarre rhombus-shaped indoor basketball court. When we were allowed out of our cells after 8PM, we watched basketball games to pass time and cheer on our favorites.

Provincial jails are youthful institutions. At 29 I was damn near an elder, closer in interest to the men named “pops” on the range than the boisterous 18-21 year olds who propagated the space. There were two levels and ten cells on each floor, each guarded by heavy doors that locked with a mechanical magnet contraption I can still hear when I close my eyes. The strategy of most of the kids I met was to await their trial date in this provincial jail in order to avoid having to go “down bottom” to the Federal institutions in Kingston, Ontario. If they sat through to their sentencing, they would receive “dead time” off their sentence amounting to 1½ of the days spent in Provincial and be eligible for parole soon after.

Whereas Federal penitentiaries are remote and don’t take the necessary steps to divide the population out by their hood politics, Provincial institutions are situated just outside metropolitan city centers and arrange everyone tribally in a way that makes the range feel communal instead of adversarial. There’s a reason Toronto South is colloquially known as “Gang Land” among people who frequent it.

8 years, 8 months, 8 days. That’s what my sentence worked out to after the judge had granted me some dead time for being on house arrest. The youths on the range marvelled at the length of time given to me, peppering me with questions about my crime. After I told them about who I once was and what I’d once done, they shifted to asking me about the price of cocaine in Australia and about any rappers I’d met. I told them $120,000 a brick—give or take ten grand—and Future. Both of these factoids seemed to impress them, and I developed the nickname “Vice.”

17 days after arriving, my name was called for the wagon to Kingston. I was supposed to spend 70 days at the assessment unit before Correction Services Canada decided on my security level and which “mother institution” I would filter to. The youths who were in and out of Provincial told me that since I had no criminal record, no violence, and narrowly avoided a sentence of 10 years, I would be able to go straight to a minimum institution, colloquially known as a “camp” for the lack of fences and the multitude of hobbies that populated the place. I boarded the wagon cuffed at the wrists and ankles along with five others, embarking on the four-hour ride to Kingston to meet my next home.

2: Joyceville Assessment Unit

COVID caused the next chapter of my journey to last three times as long as it should have as 70 days spiralled into 210.

Joyceville Assessment Unit is not unlike a boxy chalky stone donut, its large decrepit building four floors tall and cubed with the center missing. It resembled a block piece discarded from a heavenly game of Tetris dropped in the middle of a field, surrounded by farmland on three sides and a canal on the fourth. Its concrete exterior painted asylum-white, it was almost blinding to look straight on at in the daylight. Each window was sealed with bars that someone took great pains to ensure didn’t resemble those on a cage by putting an ornate circle in the middle of ironwork. From an aerial view, the center of the square-shaped block was a courtyard through which the population came from the administrative side to their ranges and when the time called for it, to the canteen and to yard.

JAU holds around 580 inmates at full capacity, though it was kept under that for safety reasons. The month before my arrival, two inmates killed a sex offender by bouncing his head off the shower stall, which prompted a lockdown that lasted half a month while they completed their investigation. The segregation of affiliations that took place in Provincial no longer applied here, since JAU was a mandatory stop along all offenders’ journeys once they became Federal property. This led to intermingling in the yard and melees of dirt-green jackets with reflecting stripes attacking other dirt-green jackets for being from the wrong ends.

A clear garbage bag full of institutional clothing was dropped in front of me after I was strip searched and a mangy-haired retriever had sniffed us out for any drugs. I dug around inside it to find jeans, a toque, three Conservative-Party-Blue shirts, three pairs of tight white briefs, three pairs of socks, and my own dirt-green winter jacket with a reflective stripe. The Corrections Canada guard assigned us each a range and whisked us out of the room in anticipation of a new batch of inmates arriving from a different corner of the Province. The walk through the courtyard was filled with other blue-shirt wearing inmates asking our group which Jail we had arrived from, eager to know where we came from in order to anticipate our affiliations and react justly.

Each of the 16 ranges is a long hallway decorated with bile-green tiles and a beige paint that could have been bright white at some point in its 60-year lifespan. Around 25 cells punctuated the sides of the halls, half of them single occupancy and filled based on seniority. This was not supposed to be anyone’s last stop, but some people ended up staying for over a year while they waited to cycle through the bureaucracy of programs and parole officers. That’s not counting the ones that kept getting in trouble to avoid being sent to their mother institution out of a fear of the unknown. Trouble would find the ones who hoarded and sold medication, made brew out of fruits and sugar, or extorted high-profile offenders. Others would seek it out by fighting other inmates in the part of the laundry room and shower area that came to be known as “the octagon” for the neutral ground it provided, free of the watchful eye of the HD cameras that peppered the corners of the range.

One of the biggest benefits to JAU was that everyone was allowed to get some personal items sent in. A few pairs of boxers, basketball shorts, and sweatpants made lounging around the range all day more humanizing and individualistic, but having a TV in your cell allowed everyone to stay busy by turning on HBO or the Movie Network and turning off their brain. Those over-50 busied themselves with the National Geographic, Discovery, and History channels, while the younger crowd tuned into BET early in the morning to listen to music. HGTV held a weird allure that spanned across race and age. When TV’s siren song didn’t have the same tune, a series of dog-eared books were scattered around the range. I killed the better part of February reading at least four Jack Reacher novels and most of the Dune series.

The weight pit was enormous, but the lack of free weights and moveable plates meant that the machines held a static workload. The gymnasium was similarly vast, and hockey and basketball games cycled through on alternating days. Hockey games allowed inmates to fight without repercussions, but the basketball games were an exhibit of true skill as 3-pointers rained down at every opportunity.In the middle of March, on my 69th day at JAU and right before I was to be sent off to camp, COVID shut everything down. There would be no traffic in or out of the institution for the foreseeable future, and all programs would cease so that any contact civilians had with inmates could be controlled and monitored. Yard privileges were throttled so the gym and the weight pit was only open to 4 ranges at a time, but that was soon scaled back further as the only thing we were allowed was to walk outside on the track. Somehow, this COVID cloud brought silver linings as offenders gossiped about the potential for early parole and a re-introduction of Accelerated Parole Release by the Trudeau government. None of this would ever come to pass, no matter how many prisoners America or Morocco released, the news of which would spread through JAU like a pandemic of hope. To be fair, the older offenders would caution against getting our hopes up every time a positive thought popped out of our mouths. They had seen a different version of this same story play out before, and it always ended with inmates getting the short end of the hockey stick.

In some ways, that lockdown period was some of the most fun I had during my bid. The shared mystery surrounding what was to come meant that most defaulted to optimism. The limited interaction with the rest of the population also neutered some individuals who drew on the strength of knowing their gang of affiliates would protect them whenever it was yard time. Due to the restrictions, the loudmouth from Ottawa could no longer threaten to sick his gang on whoever he found out was taking his eggs from the common room fridge.

The food was mostly terrible, a fact I would find out first hand after I got a job in the kitchen and was in charge of preparing the slop. Twice a day, a plastic wagon the size of a small hippo would be wheeled through the hall of each range containing the legally required amount of nutrients portioned for each inmate. My job in the kitchen involved preparing these wagons by placing the food onto trays by cutting open a number of plastic bags full of soft wet vegetables and chicken parts into a vat, where they were heated with steam and stirred with a metal canoe paddle. The slop would then be measured out into large serving trays for each range. The best meals featured pizza with too much dough; burgers fried to the size of hockey pucks; and dinner sausages so salty you’d need to pair them with a gallon of water. Some of the more creative parts of the population would remix these meals with canteen items, turning the toaster into a frying pan by jamming the heat in the ‘on’ position and putting a metal tray on top. The most valuable items would all be sweet, as people haggled away their oatmeal cookies, apple-granola slice, and bran muffins for extra portions to be paid out later.

After I accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be transferring any time soon, I made the best of my surroundings. When I wasn’t working, I would pass the day playing Big Two and Bidwiz, two card games that ate up a few hours on the range. Once a day, a group of us would line up in the hallways to do a bodyweight circuit consisting of squats, pushups, and lunges. The exercise came to be colloquially known as the Kimbo Circuit after the muscular range rep who led the workouts. The 30-odd members of range 2B were from all parts of Ontario, from Sudbury to Niagara Falls; London to Ottawa; and all points between. As the weeks progressed, movement resumed as high and medium security individuals were prioritized for shipment to Millhaven, Collins Bay, Warkworth, Fenbrook, and Bath. Minimum security individuals were last on the list, which kept me at JAU until July 19th.

3: Pittsburgh Minimum

The easiest way to describe minimum security is a socialist thought experiment molded into a Potemkin village that’s meant to simulate a law-abiding world. The narrow two-storey townhouses of Pittsburgh Minimum are arranged on a circular track about 800 meters in diameter, their rainbow-colored exterior giving the impression that they house a jolly and vibrant population. Everyone is provided with work, ranging from cleaning jobs—of which there were an abundance due to COVID precautions—to working on the farm raising cattle for eventual slaughter. Payment is provided in the form of $60 biweekly, which can be used to buy snacks at the canteen. There’s also a weekly budget of $52 for groceries, which each house orders using a printed form and a calculator like an archaic version of Instacart.

Groceries are stored and cooked in a shared kitchen on the main floor that’s complete with enough gadgets and amenities to allow a person to prepare almost anything one may find in a cookbook. The purpose of minimum security is for long-time offenders and lifers to trickle down through the system and become acclimated to the concept of society a few years before they’re released. In theory, this means they’ll learn to budget, cook, socialize, and manage their time to achieve some sense of work/life balance. In practice, minimum security provides just enough amenities to highlight the terrible personalities that populate the place. When every need you have is provided for in a way that doesn’t feel terribly prison-like, you begin to notice that hell is other people. It’s important to remember that for maybe 20% of the population, this place is the only home they’ll know for the rest of their life.

A majority of the population is over the age of 50 with some sort of physical ailment that causes them to line up for medication each morning. I was housed with three 60-year old lifers who were institutionalized for 15, 21, and 22 years respectively. Good luck making small talk with people who have been in jail longer than Wikipedia has existed. First-time non-violent offenders such as myself were a rare occurrence at that camp, and when they did appear they were only there for a month or two before getting released. Pittsburgh is known for housing the three classes of prisoners who are in most dire need of protection: Sex offenders, rats, and cops. In my time there, I could count on one hand the amount of crime-for-gain types I met, including fraudsters and guys on trafficking charges. I kept my head down and stayed busy. I wrote the book, first by hand and then on the library computers during our 90 minutes of yard time. I worked out in the weight pit and ran ball games with the few people who were physically able to run. I worked in the community, on the farm, and building furniture for military bases.

There was also a four-day stint at the abattoir that showed me how beef is made. This caused me to adopt a vegan lifestyle for the majority of my sentence once I was able to cook for myself. By the time December rolled around, I had an unexpectedly full schedule every day between writing, working, working out, and cooking.

Then COVID finally descended upon us first-hand—sort of. The neighboring institution suffered the worst outbreak in Canada, as JAU fell victim to the plague. For some reason, although Pittsburgh shared none of the same staff and didn’t perform any transfers in that week, we were put on DEFCON-1 lockdown and were unable to leave our townhouses. In theory, there should have been an advocate to fight for us, but because the people at the top were the same sex offenders who needed protection from the system, they couldn’t be bothered to rock the boat in fear of it tipping them into the water.

We sat on our hands for two weeks and endured repeated nasal swabs until we found out—1 day before Christmas Eve—that we had zero cases within our institution. For me, that episode was proof that I was in the wrong institution. Minimum or not, if I was to do my time it would be around criminals who would push back on power when they felt they were being abused by it. I put in a transfer to leave Kingston and go into the north towards Cottage Country, leaving Pittsburgh for Beaver Creek to finish my last year before release.

4: Beaver Creek Minimum

Beaver Creek is a perfectly representative cross-section of Toronto. The population of Kingston’s facilities more or less mirrored the blue-collared red necks you’d find across Ontario, with the odd Jamaican, Serbian, or Vietnamese resident thrown in. But a tour through Beaver Creek was like walking through Epcot. Conclaves formed naturally and interacted seamlessly with the sort of grace that Lester B. Pearson likely had in mind when he created the idea for the League of Nations. Pockets of criminals whose ethnicities included Serbians, Italians, Indians, Jamaicans, Somalian, French, Chinese, Sri Lankans and Russian all made Beaver Creek a welcome change of pace from the monochromatic experience of Pittsburgh. Hell was still other people, but at least there were pockets of culture.

Located on an air force base that was turned into a POW camp in WWII for Nazis, the institution spanned multiple acres and was made up of hangar-style buildings that contained a gym, a hobby craft room, a library, a chapel, a healthcare center, dental clinic, and a works department. There was a track, baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a tennis court, a mini-golf course, and a pair of bocce ball pits. Six units made up of six ranges dotted the perimeter, and each range held no more than 7 people. Because of COVID, the population was capped to around 180 inmates instead of the 250 it can hold at max capacity. Every month, parole hearings were held and ten to twelve inmates went home. Since minimum security is treated like the final step closer to release into polite law-abiding society, it was extremely rare to not see people get parole from Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek’s job pool was meager, but the opportunities for self-improvement were plentiful if you were resourceful. The weight pit was bigger, the library was always open, and the youth of the population led to competitive games of basketball, hockey, soccer, and even mini-golf. I picked up a French correspondence course and kept my conversational Russian active through daily phone calls to my mom and quick exchanges whenever I’d cross paths with a fellow Eastern European. I even took a Criminology course via correspondence with my old university, Laurentian, picking up where I’d left off 10 years prior. All those who came to learn that hard work and discipline were the only ways to achieve success ended up adopting long-term projects. For the under-50 crowd this manifested in bodybuilding. For the over-50s, it was gardening.

As the seasons changed and the vaccine was administered, things began to open back up to a 2019 level. Since I’d only known the facilities in their closed format, the re-addition of freedoms reinvented my perspective of where I was. COVID protocols were the norm for me, but for those who spent years in these places already they were an additional layer of incarceration on top of their removal from society. As we were allowed out into the community to work and our families and friends were allowed to visit us monthly, the time flew by like it had never before for me. Since the population was capped, the limited size allowed me to compartmentalize life and seek out pockets of people with varied interests to stimulate conversations.

The sense of normalcy brought on by celebrating these milestones as a community can’t be overstated. Removing an individual from a society doesn’t mean that there won’t be a sense of social order wherever you send them. By counting down milestones, you not only pass the time with more fluency, you set markers in your story that you can potentially look back on when the worst is over. My 30th birthday was spent at JAU grilling steaks in the kitchen with a side of the rarest of commodities available to kitchen workers in bulk: Onions and green peppers. My 31st was spent in Beaver Creek at a picnic table outdoors, the BBQ full of burgers and chicken passed around by Serbians and the Jamaicans playing dancehall over the portable CD player that was brought out for the occasion.

Two major virtues my time taught me were humility and patience. Compassion might be a distant third, mostly for the people afflicted by drug addiction who showed me that cocaine and opiates aren’t exclusively for a partying lifestyle. The humility instilled in me came from going through the gauntlet of constant starts and stops. Having to go through four institutions and re-introducing myself each time taught me who I was, what I valued, what my best features were, and what I needed to avoid in order to be happy. The patience to deal with difficult people was rewarded in mutual respect, since living in a shared space led to sharing resources, which led to conflict, which led to conflict resolution and stronger bonds. I never let myself think I was in prison, which led to me protecting my mental health.

I saw first-hand how lifers tended to slip into depressive states from time to time knowing that even though there weren’t any fences surrounding their home, they weren’t allowed to leave. I told myself that I was on a sabbatical, living tech-free in the woods and reconnecting with my fellow man.

The place acted like a centrifuge of intrapersonal relationships, as spending three months eating and walking around the track with a relative stranger translated into a deeper connection forged than you’d have with someone you’d known for years. Overall, my journey was the sort of adventure an 18-year old me would have loved to embark on—even though I can’t recommend anyone follow in those footsteps.

5: Penitentiary Power and Politics

Any place that has a social order is going to fall victim to having politics. Putting aside the tangled web of hood relations some inmates inherit upon entering, there is a rough order to institutions that pre-dates most inmates. Lifers have top billing, borne more from pity from the “short timers” than out of any respect. Anyone with a warrant expiry date is a short timer in the eyes of the lifers, it doesn’t matter if they’re here for three years, nine years, or sixteen years. As long as one day, however far in the future, a day comes when you are no longer under the supervision of CSC, you’re a short-timer. Everyone in an institution applies neutralization techniques to their offense on a self-created hierarchy to justify what they did as “not so bad” compared to those who caused physical violence, especially against women or children.

Most lifers are in on a body or two, but there’s levels to the lives people take. For example, someone in jail for enforcing payback in blood for a criminal enterprise is looked at in much higher regard than someone who killed their wife in a jealous fit. Similarly, second-degree, attempted murder and manslaughter offenders are rated on the scale of who the victim was. High profile killers never make it out of maximum security, mostly for their safety than anyone else’s. The middle of the totem is crime-for-gain types, who typically spend a few years networking and preparing for parole. The bottom of the pyramid is sex offenders, excluding in some cases pimps who could potentially fall into the crime-for-gain category but need to explain their circumstances every time someone brings up their Google results. In an odd way, having a high-profile story that’s easily to Google can work to your favor as it helps you avoid questioning about why you’re in jail.

Legalized drug use in the form of methadone, suboxone, and painkillers are dealt out during the morning pill parade, a daily event that causes 30% of the Caucasian population to wake up at 7AM and stumble out of bed and into a line up like White Walkers ambling towards a common goal. Since there’s a market for anything in jail, these Methadonians find ways to cheat the system that border on gruesome. For example, since methadone is prescribed via liquid that has to be taken in front of the nurse, extracting it in a form that is sellable involves the user throwing up into a sock and wringing out the liquid.

Payment is done by the purchase of items on canteen, for which each inmate has a max budget of $90 every two weeks. The items available differ depending on which institution you find yourself in, but can range anywhere from a $1.50 chocolate bar all the way to a $55 bag of whey protein. The idea of the institution is for everyone to be flattened to the same level so that inequality is unnoticeable and comfort can’t be something that’s bought. That said, there’s ways to feel “wealthy” in jail. Primarily, it would be by accruing enough garments from road that you never have to wear the jail-issued blue shirts and tighty-whiteys. Some people take this to the extreme and have no issue walking around in a Hugo Boss tracksuit and putting a target on their backs to get it forcefully taken from them, while others just make sure to own enough boxer briefs and white t-shirts so as not to have to touch institution-issued wear.

There’s also the purchase of illicit and illegal materials that obviously takes place wherever you are. Tobacco, booze and cellphones are the highest priority items for anyone, but you can also get whatever you want if your money is right. At one institution, someone dropped off a brick of cocaine via drone and the inmates cooked it into crack that they flooded the place with. Prices fluctuate based on supply and demand, but a certain high-profile inmate from a wealthy family had no issue flaunting his wealth by purchasing a bail of tobacco for $800 e-transfers. The risk of getting caught doesn’t just carry the threat of reprimand in the form of an institutional charge, it could also mean getting your security level raised from minimum to medium. This means you’d be shipped immediately from a jumbo cul-de-sac where you can cook your own food to a place with 80-foot high walls in which you have bars on your windows and you’re back to eating sludge.

When everything is taken from someone, they’ll pick small battles just to accrue meaningless wins. The need for a sense of superiority doesn’t just go away when your freedom is stripped. The thing about the system is how many rules inmates generate just so there’s something to enforce. You don’t reach across someone’s food, or look into their room without permission. You can’t whistle, jangle keys, or slam doors, because that’s what guards do. You can’t say “goof” because it leads to fighting, and can’t say things like “banana” or “come here” because that’s an eediat ting. The amount of Jamaican traditions that permeate everyday culture in the penitentiary could populate a book, and each manifest themselves in interesting ways. You take for granted how deeply yard roots run when you no longer react to hearing two rough and tumble Sudbury miners talk about how they can’t wait to “touch road” in a few months. The weirdest thing about a sequestered society for whom everything is technically provided is how they’ll manufacture their own rules for governance and economy if given the tools. Outside of the rules prisoners create for themselves, there is also a web of bureaucracy that overlays every want and need you may have while federal property.

A government body called CSC runs Canada’s program for the incarcerated. Every request an inmate has of CSC needs to be filled out in triplicate and handed off to a guard or dropped in a box. There’s a 532 form to transfer funds, a form to put money on your phone, a form to add people to your calling card, a form to apply for a job, a form to see healthcare, a form to complain about a staff member, and a form to complain about the fact your complaint isn’t being taken seriously enough. Some people will take advantage of this tangle of paperwork to busy themselves with grieving CSC for years, simply because they felt they were wronged and have all the time in the world to prove that to be true.

It’s odd that violating the rules in society brings you to a place where there are even more rules. Enforcing these rules can mean different things depends on where you are. In medium security, you can get gerked or chefed just for farting in the hallway. In minimum security, everyone walks on eggshells out of a fear of being ratted on. The fact that the most powerful people in a place that’s meant to punish others for not following the rules, are those who enforce the rules through snitching, just adds to the paradox of stupidity that is prison.

6: Doing Your Own Time

Every theory having to do with the passage of time needs to be filtered through the concept of imprisonment to be tested to its fullest. Time is truly relative when it is used as an indefinite punishment. Those inmates lucky enough to have an end to their sentence will always be counting down to that date, measuring the circumstances of life through their own timeline. Some people count in presidents, others count in Olympics, while some take the more granular approach and measure years by Superbowls. I myself have been federal property for four Superbowls, three New Year’s eves, two birthdays, and one global pandemic. I’ve thought often about what’s the least amount of time in which the most happens, and I think its four years. That’s how often it is between Olympics, the length of a presidential term, and how long it takes for someone to finish high school.

Lifers only ever count up from when they were brought in. They also think back on events with the same sense of wonder that civilians do, remembering exactly where they were when 9/11 happened or when Trump was elected. The most interesting thing about lifers is that they forever remain frozen at the age they were when they were sentenced, seeing as how they were never forced to mature as a result of having to adopt the responsibilities of life or endure the struggle of interpersonal relationships and the self-discovery that comes with them. I’ve met 40-year olds who still think of themselves as 19, as well as 60-year olds who still think of themselves as being 35. For the most part, the former is always a more dangerous person to be around as they are driven in equal parts by impulse and the need for self-preservation; the latter is more whimsical and has a wide-eyed way of looking at the modern world, constantly asking questions about technology or marveling at how much things cost now.

By the time they’ve reached minimum, lifers have become fairly docile. They’ve long since taken the time to sit with their actions and their impacts. I’ve spoken to some lifers on a body who talk about how the consequences and gravity of their crime didn’t even sink in until about year eight of their sentence, until which time they were recklessly thinking they would die in jail. That said, most lifers have formed close relationships with guards and officers during their stint, which makes them more dangerous as informants than as would-be rule breakers.Regardless of the length of your sentence, roughly the first half of everyone’s prison journey is marked by a change of environments. Lifers who have spent 20 years incarcerated will spend the first 13 in maximum and medium security until they’re allowed to come to camp. Similarly, people serving a 2 year sentence will spend four months in max and assessment before coming to camp and waiting for their parole eligibility to kick in around the 8-month mark. Because of all this motion, you meet people along the way that you share personal moments with by accidents. And since everyone’s primary source of information is the mainstream media on TV, it’s hard to inform yourself beyond the topline takes.

I remember where I was when Kobe Bryant died and how everyone flooded out of their cells to share their disbelief in the hallways. The George Floyd saga unfolded in real-time as people watched from their cells and screamed “fuck the police” and “I’m definitely getting parole now” through the bars. I remember the two lifers I was with when we watched the election results on CNN, as well as the Capitol Riots shortly after, both of them shaking their head in disbelief as I tried to explain what Qanon was. I remember who I watched the NBA Championship with when the Lakers and the Bucks won the trophy (I know nobody will believe this, but I had a perfect bracket for the 2021 NBA Playoffs, minus Atlanta over Philly), and remember that someone made a tray of nachos with too much salt on them for us to celebrate. I’ll probably never meet these people again (knock on wood) but we shared in a moment in time that will always be imprinted on my mind in that “where were you when?” sense of memory.

Time spent without purpose is its own form of prison. While many guys have no problem sleeping all day and getting up only for meds or to eat when there’s a dessert worth waking up for, others prefer to spend their days watching TV. I have developed a personal beef with whoever runs programming for BET’s morning show of music videos for not updating the slate since late 2018. But the fact that the music continues to be the same doesn’t stop the mandem from queuing up all of their TVs from 8AM to catch the predictable in the hopes of it changing one day. Those who aren’t “BET types” are more inclined to watch Discovery, History, or National Geographic channels where most of the shows are either about large trucks or aliens. Whichever camp you fall into, everyone watches the late night programming that’s essentially soft-core porn disguised as episodic TV such as Spartacus, Vida, or P-Valley.

Time is punishment if used incorrectly, but only boring people get bored. I’ve been around people who read a book a week during their 9 month detention, as well as an individual who got really good at twirling a pen between his finger and his thumb as he sat in the living room for hours on end with National Geographic on in the background. Breaking your day into blocks meant for the purpose of leisure or self-improvement seems like the obvious choice to make for anyone with time on their hands, but the mindless surfing of TV channels seemed to be the default selection for anyone with too much time and not enough imagination.

That, and making banana bread.

7: Enjoying Culture While Internet Detoxing

You take for granted how clutch watching things “on demand” is when you have to revert back to appointment viewing for every show. Yes, I do realize that it’s a fairly mundane gripe when I’m complaining about having to block off Sunday nights at 9pm to watch ‘Succession’ in jail. But at the same time, arts and culture are the only things that really did my time and kept me tethered to reality and the outside world. It’s bad enough that all of my news was absorbed through mainstream channels that offered no opposing viewpoints on shit like the pandemic and the US elections, but if I couldn’t catch ‘Into the Storm’ when it came on, where else would I learn the ins and outs about Qanon’s impact on the Capitol Riots?

When the pandemic started, the news became must-see TV. That purple ticker on CNN consumed everyone’s attention for months. And although there wasn’t any tertiary news source to draw from, it didn’t stop inmates from espousing their beliefs about COVID. Who needs the Joe Rogan podcast when Curly down the range is yelling at everyone through his methadone high that China manufactured the virus just so Trump would lose? Eventually, as a vaccine was developed, the news grew bogged down with updates about how many people had been jabbed and how many remained. Movies that were cancelled were brought back, leading to stories about how important ‘Tenant’ is or how brave Tom Cruise was.

Due to the lack of content, movies churned faster and faster to television to fill the space needed for 4 24-hour movie networks. The aforementioned ‘Tenant’ made it my way in April (not bad, but a bottom-tier Nolan project) and supposed blockbusters like ‘Wonder Woman: 1984’ forwarded in June (literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen). HBO stayed consistent, not only by releasing new series that hit hard (‘Betty’, ‘White Lotus’, ‘Lovecraft Country’) but by showing the classics late at night during the winter months like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Veep’. Even shows like ‘Power’ and its associated spin-offs warranted a watch, if only because the group I hung out with consistently talked about it like it was must-see TV. It was not.

Watching TV without accompanying thinkpieces is a huge gift, but in hindsight it led to some moments of mischaracterization. Shows like ‘Ramy’, ‘Ziwe’ and ‘30 Coins’ were the sort of content that need an explainer to be fully appreciated, since coming into it without knowing the characters and directors can make for disjointed viewing. You want to like it, but feel like you’re only getting the punch line of the joke. The whole situation just brought into question what it meant for a show to be “good” to begin with. I continued to watch things through my internet-addled mind, on a constant lookout for themes or undertones or winks about what a TV show is trying to say. But the rest of the population simply wanted to be entertained, not to be made to feel smart, and sought out content that tickled that itch. That’s why one of the most popular channels was “Bravo” and its army of catty and visually stimulating housewives.

When you’re in your Mother Institution you’re able to get two magazine subscriptions sent in. I chose ‘New Yorker’ and ‘The Economist’ primarily because they were delivered weekly and kept me abreast of the world through left and right brain viewpoints. Reading ‘New Yorker’ articles was also the closest thing I had to having the internet, and the knowledge exchange that took place when I recommended articles to other inmates was more rewarding than sharing the post online into the ether. We’d discuss articles about North Korea’s hacking troupe or Rich Paul’s rise to infamy in the evenings around the kitchen table. Articles about cults and the merits of co-habitation and shared living spaces for young professionals took on a new light as their virtues were debated among a population that had no choice but to adapt to them. It’s not as if any revelations were uncovered though, as most were simply content to shrug and wish for something different without wondering if what they had was pretty good.

‘The Economist’ became a valuable resource among the crime-for-gain types who sought to legitimize their future dealings. Fraudsters who maintained their stock portfolio over the phone and on custom Excel spreadsheets used my reading of the magazine as an entry point to talk shop and brag about past successes—likely inflating numbers as they went along. After a year in minimum when the news and its COVID updates no longer interested me, I started the mornings off by watching CNBC. The backbone of the updates still ran through the COVID lens, but it was far more interesting than getting the latest count on the vaccination race. Removed from society, it was wondrous to see that people took advantage of the Universal Basic Income provided to them not by hunkering down and learning a new language or skill, but by investing their newly-found wealth into Gamestop stock or crypto.

If magazines taught me how to slow down and appreciate the written word for the window it provided into a segment of society, CDs gave me an appreciation for what music said about a moment in time. In an almost throwback fashion, music sharing and discovery took on a more personal manner when the medium became physical again. You take for granted how easy it can be to slide from one era to another when you use Spotify to go from ’06 Jeezy to ’12 Pusha T to ’01 Jay Z. When you need to go through the work of getting a CD and placing it in your Walkman just to find a single song, you end up appreciating the artists who took the time to make a cohesively sequenced project. There’s a huge difference between getting lost in a Jay Z CD that has a concise narrative running through it, and listening to ‘Culture 2’—which is simply a collection of songs.

As far as the selection went, everyone seemed to have access to the classics. Wayne, Pop Smoke, G Herbo and DaBaby had their music thoroughly represented within every institution, which was as far as new music from American artists went. Prison was the only place in my life I’ve seen people cape for Toronto rappers, though it was seen in equal parts as a proclamation of wealth and neighborhood loyalty. As far as non-rap music, I was in the minority when it came to wanting to hear modern pop. I had the Fiona Apple CD sent in, but couldn’t find anyone who had any HAIM, Partynextdoor, Tame Impala, or even “artsy” rap like Travis Scott. There was no Frank Ocean, and all my requests for his music were met with the kissing of teeth and the utterings of “battymon.”

8: The Magical World of Racism

Alright, so boom. Racism.

If you’ve made it past the last update without unsubscribing in a fit after reading my thoughts on HBO shows and how magazine are cool, you’re in this for real. This is an inherently sticky topic where nobody comes off looking good, but oh well. Unlike any of the media’s portrayals having to do with prison, there aren’t a number of race-based gangs scattered across the yard lifting weights together. This is likely because the prisons you see in the media are American and have literally 10x the population of even Canada’s biggest institutions. In medium security, the block you’re from determines who you hang out with and who you oppose—to the point where some institutions are dedicated to specific neighborhoods and completely unsafe for others. However, in minimum the makeup reflects a more Torontonian experience where cultures will coagulate most of the time but also comfortably split up to mix among the population. This makes for outward-facing niceties between groups and hyper-specific insults whenever backs are turned.

There was no shortage of divisive racial topics throughout my time in ’20 and ’21, and every time an issue made itself known on mainstream media, the lifers would ask for an explainer from me in the hopes of understanding how the world works from a “boots on the ground” point-of-view. As a contrarian, I always take the other side of an argument whenever a topic surfaced. This led to me defending the stance of BLM to some rednecks who wondered aloud why it wasn’t “All Lives Matter,” as well as going to bat for the LGBT movement in a room full of Jamaicans and Muslims.

Any argument that I remembered as originating from Twitter in 2014 that I would re-purpose to support protesters after the killing of George Floyd fell on deaf ears. The closest I made to progress was when I said that “BLM” was just a new way of saying “fuck the police,” but even that argument went awry after the word “defund” started entering the lexicon. Someone who has lived in an institution their whole lives knows that cutbacks to the budget are the last thing you want when your livelihood depends on said budget. To paraphrase one lifer, the money is never taken from the officers; it is only taken from the parts of the program that help people who need it.

After the NBA entered into the playoff bubble and adopted the social justice slogans on the back of their jerseys, some people were upset by the fact that they felt their face was being rubbed in an issue that had nothing to do with them. In their mind, why should a Canadian basketball fan have to atone for the wrongs of a police force in another country? Furthermore, if these slogans were to be removed later, didn’t it make it seem as though the problem they sought to address had been solved? The pageantry of it all cheapened the movement that the media had tried so hard to solidify in the months leading up to the playoffs.

After RuPaul hosted SNL one week, I decided to watch my first episode of ‘Drag Race’ on the living room TV. After that, I made time each week to catch a new episode, as I found the show to be dramatic and dependably funny. My viewing of the show led to disgust by some inmates, as one country-bumpkin sack of potatoes wouldn’t even look at the TV when he’d pass through the room to get to the kitchen. This personified wholesale-sized jar of mayonnaise was convinced that even glancing at the screen would be enough to awaken some latent urge in him that no amount of bible study would be able to suppress again. Inevitably, my viewing of the show led people to question me about my own sexuality, which led to conversations about their relationship to LGBT issues.

These dialogues started off tense, but with enough patience and humor I was able to get to the heart of their issues. Simply put, seeing men emasculated on TV made them uncomfortable. The black inmates had an issue with the fact that black characters were often the ones portrayed as gay, and that every new show seemed to have space for one trans character. It goes without saying that none of the inmates had a problem with lesbians. They took stock of how shows like ‘P Valley’—which featured an abundance of strippers shaking ass—made sure to make one character especially flamboyant in what they felt was an effort to feminize black men.

When I tried to introduce words like “cisgender” into their vocabulary as a way of understanding the new shape society is taking, every single person thought that I was just making shit up.

Overall, I can confidently say that not a single mind was changed by my attempts. My ending argument when dealing with lifers ended up being something along the lines of “well, the world is just blacker and gayer now than it was when you were out there, I guess.”

There were some interesting points made by inmates that are hard to discount, even if seen through a modern lens. The idea of embracing people’s “lived experiences” has become popular recently and should cut both ways when it comes to understanding people’s emotions towards a group. Most of the whites who didn’t like black people had never encountered them during their sheltered country upbringing until they’d entered the system. Upon being incarcerated, they quickly found that black people stuck together inside and took advantage of anyone who didn’t look like them. Their lived experience didn’t discount people because of what they looked like, but for what they’d done to them in the past.

Black people have their run of the jail system, from the provincial buckets, to assessment, all the way to the mother institutions. It doesn’t matter if they’re Jamaican, Haitian, Guyanese, Somalian, or just Canadian, black people will always stick together. The nice way of referring to a range or unit with a predominantly black population would be to say that it’s “dogged out” or full of the “mandem,” the impolite way would be to say that it’s full of “wizards”—a slur invented by white inmates to be able to say The Word without saying it. No matter how much they would try, white inmates were never able to band together in the same way black ones were to run a range. Blame it on the fact that a lot of the white inmates were on methadone and suboxone, or the fact that most of them were on a bad beef and unable to stand up for anyone lest they expose themselves in the process. But if you weren’t riding with the dogs, your stay at any CSC establishment would be a long and defensive one.

Despite these enforced castes, all inmates are technically on the same level when it comes to any informal hierarchy within CSC. While it helps to be a worldly person and friendly with all pockets of people, groups do form based on ethnicity. Nothing unites people more than having common opponents, which is why Natives stick together and talk shit about white people, Italians stick together and talk shit about Blacks, and Jamaicans stick together to talk shit about the gays. But when you move up a level, you see that CSC and its employees, from the correctional officers to the parole officers and all the people in between like food service workers, have a deep racial animosity for “the other.” There’s no way to tell if this is borne from the CSC worker’s “lived experience” during their time working in penitentiaries, or from them simply being born and raised in the same small towns where they end up working.

All of the penitentiaries in Ontario are found in either Campbellford, Kingston, or Gravenhurst—none of which are known for having a diverse population within the small towns. Alternatively, a significant portion of the population within the confines of these institutions are Torontonians from different ends of the same metropolis. The divide ends up being not by race, but among the lines of power and class (as informed by freedom) between the staff and the inmates.

9: Everyone’s a Millionaire in Prison

In prison, power is measured not by what you have but by what you can do while you’re federal property. You can only have $1500 worth of property in your room, which means there’s no point in getting your Rolex collection sent in if you’ve found yourself jailed for millions worth of fraud. Similarly, because you can only spend $90 every two weeks, there’s no way to flex your wealth in comparison to others. Regardless if you were on welfare or a millionaire while you were on road, everyone is entitled to the same pot of wealth while inside. Because of this fact, everybody you meet says they’re a millionaire. One neighbor of mine claimed he bought $10,000 worth of Moderna stock when it was $5 a share (we later found its lowest price was $11). He also wore the same grey AND1 basketball shorts the whole summer, to the point where they had a hole in their left pocket exposing his leathery thigh. The power lies with those who have enough connections within the institution and on the outside to bring in contraband, whether it’s through bribing the staff to import, using drones to drop packages in, or by simply dropping bags off by the road and paying someone to run and get them.

Just because the minimum-security jails don’t have walls or fences, doesn’t mean they aren’t monitored. HD cameras on 40-foot poles are strategically placed along the perimeter of each institution. The view of these cameras is fixed to the spots where the jail meets the roads that civilians can drive upon, or the woods that people can hike through to meet inmates. These cameras are always on in the hopes of catching anyone in the act of picking up a package dumped from their car window or thrown into the woods. Since the institution has an informal hierarchy of risk based on release times, lifers have the most to lose by going to pick up a package, while those on short sentences and stat cases (those doomed to be released on their statutory date—two thirds into their sentence) have the least risk associated with getting caught.For every millionaire you meet, there’s at least two red seal chefs who swear they can cook the finest of meals, but they’re just missing one or two of the right ingredients. What ends up happening is that all the chefs make the same banana bread recipe as everyone else, and distribute it according to the politics they’ve aligned with.

“Spite-baking” is a popular activity in minimum-security institutions, where passive aggressive behavior is the only type of aggression allowed. When they frown upon beating people up, the logical secondary show of force is the exclusion of baked goods. Some people who have actually mastered the art of creating exquisite brownies, cakes, and pies, will monetize their passions by selling trays of the stuff for canteen or “road cash.” That’s the safest way for people to make money in jail, as it doesn’t involve doing anything illegal. For those who don’t mind taking the risk, you can always run to the road.

For some, the power that comes from being well known as a good baker, or being the guy who can flood the institution with anything from tobacco to cellphones to MDMA, is an unattainable sort. That’s why many choose to exercise power by becoming informants for the same staff that keep them contained to the institution. I’ve never understood why people rat—it’s not as if their sentence is reduced, or they’re allowed more privileges as a result of ratting. The rumor has always been that rats get free money added onto their phone card every month, but the $10 top-up is only good for three hour-long phone calls to your people on road. And in an institution with a 500-person population (250 in minimum), word spreads quickly about who’s talking to the guards for too long or sending kites up to the duty office about other inmates.

There used to be power simply associated with the crime that got you landed in jail, but that’s gone by the wayside as things became more tribal over the years. In Pittsburgh, a cop-killer deferred to a serial pedophile in the social order of things, simply because there were more sex offenders than anti-authoritarian types in that institution. Back in the day, the best thing you could be in jail was a Hell’s Angel, or another type of motorcycle club, member. As the influx of criminals changed, Muslims began to run the institutions.

Over time, they ceded their ground to different gangs and neighborhoods that people wore on their sleeve as they entered jail. In minimum institutions, hood politics don’t carry the same gravity as they do in medium, and it’s not uncommon to see someone from Galloway playing Ludy (a dice game where you have your pieces go around a square grid) with someone from Malvern once you get to camp. But when you’re in a medium, the institutions are segregated according to where you’re from. Collin’s Bay is designed for gang members from Regent Park, Galloway, and Jamestown. Warkworth is for the gang members who don’t see eye-to-eye with those sects, namely those from Driftwood, PO, and Eglington West. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend, as some foes will have a common nemesis and still not co-operate with each other. For example, I’ve yet to figure out who people from Falstaff align with.

Power is more than just a soap opera executive produced by 50 Cent. It is the ability to co-exist with people you may not agree with while still maintaining your pride and not sacrificing who you are. Power can be bought, but the stakes are high when dealing with individuals who see no shame in selling out their fellow cons for some phone time. Humility leads to connections, and connections lead to trust. Trust can be manipulated into power, but gaining trust is a political maneuver that not everyone can finesse. Regardless of the situation you find yourself in, it’s always a good idea to listen more than you talk, and look for common ground more than you try to tease out differences.

10: Lol This Sucks, Actually

It took until the 10th iteration of this newsletter (or Medium post, or whatever cooler blockchain-driven delivery method materializes between August 2021 and now) to talk about my emotions.

Reading back on some of these posts, I can see that I’m not really communicating how much prison truly sucks. That’s probably because focusing on the positives is one of my coping mechanisms–I can’t help but see life through the silver lining. Removal from society is one thing, but with COVID precautions all but eliminating contact with the outside world, I may as well have been doing time in Australia instead of Muskoka. Before COVID there were opportunities for inmates to go into the community to work, for their family to visit them, and even for them to get weekend passes to go some unescorted for 72 hours. I never experienced this, save for a 3 month stint working at a thrift store run by Habitat For Humanity in which I’d load old couches into and out of trucks all day.

If not for the phone calls I had with the people I had on my list who I would schedule in for weekly updates to stay afloat of how life was going on the outside, I think I’d have slipped into the same fog that engulfs lifers. If you don’t focus on life beyond the fence, you can get lost in the high-school gossip that drips throughout minimum security. When it’s difficult to place yourself in the big picture of what’s going on in the world, you revert to obsessing over the minutiae of your surroundings, wherever you are.As my parole date draws closer, the days seem to expand in length. I may have the same amount of hours in my day as Beyoncé, but the only thing it feels like I’m getting done is making it through the calendar. No amount of activities seemed to fill the 18 hours in each day that made up my sentence; not playing N64, not reading magazines, not watching movies, not listening to CDs, not doing homework. As all of these activities fell into routine and lost their novelty, they became boring.

I`m writing this on my 21st month incarcerated, with around 7 months to go. I’m in the communal room on the computer, while a group of Chinese inmates are talking loudly on the couches while Trudeau delivers his campaign message on the TV ahead of the election. By all measures, as far as punishments go, this is not that bad. But I still miss my friends, I miss my family, and I miss my freedom. I long for the simple freedom of playing GTA 5 while searching up some obscure Azealia Banks song on YouTube. All of the benefits of minimum just highlight how good life on road is. Sure you can play Madden 2001 on PS1, but after the novelty wears off it just reminds you how good the version that came out 20 years later probably is.

I think I just get bored of anything after 20 months. That’s how long I was in Montreal before I got arrested, and how long my serious relationships usually last before I perform an emotional audit to see if they’re truly working. I started writing this when I had 365 days to go, thinking that the diary would help me pass the time. There are currently 240 days left (or 13 more canteens!) and I’ve run out of shit to do. I’m in the best shape of my life, but my shoulder and ankles are tweaked, I fear permanently, keeping me from aiming to max out my bench press or playing proper defense in ball. I can speak passable French and understand a lot of the rules associated with it, at least enough to watch the news twice a day on TVA. But no amount of self-improvement changes the fact that I’m still in jail, surrounded by people who have lost all hope. This place is fucking depressing.

There’s a guy here who came in when he was 17, got out to a new world and said “fuck this” and took another life. He’s been in for 44 years, and has no intention of leaving since he loves the shit out of this little gated community in which someone cleans for him, his groceries are delivered to his door, and he never needs to go shopping for clothes. Ever since I read a review in the Economist about a book that dealt with cults, I’ve asked myself if this place is more of a cult than a prison. There’s certainly an order, words you can’t say, and a deprivation of wealth for the purpose of evening things out. The one thing that keeps it from being a cult is that some people want to leave, but even that’s not true of the entire population.

I wrote down themes for each iteration of this newsletter, but this one I just went full freestyle jazz mode. Truly, this is all first verse. The Chinese guys are talking very loudly and have taken their shoes off, and Jagmeet Singh is now on the TV making promises. This shit changes very gradually, and always for the worse. The silver lining is buried somewhere, I just have to look for it. Maybe it’s just being grateful that I’m in Canada and not in Kabul? That feels like a cheap grasp for positivity.

Everyone I befriend ends up leaving, which is amazing for them but just underscores how long I’ve been in. People feel the need to explain the minor characters that appear on 6ixbuzz, thinking that I’ve been in here long enough to not know who Debbie is when they tell me about the post where she pulled up to Drake’s mansion, or that she overdosed a few months later. It’s amazing how TMZ has become the most trusted news source around, as they are the only ones who talk about the people and things I care about. What do you think rings more bells for people who are getting out in two months, the bombing in Kabul or the fact that Kylie is pregnant again?

True happiness is hard to find here. The only times I’ve felt it was when something really funny happened, like when I watch the American versions of ‘Drag Race’ or when someone tried to fight a wild turkey and it actually flew at him after he squared up. But who knows if that’s happiness or just joy? Maybe happiness is just a lack of sadness. I’m never sad, I’m just anxious all the time. It’s hard to vent to people in here about my issues without entering into some sort of Olympic contest about who has it worse, so I just keep all of this inside. Prison is supposed to suck, just because I’m not in an American institution where the day-to-day is something straight out of ‘Oz’ doesn’t mean this is fun.

That said, anyone who says it’s impossible to make friends in your 30s should try jail.

11: Health is Wealth

When wealth no longer allows you more freedom than it does the next person, what good is being rich? In most of the population inside federal institutions, the way that wealth manifested was not through material things but through lifestyle choices. When everyone is a millionaire, the way to cut through the noise is by focusing on how people look. Cliché intact, health was wealth in federal. There’s no way Mr. Five Cent Moderna Stock makes the money he does looking like an inside-out barrel of beef jerky. The people who are certifiably rich, those who can talk about their portfolios and world issues with the breezy confidence that seems to be innate only in the wealthy, obsess over the fact that they want to look better after leaving here than they did coming in. To me, there is no greater mark of fortitude than to be able to maintain your discipline in the face of despair.

It’s very very very easy to get fat in jail. Not only are there whole sects of people who bake to pass the time and share the goods politically (see: spite baking) but it’s a pretty sedentary lifestyle if you don’t push yourself to get active. Furthermore, canteen is primarily stocked with candy, pop, and chips that end up filling pantries for two weeks at bulk. The more health-conscious items are more expensive, and require spending more of your budgeted allowance to stock up on. It’s easy to get some sugary items with $90, but that same amount can only get you creatine, fish oil, and some high-end oral care items before you max out and have to wait another two weeks.

The first thing I did upon learning that there’s a 18 month waitlist to see a dentist in prison was cut out all sugar from my diet and become an obsessive flosser. Someone had fashioned some mint-waxed string into a garrote wire at some point before my arrival at Beaver Creek, so dental floss was banned and needed to be ordered special from the catalog. I bought six. Teeth are one of the most important signs of health in a person, as bad oral hygiene betrayals your worst habits. Misshapen or black teeth likely mean the inmate has a bad substance abuse problem. Bad breath isn’t a huge giveaway of anything, but when you’re constantly in close contact with someone and talking a lot, it’s easy to pick up on. One inmate we called Five Teeth was clearly on the business end of a beating at some point during his life bid and had his whole top row of teeth knocked out of his head. My pearly whites would remain pearly and white come hell or high water.

If you want to stay in shape, federal institutions can work to your benefits in some respects. Sports is a constant pulse that breaks up the week, with volleyball, soccer, baseball, basketball, tennis, badminton and hockey going on in the gym. On both sides of the gymnasium are two weight pits that are not only well equipped but stocked with enough people that can inspire you and are happy to give you advice on how to start or target a specific muscle. At one point, I was working out during the night shift with two guys who weighed 270 pounds. The one who was 6”5 was nicknamed “The Fridge” and the shorter and stronger one was “The Mini Fridge.” Nicknames are vital for shooting the shit with people you’re on friendly terms with, and most of these short forms are borne out of one’s physical appearance, quarks, or criminal charges.

The aforementioned canteen did allow you to put together some semblance of a skin-care routine while in custody. Although there are no Khiels lotions or charcoal face masks, you can put together something that works for you. I personally had a combination of Pears Soap, apricot facial scrub, and St. Ives lotion that preserved whatever youth I had left. For many people, jail keeps them looking young since there’s no alcohol or tobacco to speed up the aging process.

Giving up on your body is the first step towards giving up on your future. Penitentiary time proved that discipline can be built regardless of your conditions, and that there is no limit to what you can do with your body, whether it’s inside a box or not.

12: Missing the Internet, Mostly Just Google

It took just three months of not having a phone for me to start noticing an improvement in my memory. My digital detox is one of the other unseen benefits of my stay here. I’m in an odd scenario because, unlike the people who have been here for 14 years and recently been released, I know what I’m missing and how trivial it is. I feel for the guy who discovers YouTube for the first time in his life and slips into a K-Hole of Ed Sheeran propaganda after looking up a music video. But I know what I’m missing, and I don’t feel particularly empty for missing it.

There’s something to be said about forming your own opinion about books and music without getting things bounced at you from the depths of Twitter’s echo chamber. It’s also interesting to reflect those pieces of culture through your own lived or learned experiences, such as watching a documentary about ‘Midnight Basketball’ and the US Crime Bill through the viewpoint of someone in prison. One of the best things about being a reformed Hot Take Exporter is realizing, in hindsight, how ephemeral the idea of something like live tweeting award shows was. Culture now has a stake in being controversial, which makes the mundane out of what was once shocking. When everything is clickbait, nothing is clickbait. The only thing I really missed out on was TikTok, which I can’t say is fully true since it appears to be a version of Vine that’s plugged directly into the mainstream, as “celebrities” from the platform seem to have less friction than ever when it comes to transitioning into cable shows. Everything also seems to run on the blockchain now, which is better not only for authenticity’s sake but also because it folds into my interests.

This is easy to say when I don’t have access to a device, but I’m probably only going to use my phone for social media purposes an hour a day once I touch road. The feeling I got from being online and being “surrounded” by information was a former justification of mine for staying online. But after spending my day in a library, I realize that that feeling is transferrable into the real world too. This may seem like a dumb realization to have, but the idea that information exists offline is something that it took coming to jail to click-in. Discussing an idea or an article with someone for 10 minutes in person is more fulfilling than arguing with strangers about it online.

The beauty of taking a criminal justice sociology course in here was that I was able to bring a lot to the table when it came to the readings. When I went to Laurentian University the first time at 19, all I wanted to do was finish my day and leave to go smoke popper’s in Joey’s garage. Now, more than 10 years later, I relish doing the reading because it provides an academic vocabulary to thoughts that have been jumbled around the periphery of my mind for the years I’ve been in. Having that stream of information available to me eventually became a channel for me to route information and culture through. It’s like when you’re learning a new language, you begin to see it everywhere in your daily life (like how “camouflage” is just French for “hidden”), picking up a new interest re-maps your brain to absorb information through new pathways. In hindsight, the only thing Twitter provided was a stage where culture and events could be processed to answer the question of “how do I condense this event into an ironic joke that expresses apathy but still sounds smart?”

There are times when having a phone is imperative, but they’re mostly for the purposes of trivia items or when you need to remember an actor’s name that’s on the tip of your tongue. But most of these things can wait until you call your people and ask them to Google “Kevin Connoly IMDB” and read the non-‘Entourage’ items. There were also a few times we just asked a guard to search how many titles Udonis Haslem had won in order to settle a bet, and he’d come tell us the next time he walked through the unit. The cool thing about there only being like 12 websites now is that I know exactly what I’m missing, and it’s not much. The loss of access to knowledge is balanced out the lack of illusions around the fact that what you’re doing when you’re wasting time is actually “researching” something.

13: Bad People Don’t Exist, Karma Isn’t Real

Despite all the time I’ve spent in prison, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who self-identifies as a bad person. Putting aside all of the legitimate psychopaths and people who wear the negative stigma of criminality as a badge of honour, there’s two reasons people find themselves in jail. The nicest way of packaging those two groups are “lazy entrepreneurs” and “those who suffer gravely from mental health issues.” A more corrosive type of terminology is used by sociologist Steven Spitzer to label the groups “social junk” and “social dynamite.” According to Spitzer, jail’s primary purpose is to handle the “human wreckage” constantly produced by the stresses capitalism places on families, communities and individuals.

Those who are dynamite/lazy entrepreneurs decided to play the game of life using their own rules and took some shortcuts to wealth and happiness, sometimes because they didn’t know any other way to accrue wealth but mostly because they knew, and found the alternative more alluring. Those in the junk/mental health group aren’t criminal-minded, but just snapped on someone at some point in their life and made a life-altering decision in the process. If asked, neither grouping would say they’re a bad person, just that they made some bad decisions.

Buying into this same logic, “good” people don’t exist either. People simply make good decisions to avoid negative consequences whether they be tangible and based in legal rule, or intangible and based on religious doctrine (karma falls into this category). Obviously, there’s a wide range on this morality spectrum. Not everyone who finds their wife cheating on them goes on to kill her, and not everyone who finds a wallet returns it with all the money intact.

But why do people put themselves in the “good person” bucket so quickly? Most people know that they do not deserve to be there if they perform any sort of internal audit on their actions, but that doesn’t stop them from self-diagnosing. If people in prison don’t refer to themselves as “bad people,” then where are all of the bad people hiding? If anything, my time has shown me that good and bad people don’t exist at all, and the moral dichotomy is something that was created by Hollywood to sell us propaganda masked as tropes.

Reform is framed through applying a Marxist lens to criminal justice because the current system of punishment has roots in neoliberal economics. Viewing crime through an economic lens means that some believe that if you exact a high enough price for committing crime, people will not do it. This flies in the face of the evidence that offenders are not thinking about the consequences of their actions when they commit crimes. Since neoliberalism paints all social problems as individual problems, and individuals are solely responsible for fixing their own shit, law and order needs the dichotomy of good and bad in order to function. The two social institutions that neo-liberals believe in are the “free” market, and law and order, so a look at the foundation would potentially shake the very structure of their beliefs.

I think the reason most people are so quick to label themselves as good is because it demonstrates that they’ve succeeded at playing the game using the rules society has agreed upon. It’s a philosophical question to ask why we don’t question the way things are and why we’re here, so it is easier to just not do this and follow the rules. Most people who leave prison (the dynamite types, not the wreckage types) go on to live a life where they get a union job, learn a trade, and perform manual labour in order to make their parole officers—an instrument of the neoliberal state—happy.

Bad people don’t exist at the numbers the incarceration rate would have you believe, only lazy or sick people who commit bad actions do. The faster society understands law and order through this lens to apply restorative instead of punitive systems, the better it will be for everyone.

14: Working for “The Man”

There’s two main ideological camps in penitentiaries when it comes to working attitudes: Those who say they’re not going to work for CSC by any means, and those who will happily go the extra mile in whatever menial labour gig they get assigned. Those in the former group are likely short-timers who don’t see the point in doing something that could benefit their oppressors in any way. They will find whatever excuses, medical or otherwise, to keep from having to go to work each morning. The second camp is mostly made up of lifers who seem to believe that a shining letter from their boss is going to be the difference maker when they go up to see the parole board. Many live in the middle ground, doing just enough to not piss off the authorities while still making sure they maintain autonomy over their schedule. For many who have been incarcerated for a long time and lost support from their family, the $4-$7 they earn per day is the only hope they have of sustaining themselves.

None of the jobs presented at the institutions are difficult. For the first 18 months I worked as a butcher, cut and stamped facemasks, upholstered furniture for the army, loaded donated couches in and out of moving vans, and worked as a farm hand tapping trees for the syrup harvest. Most of these jobs have been for CORCAN, a subsidiary of CSC that handles its manual labour and acts like the manufacturing arm of corrections. CORCAN doesn’t just makes clothes and furniture for institutions across Canada, with a compartmentalization that means that one institution ends up making all of one product for the rest of (fun fact: a women’s prison makes all of the men’s underwear). It also uses inmate labour to provide goods for the army, the post office, and government offices across the country.

That means inmates can be tasked with making gun lockers for the military barracks one week, sew up mail bags the next, and then construct aluminium cubicles to be shipped to some bureau in Ottawa.

The last third of my sentence was spent taking University courses in Sociology and a French correspondence course. Both of these endeavors were self-funded and completed without any assistance from the institution. I had to find my own spot in the library and work independently, and since there was nobody else in my course, discussions were limited to the two helpfully smart lifers who worked in the library. Although, since one of them was a staunch libertarian and the other was a Soviet studies graduate from University of Toronto, their worldviews were pointed in a way that didn’t always provide me with the answers I needed.

I was under the impression that one could learn a trade while incarcerated, but apparently, those programs ended under Stephen Harper in the mid-2000s. The only schooling available was for inmates who didn’t complete their Grade 10 education, and the classes were taught by exceedingly patient teachers who came three times a week just to help out. Although the library was well-stocked, there was no guide on where to start reading specific materials or curriculum. Plus, to be completely frank, most of the population was comfortably dim and uneager to do anything but watch TV and eat snacks all day.

Most of the skills that can be imported into the real world don’t come from anything that CSC does for inmates. To be fair, most of these restrictions are caused by inmates screwing it up for others by taking stupid risks. For example, there was once a table saw in the hobby craft room until an inmate sliced his hand in half. The thing about freedoms and privileges is that they’re easy to take away but are never really reinstated.

All of the things that Stephen Harper took away are still missing, despite the fact that Justin Trudeau talks a good game about criminal justice reform.

The true benefits I’ve seen for inmates only kick in one they become ex-cons. For lifers who get out, they have to spend a mandatory two years in a halfway house, which has a set of rules that mirror the authority of prison, but are still a place within a community where you can go out and rebuild your life. At a halfway house, your rent and groceries are covered. Whenever you get a job, you can stack up enough money to get on your feet after you complete the two years in the hallway house. Since you’re required to submit to a piss test every month, blowing all your money on drugs is out of the question. If you get a trades certificate and become a tradesperson, it’s very feasible that after two years you’ll have enough money for a place of your own.

I think the problem is that everyone is striving for exponential growth. Nobody wants linear success anymore, they want to do One Big Thing that will bring them all the fame and fortune that will keep them from having to be in the rat race. Nobody sells drugs as a career plan, they do it in anticipation of the one big score after which they’ll be able to retire.

You can’t make someone a hard worker. That ethic is only self-installed after the alternative presents itself. Sloth builds complacency and mediocrity, and bad decisions are always made when looking for shortcuts. Being in jail doesn’t force anyone to change, only the promise of a better life does that. If you see that the guy beside you is living better than he was a year ago after doing a few easy tasks, you can decide to level yourself up in his image. But you need to make that choice for yourself, and a lot of people see jail as a way to network in the wrong direction and get caught up in dumber shit than what landed them here to begin with.

15: Bobbing and Weaving Through COVID in Corrections

One afternoon, while waiting for canteen in a line with a group of inmates, I heard a guy who had been in jail for 20 years tell everyone that the only time he was happy to be incarcerated was during COVID. Not only do you know that you’re in a sequestered island away from society where you can take the proper steps to ensure your dealings with “the outside” are protected, but you also have the “freedom” to exist alongside others who are safe from harm.

It’s an interesting experience being isolated from society when it came time for society to isolate from each other. While the general, not incarcerated population was asked to stay inside with only their friends and family, inmates were segregated into pods with people they had never met. The lack of alternative news meant that everything that came through was from the mainstream lens of doom, gloom, and body count tickers on the TV. Security measures were introduced seemingly at random, and enforced briefly if at all. Guards didn’t wear masks, temperature checks were re-done until the right reading showed up, and the only thing that was maintained through every sectional lockdown in the jail was yard time. For some reason, even after it was proven that it was an airborne virus that could spread from person to person but not via object, the wiping down of door handles remained high on the list of concerns for CSC staff. I managed to move from Joyceville Assessment five months before they suffered the worst outbreak in Canada, with 60% of the institution getting infected as a result of—allegedly!—a kitchen steward bringing it in. I worked in the kitchen at Joyceville and let me tell you that as far as rumors go, this one is very easy to believe.

Four people died as a direct result of this negligence. A government body was instructed with maintaining the welfare of people in its care, and it failed. Over ten percent of the inmate population in Canada got COVID. By comparison, only 2% of the Canadian population had contracted the disease by that time. This is just federal statistics. The numbers for provincial jails, which seemed to suffer outbreaks at a pace of one a month for a year, are much harder to find.

These grim numbers only reflect the people who died from the virus. As a result of lockdowns, many people in provincial jails and medium security federal institutions overdosed on contraband, brought on by either boredom or deteriorating mental health. We may never find out the true body count brought on by COVID hitting corrections, which is a scary thought in a country as advanced as Canada.

I know the common refrain will be “they’re prisoners, they made bad decisions and hurt people, who cares if they die?” But consider the fact that the worst offenders, the high profile ones who have their mug shot on TV and have their name become eponymous with some heinous era in Canada, are the ones best protected from the virus. The Church Street Killer and the Minivan Incel are on 23 hour lockdown in maximum security, they don’t interact with anyone long enough to catch an airborne virus. Those who suffered COVID’s effect were the medium and minimum inmates, the ones in for drug dealing, a driving while impaired charge, or for fraud. Nobody deserves to die from COVID, but the man who defrauded a business partner and was sentenced for 2 years in custody shouldn’t receive a death sentence via negligence.

The way that the government of Canada handled COVID in Corrections might go down as one of Trudeau’s greatest embarrassments—which is saying a lot for that guy. It didn’t help that the minister in charge of our health and safety was Bill Blair, the former police commissioner for Toronto. But the personal silver lining through all of this was the fact that I’ve never become so civil-minded and engaged in politics now that it had a direct hand in the life-and-death decisions that affected those around me.

16: Corrections Needed

So you’ve been found guilty and sentenced to federal time. What’s next? Immediately after the judge reads out how much time you’ll be expected to spend as federal property, you’re taken to a holding cell where you’ll be held until it’s time to ship you to the provincial institution closest to the courthouse. Once there you’ll be stripped and equipped with a kit of clothing, including an orange one-piece jumpsuit. Since you’re technically federal property, the provincial institution needs to alleviate themselves of you within 14 days—a delay that’s been exponentially lengthened due to COVID-19 and has resulted in federal inmates being housed in provincial detention centres for up to six months.

During your time in provincial, you can expect to double or even triple bunk, sharing a toilet and a small table where you’ll each take your meals during the times you’re locked up. If there’s no staffing or safety issues in the entire institution, you may be allowed out of your cell for a few hours a day, but if they’re even one person short or a “code blue” is announced on the speakers marking a fight somewhere in the building, you’ll be locked up all day. According to some rumoured legal standard, an inmate must be allowed out every 72 hours in order to bathe and use the phone, which is exactly what takes place after three days of lockdowns as a guard escorts two inmates at a time for 20 minutes to do both activities.

Once you hear your name called for the wagon to Kingston, your time as federal property starts in earnest. You arrive at an assessment institution where you’re meant to spend 70 to 90 days in order to meet with a preliminary parole officer and figure out what sorts of programs you’ll need to take during your time, and where you’ll be stationed for the remainder of your sentence. Your “criminal recidivism index” score decides your programs, and which mother institution you’ll do a majority of your time in is judged according to your “security intervention risk” rating. It’s at this level where you’re given a patina of individuality, as you’re no longer made to wear orange and can have some personal effects sent in.

Since assessment is a mandatory stop for everyone’s path of progress, there’s a mixing of offenders as maximum and minimum security individuals are all housed on the same range. For anyone with a life sentence, maximum security for two years is a non-negotiable stepping stone in the journey. Those who have been prescribed a set of programs will be assigned an institution that can facilitate those needs, provided they have no incompatible inmates. As Ontario is home to nine institutions of various security levels, everyone will find a home eventually.

The goal for everyone is to cascade down the various levels of security until they can end up at minimum security—colloquially known as “camp.” At the mother institution, you are housed with between 200 to 500 other inmates, depending on the security level. To avoid overcrowding and maintain safety Correction Service Canada has a mandate about keeping one guard for every four inmates in maximum security, one for every eight in medium, and one for every sixteen in minimum. The way to graduate and progress through security levels is to take programs that address everything from an inmate’s attitude to substance abuse issues. These programs involve a classroom-style situation where a group will walk through a PowerPoint deck featuring the vocabulary necessary for them to address the issues that led to their index offense and crime cycle.

As long as an inmate maintains perfect attendance and doesn’t antagonize the class, the program is considered successful and a box is ticked on the offender’s correctional plan. During the regular meetings an offender is meant to have with their Parole Officer, progress is demonstrated and marked in the hopes of qualifying them towards a lower security level, and eventually conditional release. The worst of the worst are unlikely to see release, especially if they never show any remorse or apologize for their actions, or if they continually neutralize their actions by reframing them in a way that the parole officer doesn’t agree with.

Doing time in a federal institution isn’t difficult if you come into the experience respectful of all cultures and keep your thinking from being too rigid. Loss of autonomy is subjective—while reframing the experience as a “digital detox” may be a way of neutralizing your offense and the retribution you’ve incurred for it, it’s also a coping mechanism that proves useful for some. If you enter the institution with strong social ties to certain groups that may provide safety on the inside, like a religious sect or street gang, you’re more likely to see the experience not as a punishment but as a necessary crucible in your professional development.

The biggest hurdle for anyone to get over is the boredom experienced by not being able to leave a certain building for a majority of your day and having to be put onto a set schedule. The warehousing era of criminal justice in Canada may not be as applicable under COVID, during which federal institutions have been purposefully keeping numbers low, but the push for turning offenders into “zombies” or “robots” is evident in the prescription drugs that healthcare prescribes. Anyone experiencing trouble sleeping will be given Trazadone, Ramron, or Syraquil—medications that are actually SSRIs with sedentary effects. By keeping the offender’s mood dampened, they are kept docile and mild-mannered. This may make the jobs of the guards easier, but it can also be seen as a soft punishment and a form of retribution.

There are no longer any punishments of the body, but there are codes and cultural tropes one must be mindful of while living in prison. Some of them have been around so long that they can be classified as indigenous, if only because they help establish the line between the inmates and the guards. For example, inmates are to never whistle, as that’s what guards used to do when they brought an inmate to be hung back in the early days of Canada’s federation. Similarly, one should not jangle keys, as that is also guard behaviour. Words like “goof” are triggers to fight, though nobody knows exactly why such an inoffensive word in modern parlance became such a trigger on the inside. There’s also a number of imported cultural tropes which have come in waves over the years as different cultures drifted through the institution, leaving their imprint upon the place long after they left.

The Muslim contingency that made sure there’s a twin “pork-free” cooking apparatus in each kitchen, the Jamaican groups that made homophobia the norm to the point where you need to say “yellow fruit” instead of “banana.” These linguistic tics have seeped into the walls to the point where they are ingrained in those who have spent enough time in institutions that they’ve grown “prisonized” and self-censor. These can be seen as mental punishments, for they create an additional mesh of censorship that needs to be forever present in an inmate’s mind in order to move without conflict in the institution.

Most of the people in prison are misguided. The terms “social junk” and “social dynamite” are overt in their categorizations. To put it simply, institutions are filled with either lazy entrepreneurs or individuals with mental health issues. Those who fall in the latter camp need to receive the sort of constant care that correctional guards can’t provide, and are best suited to mental health institutions than criminal ones. However, the lazy entrepreneurs would be the ones that would benefit most from a rethinking of the neoliberal idea of prison, and would absorb any of the skills that could be taught to them during their time incarcerated. As it stands, their entrepreneurial mind-state is put to use networking with other criminal individuals who are also bored.

The explicit purpose of Correctional Service Canada is to protect society by removing guilty people from public life, to deter future criminal acts by punishing offenders, and to rehabilitate inmates. It’s tempting to say that none of this works, but anecdotally I can attest to the fact that nobody I’ve met during my time has decided to change their ways as a result of something CSC has instilled in them, through programs or otherwise. Neutralization techniques can help anyone cope with the lack of privacy and loss of family relationships that occur during their time incarcerated by reminding themselves that it’s temporary. The sophisticated methods of surveillance aren’t used to keep inmates safe as much as they’re used to keep the guard’s jobs easy and keep contraband out from the institution.

At every step, it is evident that the guards are not responsible for the social welfare of the prisoner, so moral bankruptcy and deterioration can very easily fester when an institutionalized person sees that nobody cares about their well-being. This flippant attitude is apparent in the guard’s actions, who regularly tell inmates that they are just there for the paycheck and are “doing time” just like them, counting down the days to a retirement pension from the federal government.

Privatization has led to some dangerous and deadly effects in America, but keeping Canada’s correction system in public hands while adding a unionized layer to the staff in charge of inmates has created a unique set of problems. Like most unionized workers, CSC staff expect to see their wages and workplace standards rise in perpetuity. Nobody in a union job will ever sign on to go the extra mile and do more work for free, especially when it could make them into a class traitor or scab in the process. Similar to police unions, guard unions can use their power as a voting bloc to keep legislation favorable and vote in Members of Parliament who are tough on law and order. They can go on strike if they feel like their needs aren’t being taken seriously, in which case the primary losers are the prisoners who depend on the guards in order to be let out of their cells.

Corrections are needed at some level of Correction Services Canada, but the only question is where to point the solutions and where to find money for it. “Privatization” has been a dirty word in Canadian politics ever since the Penetanguishine experiment, but to look at the system as it exists today and see it as being in full working order is naïve. To borrow terminology from the tech sector, corrections presents a vast pool of untapped human capital and with the right guidance could venture into novel technological frontiers. Maybe the best way forward is to take a bold step in an experimental direction, because as it’s set up now it doesn’t seem to be working for anyone.

17: What is a Perfect Prison?

Let’s imagine a world in which we have a “perfect” correction institution, and what that would look like practically. This institution would be one that not only serves the desires of the public’s need for safety from dangerous offenders via removal from society, but also one that rehabilitates those people who have been underserved by society. It would need to provide inmates with the skills they need to be ready for life on the outside, while allowing them to make amends for the mistakes that brought them to prison in the first place. It would keep inmates from feeling “institutionalized” by allowing them to maintain some level of autonomy over their lives, while still prioritizing the safety of the other inmates, as well as the correctional officers meant to watch over them.

Canada is the ideal place to try this, since it’s a country that wants to reform its criminal justice system, has a large number of incarcerated individuals, and has had negative experiments with privatization of prisons, which in turn would motivate it to try something new. The best place to start would be minimum security, which is already the last step before many inmates are allowed back into society. Minimum security inmates already enjoy things like decreased barriers to working in the community and the ability to shop for and cook their own food, so improving these institutions would be easier than reforming any others. In an effort to keep from participating in the prison industrial complex, the solution can’t simply be to build more institutions meant solely for federal inmates. The ideal shift would be to add a forked path at the end of the existing pipeline, where inmates within two years of release can transition towards two streams: High-skilled information labour, or military service.For this system to work, we’d have to operate under the assumption that the existing system that places inmates in the proper institution based on their security score works.

As it stands, lifers must go in front of the parole board for a decision any time they are to be released into the community, even if they are to be escorted the entire time by a correctional officer. We’d have to also assume that the parole board makes the right decision one hundred percent of the time, and everyone who “graduates” to minimum security deserves the right to be there. With these assumptions established, the last step of corrections would kick in only when someone Is within two years of their day parole eligibility—a date set at one third of a federal sentence, minus six months. Parole officers would be the ultimate arbiters of choice in this matter, and could hold someone back from this program if they believe they aren’t a good fit or need more time in a structured environment before being granted the privilege of embarking on these next steps.

The newly created ‘Correctional Reserves’ stream would ship inmates to an army, air force, or navy barracks for them to serve out the remainder of their sentence. Under the watchful eye of commanders and sergeants, inmates would serve as full-time on-site reservists, existing far outside of the military organizational chart. They would be charged with maintenance of the grounds and equipment, and not be given access to any weapons or classified information. Inmates would sleep on-site and eat with the cadets, enforcing pro-social behaviours and reducing the effects of institutionalization that may have crept in. Since inmates don’t return daily to their institution, the smuggling of contraband isn’t an issue and is monitored in the same way it currently is on the army grounds. Upon completion of their sentence, inmates who participated in the Correctional Reserve program would be eligible to enter the Reserves officially and potentially work their way up the military hierarchy starting from the bottom. This stream would be most beneficial for anyone who has the classifications of a low-skilled labour employee, but lacks the discipline to self-motivate their way into entrepreneurship.

The ‘Correctional Technology Training’ stream of the program would ship inmates out to a federally run institution that would be closer in environment to campus than to prison. This institution would provide advanced learning programs for anyone interested in data infrastructure, coding programs, website development, or mobile application creation. Funding would come partly from a technology partner, who would equip the institution to act like a “Smart City” where data is mined from an individual’s daily mundane interactions within the space in an effort to find avenues for optimization. The most drastic change from existing minimum-security prisons to this Smart Institution would be the fact that not only inmates are housed on the property.

Teachers would be able to enter and exit freely, and any civilians who choose to pursue this advanced learning would be able to live on campus as well, provided they adhere to the same rules around contraband as the Correction’s Officers would (no smoking on the property, for example). All inmates would be required to equip themselves with some sort of wearable technology in order to monitor their movements, while the civilians would not. Upon graduating from the Smart Institute, any inmate who chose to pursue the Correctional Technology Training stream would be able to apply for an internship with the technology partner involved and work their way up within the ranks of the organization.

These additional streams would act like training grounds for labour, reducing recidivism rates by giving inmates something to strive for and some sense of purpose. Harper-era mandates removed the ability for inmates to learn skilled labour trades in the institution, and this would be a remedial effort to equip inmates with something productive to take from their time incarcerated. Not only are inmates given some tools to start anew with, but by regularly interacting with civilian populations, they can begin the reintegration process of being released into the community without the jarring effects that post-release life can have on people now.

As it currently stands, Canada’s correction system doesn’t prepare the incarcerated for life on the outside. Since life without parole doesn’t exist in Canada, everyone eventually makes their way out—save for the most violent or dangerous offenders. Being released from prison means that you’re able to write a new chapter in your life, but you’re also constantly reminded of the fact that you’re starting at the bottom. This is a humbling experience, but it also lets you know that you have somewhere to climb to if you’re driven enough and given the right set of tools to make use of. It shouldn’t be a hopeless situation, and the way to keep it from being one is to make the most of the “social wreckage” as early on as possible in their rehabilitation.

18: Tall Poppies Syndrome

For a culture that’s in a constant state of self-assessment, Canada does offer a healthy dose of propaganda that it feeds its own citizens every November. The events are referred to as “Vimy Ridge” and “D-Day” for WWI and WWII, respectively. With poppies on, Canadians take a moment of silence to remember the lives lost in war. This practice is much more pronounced in places like Kingston than Toronto, as I found out when the whole store I was working in during my prison work release came to a halt at 11:00 AM on the 11th of the month.

Sociologist Jonathan Vance looked at the memorials Canada constructed after the First World War and found that they helped the country establish a “religion of state.” In this new secular religion of statehood the myth of Christ’s suffering and ultimate sacrifice on the cross was being replaced by the soldier’s suffering and ultimate sacrifice in the trenches. The national flag was replacing the crucifix. This new state mythology gave a ' purified' narrative of the Great War ' free of complexity' and re-cast the trauma of the war in the larger mythology of democracy, Empire, and the birth of the Canadian nation-state.

When I first enrolled in elementary school in Canada and it came time to learn history, I understood the way the war ended in a different way than how my mother did. She came of age in the USSR, and had never heard of “D-Day” in her life. Her teaching had taught her that WWII had come to a halt in Stalingrad, where troops were frozen into surrender. The version I learned in history class re-centered the war through the eyes of Canada and cast the trauma in a mythology of democracy. The idea being that “Canada” wouldn’t be possible if not for the battles its soldiers fought in at the end of each war.

With no wars taking place between now and then, this “religion of state” has extended to slain police officers in the following decades. Though Canadians seem to be going through a fraught relationship with their local police forces right now, there is a general level of appreciation for the federal force of RCMP officers, or ‘Mounties.’ No other country in the world is so globally identifiable by their police force. When one of the biggest cultural exports of Canada is our police force and the greatest coagulation point for our patriotic feelings is the remembrance of fallen soldiers, calling out someone for being un-Canadian means calling someone out for not loving the police. Especially in a secular nation like Canada where religion is considered less and less of a comfort, the religion of the state is all that some people have left to look towards for common ground. Canada is a land of immigrants with no culture to assimilate into. This can lead to sticky situations, like what happened with Don Cherry.

Don Cherry was a hockey commentator with loud suits and gruff opinions. In 2019, he said that new immigrants to Canada don’t recognize the gravity that comes from wearing a poppy. His abrasive opinion ended up getting him fired from ‘Hockey Night In Canada’ while making him a folk-hero in the eyes of the people who make sure to honor the moment of silence every November 11th. But Don Cherry was right: New arrivals to Canada don’t understand the religion of the state that comes from knowing about two indecisive battles that meant little in the grand scheme of the wars, but are vital to Canada’s understanding of Canada. His opinion was dumb, but correct, because the whole situation is dumb and hard to disagree with.

You can’t begrudge new immigrants for not knowing who we fought 100 years ago. Maybe the solution is new ops, a new set of challengers to take on. At the very least, we need something new to rally around, something that unites people all over Canada. Maybe the solution is to take down all the statues and replace them with new statues of pop stars: Bieber, Mendes, Drake, Abel. These can be our new lodestars—those who valiantly marched into America and came back famous—not old fallen troops.

19: Freedom vs. Order

The paradox of order versus freedom sits heavier upon society than ever before. As the world seems to take on a new reality annually, the question of who enforces novel laws always follows in the wake of their creation. While topics like COVID have put society’s rules in a hyperbolic chamber where new regulations shoot up like sprouts from wet soil, order tries to leash freedoms we once took for granted. While there may not be a clear answer to how much freedom we can have under the threat of seemingly arbitrary laws, beginning to look at the police as a commercial enterprise and not a guardian institution would help us make sense of the decisions they continue to make. The society of 2022 cares infinitely more about the enforcement of mask regulations and vaccine protocols than it did in 2019, due partly to some’s concern for the “greater good” but mostly to the threat of punishment that shrouds would-be law-breakers. Order has been presented as the tonic, and freedom must be sacrificed for the common cause.

This is not a new phenomenon, but due to COVID, protests, and wars we’re seeing it play out over the series of months instead of years.

Anecdotally, the police have always been enforcers of order. They have limited the freedom of upstart entrepreneurs to pursue black market dealings that may have been legal at one point, or may well be legal in the future. A tavern owner in Ontario in 1915 would be akin to a local celebrity and would have earned an honest living from selling liquor to his neighbours. Three years later, that same barkeep would be a lawbreaker under the Ontario Temperance Act. Fast forward to 1924, our tavern owner would be able to operate without issue from the local officers again—assuming he only bought his goods at a licensed alcohol distributor. The introduction of liquor taxes allowed the government to monitor our tavern keeper, but it also transformed the police force into a commercial enterprise.

If the police are truly guardian institutions, they are expected to defend a “greater good” and operate with a sense of public duty. Commercial enterprises seek to “move fast and break things” in the name of profit. By changing the definition of “greater good” based on manufactured fears, and then resetting that change whenever there’s the possibility of turning a profit from it, the police undermine themselves. If guardians worried solely about profit, they would abandon the greater good.

The police and the labour movements have a fraught history that’s entwined at its origins but splits outwards and farther away as time goes on and police abandon class consciousness after making more money as a result of having the same strong unions that they fought to break up decades earlier. Commercial enterprises should still enjoy the protection of unions and collective bargaining. Problems arise when police use their unions to keep from having to follow new regulations set onto them by the federal powers. Police unions and associations want to maintain their own freedom from outside the thumb of the government who provides them funding, which seeks to enforce order onto the police force.

If society ran similar, to how a police force operates, it would be bedlam. We need to feel as though laws aren’t being created arbitrarily and haphazardly. Until we can see the police as something other than a commercial enterprise, we can’t trust them to maintain objective order.

20: pig emoji

Being a cop sucks and its always sucked. Back in the day, cops fought against unions and broke up strikes until they achieved some class-consciousness and got their own unions. Then those unions started to work so well, they were not just pushing back via collective bargaining against low wages and poor working conditions, but on rules that said they had to limit their use of force or wear a body cam. Once they started to make some money (look up how much of your city’s budget goes towards funding the police, then look up how much of that police’s budget goes towards salary and wages) they abandoned class consciousness and no longer saw themselves as part of the neighbourhood they’re supposed to protect.

Once cops no longer trusted anyone but other cops, policing the community hard became harder as they were no longer part of the community.This “us vs. them” mentality is enforced by the force as early as rookie training camp, where they have to go through hazing rituals and are essentially brainwashed into loving Authority Daddy. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a tool of the oppressor, but when the average officer goes through a gauntlet specifically designed to remove his objective morals and loyalties, how can you begrudge the decisions they make?

There’s no easy solution, but maybe the most drastic one would be to remove police unions and associations. I’m generally anti-union when it comes to organizing a group that has guardianship (such as police, corrections officers, and teachers) and I generally find unions to be an obstacle to efficiency and maturation for industries. Imagine the army had a union where basic infantry and foot soldiers could take steps to not only fight for better wages, but also negotiate the work they’re asked to do. If demands aren’t met, the army would go on strike. This thought-experiment would be near impossible to imagine, since in the army you’re a direct instrument of the government. With the police, you’re two or three steps away from being employed by the Empire of The State, but you’re essentially still a soldier.

Like most unions, police unions no longer serve a greater purpose as most of the things they fought for hundreds of years ago have become enshrined in laws. Is policing a dangerous job? Statistically, not very. In Canada, the rate of on-the-job fatalities for police officers is 14 deaths per 100,000. That’s well below manual labour jobs like mining (281), construction (246), pilots (137), truck drivers (38), and plumbers (31) Without a doubt, police officers sometimes face fatal risks. Without a doubt, police officers sometimes perform heroic deeds. But the dangers they face aren’t as great as they’d have us believe. Thanks to US popular culture, the idea that policing is among the most dangerous of jobs is axiomatic.

The police will still catch criminals if unions cease to exist, and the legal arm of criminal justice functions just fine without their own unions. The idea of a fraternity or brotherhood of police officers isn’t just a silly boys club mentality, but it also leads to actual danger for civilians. One of the worst mass-shootings in Canadian history was committed in 2020 in Nova Scotia by an individual who dressed up in a cop uniform and rode around in a car altered to look like a police cruiser. He was a dentist who failed to become a police officer in a past life.

We may never know the inner dealings that this individual had when he committed domestic terrorism. What we do know is that the clothes he donned while performing these heinous acts wasn’t a religious garb or a graphic t-shirt with his favorite website featured in stylized font, but a police uniform.

21: Police in Pop Culture

There’s a rule in jail that says you can’t watch cop shows on common room TVs. That’s a lot easier said than done since so many primetime shows somehow about law enforcement. But with this rule in mind, I would constantly sneak to my room and lock my door every day at noon to watch ‘Brooklyn 99’ on FX for an hour.What can the most popular cultural depictions of police officers tell us about respect for the government at any given time? Looking at only the dominant exporter of media (America, duh) we can trace an interesting arc that goes from ‘Keystone Kops’, to ‘Dragnet’, to ‘Dirty Harry’, to ‘24’, and ends at ‘Brooklyn 99’. Those are the main cultural totems when it comes to portraying the police in each era, though there are other smaller shows that exist within the umbrella of those.

There are also shows like ‘Law and Order’ and ‘CSI’ that have become such major franchises and self-contained universes that they have their own evolutionary arc when it comes to their depictions of the police over the years.

From the start of police in pop culture, the public saw them—and therefore, the nation-state which they represented—go from inept, to efficient, to being bad for good reasons, to being a tool that’s begrudgingly necessary. The fact that the depictions changed in line with major US-centric world events like WWII (‘Dragnet’), the Cold War (‘Dirty Harry’), and the War on Terror (‘24’) is a reflection of how the citizens of the government saw their leaders role in the bigger picture. More often than not, the message that each of these shows sent was that bending the rules is sometimes necessary if it results in the greater good being served.

‘Brooklyn 99’ is an interesting depiction of the police in pop culture because, by being created in the 2010s and existing in a constant state of flux, it tells us more about the general public’s respect for the government than it likely intended to upon its inception. Jake Peralta, the central character, grew up on a diet of cop shows and movies, openly praising the ‘Die Hard’ saga and other cop shows frequently. In one opening scene, the episode opens with the precinct discussing their favorite cop shows, something that establishes ‘Brooklyn 99’ as cop show with a Meta lens.

The show features a diverse cast of characters that’s meant to be representative of the New York precinct they serve, and there’s numerous arcs on the show where these stereotypes are poked at to highlight the human nature of the police and the community that cops are sourced from. The show also deals with issues like stop and frisk and racism within the force head-on, developing a humanity around the people who have to uphold laws that may be flawed.

While more liberal-leaning cop shows aren’t a new development, with shows like ‘Barney Miller’ and ‘Hill Street Blues’ existing in the zeitgeist at the same time as shows like ‘24’, the public’s reaction to ‘Brooklyn 99’ made it matter more than any show in the past. The show was temporarily cancelled, then brought back to a new network after a petition from fans, only to cease production in the wake of the racial upheaval that began the 20s. In its own way of existing in a constant state of questioning flux, ‘Brooklyn 99’ tells us more about the public’s respect for the government than it probably intended to.

Depictions of the police in media have existed for as long as we’ve had media. Police shows are a perfect vehicle for drama because not only do they deal with moral themes like good vs evil, they’re a good way to reflect signs of the times by keeping the public up-to-date with important issues. By focusing on the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, they can shift the focus away from the cops as central lodestars of morality.

In its attempts to tell funny cop stories while still being diverse, meta, and woke—only to still be taken off the air twice, ‘Brooklyn 99’ tell us about the general public’s respect for the government than it likely intended to.

22: Toronto is Gangland

This Toronto hood shit is almost Shakespearean. Imagine a constantly changing power rankings system in which gangs are constantly moving up and down based on notoriety levels. The top five spots would remain consistent over the past ten years (the Drake era) and maybe even beyond. In fact, a map of the highest rates of incarceration indicates that offenders come from Toronto’s most troubled neighbourhoods, including Regent Park, Kingston-Galloway, Jane-Finch and Jamestown—all of which have perennial placements on this power ranking system. While the data maps cleanly onto Toronto’s main ends it fails to take into consideration the infighting that occurs within those sectors.

There are no “gangs” in the American sense of the word, with primary colors and a milieu of members across a large plot of land banded together under a flag. Toronto’s groups are sectioned off by neighbourhood block, typically ones that contain low-income housing units and apartment buildings. Hundreds of feet could separate warring factions, or two rival groups could be kilometers apart on the other side of town. Most of the beef isn’t over territory—though some of it is, especially when it comes to dictating who can sell drugs on what blocks—but over generational grief. There’s no organization or narrative focus that would slot these wars into tidy tales, just a series of jealousy-driven offenses that go on to spark years of retributive justice. I’ve heard stories where a disagreement about a girl or a gun would go on to leave a trail of bodies for years, along with an increase in CSC’s institutional population.

Because a lot of these issues are generational, sons inherit the conflict of their fathers and nephews pay back their uncle’s killing in blood, as fights erupt over something that happened 10 years ago. Combined with the fact that gang life is a young boy’s game where you rise fast and fall hard, and it’s obvious why the arms race of collecting money and bodies is something that consumes people before they’ve fully developed as adults. The rise of Instagram as a platform to boast has made these cowboys into notorious figures in their community, while also being a catalyst for conflict whenever someone feels that a fallen soldier isn’t properly respected on the gram. Not posting someone from your block when they “drop out” can be just as political as paying respects, since it signals that they might have not been as solid as they made themselves out to be. Cropping someone out of a picture can be more damaging than arranging a hit on an individual, who has to live with that shame for the rest of their lives.

All of the technological advancements that have taken place in the “Drake era” have made it harder for the kids who are most easily influenced by seeing the wrong behaviour celebrated to even try and find a way out. That’s the most morose part of all of this: It’s not going to stop anytime soon. With the rise of streaming platforms, hood stars can monetize their clout by putting out songs. This only makes them a larger target, feeding back into the cycle of violence. The story of Houdini is made all the more tragic when you consider that almost all of it unfolded within a calendar year. Because so much of the hood culture becomes jail culture and pop culture, it’s hard to see a way out if you don’t look beyond what’s in front of you.

It’s not enough to say that pop culture celebrates a lifestyle, which encourages people to get into it. Pop culture is a reflection of reality, not a compass for it. To his credit, Drake doesn’t glorify or encourage cowboy behavior in a way that, say 50 Cent, did in the mid-aughts. More to his credit, Drake is a stand-up guy when it comes to taking care of people from certain parts of Toronto, regardless of how long their prison bid is. But looking to the pop star to fix structural and systemic damage is pointless, as is blaming the Raptors for an increase in gun violence. There’s not much that can be done about the seeking of retribution for generational trauma, or the allure of easy money for a community that runs on instant gratification.

If this Toronto hood shit was actually Shakespearean it would have a neat ending, but unfortunately right now is just appears to be a series of open-ended tragedies.

23: Looking for Pride in Ontario

I read about 60% of a book about Che Guevara in which he is quoted as saying “the soul of a nation can be found in its hospitals and its prisons.” This sounds very egalitarian and idealistic, but if true, it raises more questions about where I live, and where I will be living until 2028, than ever before. Canada’s identity and soul have been in question since the creation of our country, and nobody has been able to land on an answer in that time. The closest I’ve heard came from one Russian man I encountered in prison, who summed it up as “a socialist country that believes in private property and gay marriage.”

Being Canadian means asking America what they think of you. Very often, the answer is “not much.” Despite the fact that Canada has all of the dangerous aspects of life that America has, we like to pretend that gun crime and gang warfare is something that happens “over there.” We want to believe we’re the kind of people who always do the right thing, but that’s often just powerlessness masked as virtue. Canada is quick to rebuke a country with human rights violations (unless it’s a country we trade with) but doesn’t do much outside of the issued PR statement.

Because of their uncharacteristically long stays in power, you can look towards Canada’s past leaders and their accomplishments to see what’s been important to the temperature of the country. Stephen Harper’s main goals were to get tough on crime and balance the deficit, two pragmatic and puritanical mission statements that show Canada to be a disciplined country that’s willing to undergo some austerity measures as long as it means keeping basic tenants of Canadiana, like free healthcare. Justin Trudeau’s biggest and only accomplishment before COVID was the legalization of marijuana and a briefly gender balanced cabinet, both of which look nice in a tweet but lack gumption in regards to national identity.

Maybe the soul of our nation can never be defined because it was never defined to begin with. Unlike South Korea’s “hallyu” there was never a focused and well-defined movement for the country to take pride in, and unlike that country’s concept of “han” we have no shared cultural traits for people to be able to point to. The reason that so many immigrants have trouble assimilating into Canadian culture is because we have none. Outside of the fact that some of us play hockey and get our coffee from a now-Brazilian owned breakfast restaurant chain, Canada has nothing for people to get behind.

We have no mission statement, no purpose, and no power on the international stage. We have soft power galore thanks to movie directors, actors, musicians, and writers who break out into the mass media market via Hollywood, but because we create art in the same language and about the same topics as Americans, the line between the two cultures is dotted at best and non-existent at worst.

The closest Canada may have to a culture is what’s found in Quebec. That’s largely because they speak a different language but also because they invest so much into their stable of talent. Quebec has its own version of “The Masked Singer” that is on par with the American version as far as spectacle goes, but all of the celebrities behind the mask are unknown entities outside of the province. In my year and a half living in Montreal, I heard everyone refer to themselves as “Quebecois” with pride, but never in my life have I heard someone call themselves an “Ontarian,” let alone a proud one. The closest we may have is someone saying they’re from Toronto, but considering it’s the largest province and home to Canada’s capital, is it asking too much for it to have its own identity? Part of this struggle may be the fact that once we get close to being prideful, there’s a chorus of voices ready to shout us down. In Australia this is called “tall poppy syndrome,” and in Canada this manifests in shame towards anybody who may have been harmed during the making of this nation.

“Assimilation” has now become a dirty word in Canada, and there may have been a few readers who winced at the words “Ontario” and “proud” being so close together as it invoked memories of the housing developer-funded meme factories that helped get a Conservative premiere elected. The soul of a nation needs to be self-defined, manifest itself in our leaders, and be expressed using the culture that comes about as a show of our soft power.

Part of the problem may be that we focus more on the macro by asking “What is Canada?” instead of figuring out the more micro “What is Ontario?” but we can’t even answer that until we feel comfortable taking pride in what we’ve done and where it’s led us this far. History shouldn’t be hidden because it makes us uncomfortable, it should be examined to allow us direction to pivot into. Confederation happened about 155 years ago in 1867. Only 107 years before that, this whole mass of land was known as “New France.”

It’s okay for countries to evolve and change, but there needs to be something we’re aiming to change into. Every year we have more influential Canadians than ever before. The cultural exports that come from just Ontario have run the Billboard charts for over a decade. We have all of the tools at our disposal to brand the country in a way that doesn’t just boost our standing on the world stage, but gives new immigrants something to be proud of about their adopted land. Canada needs to be better, but before that, it needs to decide what it wants to be. Obviously prisons and hospitals won’t show you the ideal version of what the nation is, but it’s a cross section that helps you understand how the country serves its lowliest patrons.

24: Crime is Culture

What is culture, at its most basic, if not just an interaction between two individuals? What we talk about is what we’ve come to understand as culture, but sociologically culture is just the act of communicating and the nuances around that act. Content is culture, because it’s what we use to fill our time up in order to feel satisfied that we aren’t just wasting away and staring into the void. We look to content to learn more about the world or about ourselves, to pile so much trivia into our mind that we either becomes genre otakus about some niche, or to add textures to ourselves based on the implied reflections against individuals we see in on-screen characters.If content is culture, much of what has taken up oxygen in that space in recent years has revolved around crime.

I can’t even count how many four-part docu-series’ are centered around a deep dive into some heinous act in a small community and the fallout of it all years later. Crime is culture because it overlaps with universal themes like love, family, greed, betrayal, and justice. Crime creates definable heroes and villains, and offers potential redemption narratives for those involved.

Crime stories are a form of escapism, taking us across the world or into the mind of a troubled individual. Some of the stories I heard in jail would put any streaming offering to shame, and had they not often ended tragically they’d be prime fodder for media.I think one of the reasons people love talking about crime shows is because it lets them off the hook with doing the one thing you’re never really supposed to do in polite society: Talk about other people. Personally, most of why I care about a show has little to do with costumes or set design, and mostly about how the characters act and develop.

The reasoning for this is often selfish, since the act of comparing ourselves to others alleviates the guilt we have about our worst character traits. If the character you’re watching has been able to lead a fulfilled life while committing sins, it gives you hope that there’s no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle.

Stories about murder take up a lot of space in our culture, but stories about organized crime offer a more digestible and entertaining look at business logistics, operations, and supply chain management. I read 30% of ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ before growing bored, but anytime NatGeo had a show about the cartel I’d give it at least two episodes of my time. Fundamentally, it’s all the same type of story, you’re just subbing cookies for cocaine and leveraged buy-outs for assassinations. What makes the crime-centric stories more thrilling isn’t only the stakes involved, but the bravery implicit in going for broke.

Con-artist stories allow us to feel smarter than the victims as we tell ourselves that we’d never be swindled or finessed in the way these poor souls were. So though we may not see our whole selves in every crime boss, murderer, con-artist or street-level enforcer, we may recognize parts of our psyche that we’d only admit to having in private.Actively participating in culture is hard work. Back in the glory days of Twitter from 2010-2014 before Trump made outrage the base emotion you had to tap into if you wanted successful metrics on the app, creating content was the thing to do if you wanted to get attention online.

Those who stuck with it until today are either doing it as a creative writing hobby after work, recycling their collegiate papers in the hopes that someone other than the TA will read them, or supplementing the efforts of the PR team that handles their public facing career. To make content is to surrender yourself to the masses and strip yourself of pride in the process, but it’s also a noble act because it feeds culture. If it was easy, more people would actually do it and less would sit on the sidelines and in the peanut gallery of Twitter commenting on others living their life. I get that side of things too though, as I was also once 18 with a Twitter account—I did not let having nothing to say stand in my way of being vocal.

For better or worse, the rest of my life will be based on creating content. I’ve lived too many lives in order to keep them internalized. My life is an open book—albeit a heavily edited one—that might serve as an example to others, even if it’s as a cautionary tale. Crime is as much a part of my mythology as VICE is now—I will have been in jail 18 months less than my tenure at that company and it wouldn’t make any sense to hide away from it. I’m not sure how much of my day will be dedicated to building narratives and deconstructing biases, but if I don’t do anything with the time I spent inside, it will have all been for nothing. If crime is the lifeblood of content, and content is culture, then I’m in a unique position. The only way that this time would have been wasted is if nothing good comes of it, and I’m determined for that not to be the case. The fact that I’m restricted by Canada means I’ll have to fight twice as hard if I want to make it past the gate-keepers who decided ‘Run The Burbs’ is primetime TV.

As you probably know by now, I’m not great at conclusions when it comes to my life and my experiences. It’s hard to wrap a bow around a story that’s ongoing. All I know is that coming out of a situation like jail only to fall into the same patterns as before means that I’ll have truly wasted this time. Between the people I’ve met and the things I’ve learned while incarcerated, I have no choice but to make the most of this. One of my biggest fears about this time in my life was that I would miss out on life and on culture, but now that I’m out I understand that time has stood completely still for a lot of people these past three years. I thought the pandemic would have forced some people to roll up their sleeves and either help out their community by going into a valuable trade job, or moving out into a small towns and bringing their metropolitan ideals to a smaller sea, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. People kept toiling away, measuring their forward progress by how much content they’ve consumed. That’s the most ringing endorsement for content’s true value—that of an opiate.

From December 3rd, 2019 until April 26, 2022, I was in Federal Prison in Canada. The story of how I ended up there is well documented, but what I saw during my time inside inspired me to write about it. What follows was written during my last 365 days in jail, typed out on an old computer in the shared neighbourhood space. I posted these as a newsletter service called Revue, which Elon shut down upon purchasing Twitter.

Enjoy!

1: Toronto South Detention Center

I thought the worst of it was over in 17 days. Entering Toronto South Detention Center on December 3rd was a dehumanizing experience marked by a rotation of kits comprised of orange garments and meals served in what resembled an adult version of lunchables. Since I came in without the burden of politics that most inherit because of growing up in a certain pocket of the city, I was placed on a range full of Weston and Flemo Park denizens. I quickly got used to the concept of “doing time,” in which you simultaneously count up from how long you’ve been incarcerated and countdown to your parole date. Safety was prioritized to a point that felt like punishment as we were locked down often for infractions that took place on other ranges.

Toronto South is built like a maze, the hallways sectioned using alphanumeric codes and colors that can make moving through them feel repetitive and purposefully disorienting. The whole thing would have been impressive had it not been constructed with the intention of containing souls. I spent most of those 17 days either doing push-ups or working on my jump shot on a bizarre rhombus-shaped indoor basketball court. When we were allowed out of our cells after 8PM, we watched basketball games to pass time and cheer on our favorites.

Provincial jails are youthful institutions. At 29 I was damn near an elder, closer in interest to the men named “pops” on the range than the boisterous 18-21 year olds who propagated the space. There were two levels and ten cells on each floor, each guarded by heavy doors that locked with a mechanical magnet contraption I can still hear when I close my eyes. The strategy of most of the kids I met was to await their trial date in this provincial jail in order to avoid having to go “down bottom” to the Federal institutions in Kingston, Ontario. If they sat through to their sentencing, they would receive “dead time” off their sentence amounting to 1½ of the days spent in Provincial and be eligible for parole soon after.

Whereas Federal penitentiaries are remote and don’t take the necessary steps to divide the population out by their hood politics, Provincial institutions are situated just outside metropolitan city centers and arrange everyone tribally in a way that makes the range feel communal instead of adversarial. There’s a reason Toronto South is colloquially known as “Gang Land” among people who frequent it.

8 years, 8 months, 8 days. That’s what my sentence worked out to after the judge had granted me some dead time for being on house arrest. The youths on the range marvelled at the length of time given to me, peppering me with questions about my crime. After I told them about who I once was and what I’d once done, they shifted to asking me about the price of cocaine in Australia and about any rappers I’d met. I told them $120,000 a brick—give or take ten grand—and Future. Both of these factoids seemed to impress them, and I developed the nickname “Vice.”

17 days after arriving, my name was called for the wagon to Kingston. I was supposed to spend 70 days at the assessment unit before Correction Services Canada decided on my security level and which “mother institution” I would filter to. The youths who were in and out of Provincial told me that since I had no criminal record, no violence, and narrowly avoided a sentence of 10 years, I would be able to go straight to a minimum institution, colloquially known as a “camp” for the lack of fences and the multitude of hobbies that populated the place. I boarded the wagon cuffed at the wrists and ankles along with five others, embarking on the four-hour ride to Kingston to meet my next home.

2: Joyceville Assessment Unit

COVID caused the next chapter of my journey to last three times as long as it should have as 70 days spiralled into 210.

Joyceville Assessment Unit is not unlike a boxy chalky stone donut, its large decrepit building four floors tall and cubed with the center missing. It resembled a block piece discarded from a heavenly game of Tetris dropped in the middle of a field, surrounded by farmland on three sides and a canal on the fourth. Its concrete exterior painted asylum-white, it was almost blinding to look straight on at in the daylight. Each window was sealed with bars that someone took great pains to ensure didn’t resemble those on a cage by putting an ornate circle in the middle of ironwork. From an aerial view, the center of the square-shaped block was a courtyard through which the population came from the administrative side to their ranges and when the time called for it, to the canteen and to yard.

JAU holds around 580 inmates at full capacity, though it was kept under that for safety reasons. The month before my arrival, two inmates killed a sex offender by bouncing his head off the shower stall, which prompted a lockdown that lasted half a month while they completed their investigation. The segregation of affiliations that took place in Provincial no longer applied here, since JAU was a mandatory stop along all offenders’ journeys once they became Federal property. This led to intermingling in the yard and melees of dirt-green jackets with reflecting stripes attacking other dirt-green jackets for being from the wrong ends.

A clear garbage bag full of institutional clothing was dropped in front of me after I was strip searched and a mangy-haired retriever had sniffed us out for any drugs. I dug around inside it to find jeans, a toque, three Conservative-Party-Blue shirts, three pairs of tight white briefs, three pairs of socks, and my own dirt-green winter jacket with a reflective stripe. The Corrections Canada guard assigned us each a range and whisked us out of the room in anticipation of a new batch of inmates arriving from a different corner of the Province. The walk through the courtyard was filled with other blue-shirt wearing inmates asking our group which Jail we had arrived from, eager to know where we came from in order to anticipate our affiliations and react justly.

Each of the 16 ranges is a long hallway decorated with bile-green tiles and a beige paint that could have been bright white at some point in its 60-year lifespan. Around 25 cells punctuated the sides of the halls, half of them single occupancy and filled based on seniority. This was not supposed to be anyone’s last stop, but some people ended up staying for over a year while they waited to cycle through the bureaucracy of programs and parole officers. That’s not counting the ones that kept getting in trouble to avoid being sent to their mother institution out of a fear of the unknown. Trouble would find the ones who hoarded and sold medication, made brew out of fruits and sugar, or extorted high-profile offenders. Others would seek it out by fighting other inmates in the part of the laundry room and shower area that came to be known as “the octagon” for the neutral ground it provided, free of the watchful eye of the HD cameras that peppered the corners of the range.

One of the biggest benefits to JAU was that everyone was allowed to get some personal items sent in. A few pairs of boxers, basketball shorts, and sweatpants made lounging around the range all day more humanizing and individualistic, but having a TV in your cell allowed everyone to stay busy by turning on HBO or the Movie Network and turning off their brain. Those over-50 busied themselves with the National Geographic, Discovery, and History channels, while the younger crowd tuned into BET early in the morning to listen to music. HGTV held a weird allure that spanned across race and age. When TV’s siren song didn’t have the same tune, a series of dog-eared books were scattered around the range. I killed the better part of February reading at least four Jack Reacher novels and most of the Dune series.

The weight pit was enormous, but the lack of free weights and moveable plates meant that the machines held a static workload. The gymnasium was similarly vast, and hockey and basketball games cycled through on alternating days. Hockey games allowed inmates to fight without repercussions, but the basketball games were an exhibit of true skill as 3-pointers rained down at every opportunity.In the middle of March, on my 69th day at JAU and right before I was to be sent off to camp, COVID shut everything down. There would be no traffic in or out of the institution for the foreseeable future, and all programs would cease so that any contact civilians had with inmates could be controlled and monitored. Yard privileges were throttled so the gym and the weight pit was only open to 4 ranges at a time, but that was soon scaled back further as the only thing we were allowed was to walk outside on the track. Somehow, this COVID cloud brought silver linings as offenders gossiped about the potential for early parole and a re-introduction of Accelerated Parole Release by the Trudeau government. None of this would ever come to pass, no matter how many prisoners America or Morocco released, the news of which would spread through JAU like a pandemic of hope. To be fair, the older offenders would caution against getting our hopes up every time a positive thought popped out of our mouths. They had seen a different version of this same story play out before, and it always ended with inmates getting the short end of the hockey stick.

In some ways, that lockdown period was some of the most fun I had during my bid. The shared mystery surrounding what was to come meant that most defaulted to optimism. The limited interaction with the rest of the population also neutered some individuals who drew on the strength of knowing their gang of affiliates would protect them whenever it was yard time. Due to the restrictions, the loudmouth from Ottawa could no longer threaten to sick his gang on whoever he found out was taking his eggs from the common room fridge.

The food was mostly terrible, a fact I would find out first hand after I got a job in the kitchen and was in charge of preparing the slop. Twice a day, a plastic wagon the size of a small hippo would be wheeled through the hall of each range containing the legally required amount of nutrients portioned for each inmate. My job in the kitchen involved preparing these wagons by placing the food onto trays by cutting open a number of plastic bags full of soft wet vegetables and chicken parts into a vat, where they were heated with steam and stirred with a metal canoe paddle. The slop would then be measured out into large serving trays for each range. The best meals featured pizza with too much dough; burgers fried to the size of hockey pucks; and dinner sausages so salty you’d need to pair them with a gallon of water. Some of the more creative parts of the population would remix these meals with canteen items, turning the toaster into a frying pan by jamming the heat in the ‘on’ position and putting a metal tray on top. The most valuable items would all be sweet, as people haggled away their oatmeal cookies, apple-granola slice, and bran muffins for extra portions to be paid out later.

After I accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be transferring any time soon, I made the best of my surroundings. When I wasn’t working, I would pass the day playing Big Two and Bidwiz, two card games that ate up a few hours on the range. Once a day, a group of us would line up in the hallways to do a bodyweight circuit consisting of squats, pushups, and lunges. The exercise came to be colloquially known as the Kimbo Circuit after the muscular range rep who led the workouts. The 30-odd members of range 2B were from all parts of Ontario, from Sudbury to Niagara Falls; London to Ottawa; and all points between. As the weeks progressed, movement resumed as high and medium security individuals were prioritized for shipment to Millhaven, Collins Bay, Warkworth, Fenbrook, and Bath. Minimum security individuals were last on the list, which kept me at JAU until July 19th.

3: Pittsburgh Minimum

The easiest way to describe minimum security is a socialist thought experiment molded into a Potemkin village that’s meant to simulate a law-abiding world. The narrow two-storey townhouses of Pittsburgh Minimum are arranged on a circular track about 800 meters in diameter, their rainbow-colored exterior giving the impression that they house a jolly and vibrant population. Everyone is provided with work, ranging from cleaning jobs—of which there were an abundance due to COVID precautions—to working on the farm raising cattle for eventual slaughter. Payment is provided in the form of $60 biweekly, which can be used to buy snacks at the canteen. There’s also a weekly budget of $52 for groceries, which each house orders using a printed form and a calculator like an archaic version of Instacart.

Groceries are stored and cooked in a shared kitchen on the main floor that’s complete with enough gadgets and amenities to allow a person to prepare almost anything one may find in a cookbook. The purpose of minimum security is for long-time offenders and lifers to trickle down through the system and become acclimated to the concept of society a few years before they’re released. In theory, this means they’ll learn to budget, cook, socialize, and manage their time to achieve some sense of work/life balance. In practice, minimum security provides just enough amenities to highlight the terrible personalities that populate the place. When every need you have is provided for in a way that doesn’t feel terribly prison-like, you begin to notice that hell is other people. It’s important to remember that for maybe 20% of the population, this place is the only home they’ll know for the rest of their life.

A majority of the population is over the age of 50 with some sort of physical ailment that causes them to line up for medication each morning. I was housed with three 60-year old lifers who were institutionalized for 15, 21, and 22 years respectively. Good luck making small talk with people who have been in jail longer than Wikipedia has existed. First-time non-violent offenders such as myself were a rare occurrence at that camp, and when they did appear they were only there for a month or two before getting released. Pittsburgh is known for housing the three classes of prisoners who are in most dire need of protection: Sex offenders, rats, and cops. In my time there, I could count on one hand the amount of crime-for-gain types I met, including fraudsters and guys on trafficking charges. I kept my head down and stayed busy. I wrote the book, first by hand and then on the library computers during our 90 minutes of yard time. I worked out in the weight pit and ran ball games with the few people who were physically able to run. I worked in the community, on the farm, and building furniture for military bases.

There was also a four-day stint at the abattoir that showed me how beef is made. This caused me to adopt a vegan lifestyle for the majority of my sentence once I was able to cook for myself. By the time December rolled around, I had an unexpectedly full schedule every day between writing, working, working out, and cooking.

Then COVID finally descended upon us first-hand—sort of. The neighboring institution suffered the worst outbreak in Canada, as JAU fell victim to the plague. For some reason, although Pittsburgh shared none of the same staff and didn’t perform any transfers in that week, we were put on DEFCON-1 lockdown and were unable to leave our townhouses. In theory, there should have been an advocate to fight for us, but because the people at the top were the same sex offenders who needed protection from the system, they couldn’t be bothered to rock the boat in fear of it tipping them into the water.

We sat on our hands for two weeks and endured repeated nasal swabs until we found out—1 day before Christmas Eve—that we had zero cases within our institution. For me, that episode was proof that I was in the wrong institution. Minimum or not, if I was to do my time it would be around criminals who would push back on power when they felt they were being abused by it. I put in a transfer to leave Kingston and go into the north towards Cottage Country, leaving Pittsburgh for Beaver Creek to finish my last year before release.

4: Beaver Creek Minimum

Beaver Creek is a perfectly representative cross-section of Toronto. The population of Kingston’s facilities more or less mirrored the blue-collared red necks you’d find across Ontario, with the odd Jamaican, Serbian, or Vietnamese resident thrown in. But a tour through Beaver Creek was like walking through Epcot. Conclaves formed naturally and interacted seamlessly with the sort of grace that Lester B. Pearson likely had in mind when he created the idea for the League of Nations. Pockets of criminals whose ethnicities included Serbians, Italians, Indians, Jamaicans, Somalian, French, Chinese, Sri Lankans and Russian all made Beaver Creek a welcome change of pace from the monochromatic experience of Pittsburgh. Hell was still other people, but at least there were pockets of culture.

Located on an air force base that was turned into a POW camp in WWII for Nazis, the institution spanned multiple acres and was made up of hangar-style buildings that contained a gym, a hobby craft room, a library, a chapel, a healthcare center, dental clinic, and a works department. There was a track, baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a tennis court, a mini-golf course, and a pair of bocce ball pits. Six units made up of six ranges dotted the perimeter, and each range held no more than 7 people. Because of COVID, the population was capped to around 180 inmates instead of the 250 it can hold at max capacity. Every month, parole hearings were held and ten to twelve inmates went home. Since minimum security is treated like the final step closer to release into polite law-abiding society, it was extremely rare to not see people get parole from Beaver Creek.

Beaver Creek’s job pool was meager, but the opportunities for self-improvement were plentiful if you were resourceful. The weight pit was bigger, the library was always open, and the youth of the population led to competitive games of basketball, hockey, soccer, and even mini-golf. I picked up a French correspondence course and kept my conversational Russian active through daily phone calls to my mom and quick exchanges whenever I’d cross paths with a fellow Eastern European. I even took a Criminology course via correspondence with my old university, Laurentian, picking up where I’d left off 10 years prior. All those who came to learn that hard work and discipline were the only ways to achieve success ended up adopting long-term projects. For the under-50 crowd this manifested in bodybuilding. For the over-50s, it was gardening.

As the seasons changed and the vaccine was administered, things began to open back up to a 2019 level. Since I’d only known the facilities in their closed format, the re-addition of freedoms reinvented my perspective of where I was. COVID protocols were the norm for me, but for those who spent years in these places already they were an additional layer of incarceration on top of their removal from society. As we were allowed out into the community to work and our families and friends were allowed to visit us monthly, the time flew by like it had never before for me. Since the population was capped, the limited size allowed me to compartmentalize life and seek out pockets of people with varied interests to stimulate conversations.

The sense of normalcy brought on by celebrating these milestones as a community can’t be overstated. Removing an individual from a society doesn’t mean that there won’t be a sense of social order wherever you send them. By counting down milestones, you not only pass the time with more fluency, you set markers in your story that you can potentially look back on when the worst is over. My 30th birthday was spent at JAU grilling steaks in the kitchen with a side of the rarest of commodities available to kitchen workers in bulk: Onions and green peppers. My 31st was spent in Beaver Creek at a picnic table outdoors, the BBQ full of burgers and chicken passed around by Serbians and the Jamaicans playing dancehall over the portable CD player that was brought out for the occasion.

Two major virtues my time taught me were humility and patience. Compassion might be a distant third, mostly for the people afflicted by drug addiction who showed me that cocaine and opiates aren’t exclusively for a partying lifestyle. The humility instilled in me came from going through the gauntlet of constant starts and stops. Having to go through four institutions and re-introducing myself each time taught me who I was, what I valued, what my best features were, and what I needed to avoid in order to be happy. The patience to deal with difficult people was rewarded in mutual respect, since living in a shared space led to sharing resources, which led to conflict, which led to conflict resolution and stronger bonds. I never let myself think I was in prison, which led to me protecting my mental health.

I saw first-hand how lifers tended to slip into depressive states from time to time knowing that even though there weren’t any fences surrounding their home, they weren’t allowed to leave. I told myself that I was on a sabbatical, living tech-free in the woods and reconnecting with my fellow man.

The place acted like a centrifuge of intrapersonal relationships, as spending three months eating and walking around the track with a relative stranger translated into a deeper connection forged than you’d have with someone you’d known for years. Overall, my journey was the sort of adventure an 18-year old me would have loved to embark on—even though I can’t recommend anyone follow in those footsteps.

5: Penitentiary Power and Politics

Any place that has a social order is going to fall victim to having politics. Putting aside the tangled web of hood relations some inmates inherit upon entering, there is a rough order to institutions that pre-dates most inmates. Lifers have top billing, borne more from pity from the “short timers” than out of any respect. Anyone with a warrant expiry date is a short timer in the eyes of the lifers, it doesn’t matter if they’re here for three years, nine years, or sixteen years. As long as one day, however far in the future, a day comes when you are no longer under the supervision of CSC, you’re a short-timer. Everyone in an institution applies neutralization techniques to their offense on a self-created hierarchy to justify what they did as “not so bad” compared to those who caused physical violence, especially against women or children.

Most lifers are in on a body or two, but there’s levels to the lives people take. For example, someone in jail for enforcing payback in blood for a criminal enterprise is looked at in much higher regard than someone who killed their wife in a jealous fit. Similarly, second-degree, attempted murder and manslaughter offenders are rated on the scale of who the victim was. High profile killers never make it out of maximum security, mostly for their safety than anyone else’s. The middle of the totem is crime-for-gain types, who typically spend a few years networking and preparing for parole. The bottom of the pyramid is sex offenders, excluding in some cases pimps who could potentially fall into the crime-for-gain category but need to explain their circumstances every time someone brings up their Google results. In an odd way, having a high-profile story that’s easily to Google can work to your favor as it helps you avoid questioning about why you’re in jail.

Legalized drug use in the form of methadone, suboxone, and painkillers are dealt out during the morning pill parade, a daily event that causes 30% of the Caucasian population to wake up at 7AM and stumble out of bed and into a line up like White Walkers ambling towards a common goal. Since there’s a market for anything in jail, these Methadonians find ways to cheat the system that border on gruesome. For example, since methadone is prescribed via liquid that has to be taken in front of the nurse, extracting it in a form that is sellable involves the user throwing up into a sock and wringing out the liquid.

Payment is done by the purchase of items on canteen, for which each inmate has a max budget of $90 every two weeks. The items available differ depending on which institution you find yourself in, but can range anywhere from a $1.50 chocolate bar all the way to a $55 bag of whey protein. The idea of the institution is for everyone to be flattened to the same level so that inequality is unnoticeable and comfort can’t be something that’s bought. That said, there’s ways to feel “wealthy” in jail. Primarily, it would be by accruing enough garments from road that you never have to wear the jail-issued blue shirts and tighty-whiteys. Some people take this to the extreme and have no issue walking around in a Hugo Boss tracksuit and putting a target on their backs to get it forcefully taken from them, while others just make sure to own enough boxer briefs and white t-shirts so as not to have to touch institution-issued wear.

There’s also the purchase of illicit and illegal materials that obviously takes place wherever you are. Tobacco, booze and cellphones are the highest priority items for anyone, but you can also get whatever you want if your money is right. At one institution, someone dropped off a brick of cocaine via drone and the inmates cooked it into crack that they flooded the place with. Prices fluctuate based on supply and demand, but a certain high-profile inmate from a wealthy family had no issue flaunting his wealth by purchasing a bail of tobacco for $800 e-transfers. The risk of getting caught doesn’t just carry the threat of reprimand in the form of an institutional charge, it could also mean getting your security level raised from minimum to medium. This means you’d be shipped immediately from a jumbo cul-de-sac where you can cook your own food to a place with 80-foot high walls in which you have bars on your windows and you’re back to eating sludge.

When everything is taken from someone, they’ll pick small battles just to accrue meaningless wins. The need for a sense of superiority doesn’t just go away when your freedom is stripped. The thing about the system is how many rules inmates generate just so there’s something to enforce. You don’t reach across someone’s food, or look into their room without permission. You can’t whistle, jangle keys, or slam doors, because that’s what guards do. You can’t say “goof” because it leads to fighting, and can’t say things like “banana” or “come here” because that’s an eediat ting. The amount of Jamaican traditions that permeate everyday culture in the penitentiary could populate a book, and each manifest themselves in interesting ways. You take for granted how deeply yard roots run when you no longer react to hearing two rough and tumble Sudbury miners talk about how they can’t wait to “touch road” in a few months. The weirdest thing about a sequestered society for whom everything is technically provided is how they’ll manufacture their own rules for governance and economy if given the tools. Outside of the rules prisoners create for themselves, there is also a web of bureaucracy that overlays every want and need you may have while federal property.

A government body called CSC runs Canada’s program for the incarcerated. Every request an inmate has of CSC needs to be filled out in triplicate and handed off to a guard or dropped in a box. There’s a 532 form to transfer funds, a form to put money on your phone, a form to add people to your calling card, a form to apply for a job, a form to see healthcare, a form to complain about a staff member, and a form to complain about the fact your complaint isn’t being taken seriously enough. Some people will take advantage of this tangle of paperwork to busy themselves with grieving CSC for years, simply because they felt they were wronged and have all the time in the world to prove that to be true.

It’s odd that violating the rules in society brings you to a place where there are even more rules. Enforcing these rules can mean different things depends on where you are. In medium security, you can get gerked or chefed just for farting in the hallway. In minimum security, everyone walks on eggshells out of a fear of being ratted on. The fact that the most powerful people in a place that’s meant to punish others for not following the rules, are those who enforce the rules through snitching, just adds to the paradox of stupidity that is prison.

6: Doing Your Own Time

Every theory having to do with the passage of time needs to be filtered through the concept of imprisonment to be tested to its fullest. Time is truly relative when it is used as an indefinite punishment. Those inmates lucky enough to have an end to their sentence will always be counting down to that date, measuring the circumstances of life through their own timeline. Some people count in presidents, others count in Olympics, while some take the more granular approach and measure years by Superbowls. I myself have been federal property for four Superbowls, three New Year’s eves, two birthdays, and one global pandemic. I’ve thought often about what’s the least amount of time in which the most happens, and I think its four years. That’s how often it is between Olympics, the length of a presidential term, and how long it takes for someone to finish high school.

Lifers only ever count up from when they were brought in. They also think back on events with the same sense of wonder that civilians do, remembering exactly where they were when 9/11 happened or when Trump was elected. The most interesting thing about lifers is that they forever remain frozen at the age they were when they were sentenced, seeing as how they were never forced to mature as a result of having to adopt the responsibilities of life or endure the struggle of interpersonal relationships and the self-discovery that comes with them. I’ve met 40-year olds who still think of themselves as 19, as well as 60-year olds who still think of themselves as being 35. For the most part, the former is always a more dangerous person to be around as they are driven in equal parts by impulse and the need for self-preservation; the latter is more whimsical and has a wide-eyed way of looking at the modern world, constantly asking questions about technology or marveling at how much things cost now.

By the time they’ve reached minimum, lifers have become fairly docile. They’ve long since taken the time to sit with their actions and their impacts. I’ve spoken to some lifers on a body who talk about how the consequences and gravity of their crime didn’t even sink in until about year eight of their sentence, until which time they were recklessly thinking they would die in jail. That said, most lifers have formed close relationships with guards and officers during their stint, which makes them more dangerous as informants than as would-be rule breakers.Regardless of the length of your sentence, roughly the first half of everyone’s prison journey is marked by a change of environments. Lifers who have spent 20 years incarcerated will spend the first 13 in maximum and medium security until they’re allowed to come to camp. Similarly, people serving a 2 year sentence will spend four months in max and assessment before coming to camp and waiting for their parole eligibility to kick in around the 8-month mark. Because of all this motion, you meet people along the way that you share personal moments with by accidents. And since everyone’s primary source of information is the mainstream media on TV, it’s hard to inform yourself beyond the topline takes.

I remember where I was when Kobe Bryant died and how everyone flooded out of their cells to share their disbelief in the hallways. The George Floyd saga unfolded in real-time as people watched from their cells and screamed “fuck the police” and “I’m definitely getting parole now” through the bars. I remember the two lifers I was with when we watched the election results on CNN, as well as the Capitol Riots shortly after, both of them shaking their head in disbelief as I tried to explain what Qanon was. I remember who I watched the NBA Championship with when the Lakers and the Bucks won the trophy (I know nobody will believe this, but I had a perfect bracket for the 2021 NBA Playoffs, minus Atlanta over Philly), and remember that someone made a tray of nachos with too much salt on them for us to celebrate. I’ll probably never meet these people again (knock on wood) but we shared in a moment in time that will always be imprinted on my mind in that “where were you when?” sense of memory.

Time spent without purpose is its own form of prison. While many guys have no problem sleeping all day and getting up only for meds or to eat when there’s a dessert worth waking up for, others prefer to spend their days watching TV. I have developed a personal beef with whoever runs programming for BET’s morning show of music videos for not updating the slate since late 2018. But the fact that the music continues to be the same doesn’t stop the mandem from queuing up all of their TVs from 8AM to catch the predictable in the hopes of it changing one day. Those who aren’t “BET types” are more inclined to watch Discovery, History, or National Geographic channels where most of the shows are either about large trucks or aliens. Whichever camp you fall into, everyone watches the late night programming that’s essentially soft-core porn disguised as episodic TV such as Spartacus, Vida, or P-Valley.

Time is punishment if used incorrectly, but only boring people get bored. I’ve been around people who read a book a week during their 9 month detention, as well as an individual who got really good at twirling a pen between his finger and his thumb as he sat in the living room for hours on end with National Geographic on in the background. Breaking your day into blocks meant for the purpose of leisure or self-improvement seems like the obvious choice to make for anyone with time on their hands, but the mindless surfing of TV channels seemed to be the default selection for anyone with too much time and not enough imagination.

That, and making banana bread.

7: Enjoying Culture While Internet Detoxing

You take for granted how clutch watching things “on demand” is when you have to revert back to appointment viewing for every show. Yes, I do realize that it’s a fairly mundane gripe when I’m complaining about having to block off Sunday nights at 9pm to watch ‘Succession’ in jail. But at the same time, arts and culture are the only things that really did my time and kept me tethered to reality and the outside world. It’s bad enough that all of my news was absorbed through mainstream channels that offered no opposing viewpoints on shit like the pandemic and the US elections, but if I couldn’t catch ‘Into the Storm’ when it came on, where else would I learn the ins and outs about Qanon’s impact on the Capitol Riots?

When the pandemic started, the news became must-see TV. That purple ticker on CNN consumed everyone’s attention for months. And although there wasn’t any tertiary news source to draw from, it didn’t stop inmates from espousing their beliefs about COVID. Who needs the Joe Rogan podcast when Curly down the range is yelling at everyone through his methadone high that China manufactured the virus just so Trump would lose? Eventually, as a vaccine was developed, the news grew bogged down with updates about how many people had been jabbed and how many remained. Movies that were cancelled were brought back, leading to stories about how important ‘Tenant’ is or how brave Tom Cruise was.

Due to the lack of content, movies churned faster and faster to television to fill the space needed for 4 24-hour movie networks. The aforementioned ‘Tenant’ made it my way in April (not bad, but a bottom-tier Nolan project) and supposed blockbusters like ‘Wonder Woman: 1984’ forwarded in June (literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen). HBO stayed consistent, not only by releasing new series that hit hard (‘Betty’, ‘White Lotus’, ‘Lovecraft Country’) but by showing the classics late at night during the winter months like ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Veep’. Even shows like ‘Power’ and its associated spin-offs warranted a watch, if only because the group I hung out with consistently talked about it like it was must-see TV. It was not.

Watching TV without accompanying thinkpieces is a huge gift, but in hindsight it led to some moments of mischaracterization. Shows like ‘Ramy’, ‘Ziwe’ and ‘30 Coins’ were the sort of content that need an explainer to be fully appreciated, since coming into it without knowing the characters and directors can make for disjointed viewing. You want to like it, but feel like you’re only getting the punch line of the joke. The whole situation just brought into question what it meant for a show to be “good” to begin with. I continued to watch things through my internet-addled mind, on a constant lookout for themes or undertones or winks about what a TV show is trying to say. But the rest of the population simply wanted to be entertained, not to be made to feel smart, and sought out content that tickled that itch. That’s why one of the most popular channels was “Bravo” and its army of catty and visually stimulating housewives.

When you’re in your Mother Institution you’re able to get two magazine subscriptions sent in. I chose ‘New Yorker’ and ‘The Economist’ primarily because they were delivered weekly and kept me abreast of the world through left and right brain viewpoints. Reading ‘New Yorker’ articles was also the closest thing I had to having the internet, and the knowledge exchange that took place when I recommended articles to other inmates was more rewarding than sharing the post online into the ether. We’d discuss articles about North Korea’s hacking troupe or Rich Paul’s rise to infamy in the evenings around the kitchen table. Articles about cults and the merits of co-habitation and shared living spaces for young professionals took on a new light as their virtues were debated among a population that had no choice but to adapt to them. It’s not as if any revelations were uncovered though, as most were simply content to shrug and wish for something different without wondering if what they had was pretty good.

‘The Economist’ became a valuable resource among the crime-for-gain types who sought to legitimize their future dealings. Fraudsters who maintained their stock portfolio over the phone and on custom Excel spreadsheets used my reading of the magazine as an entry point to talk shop and brag about past successes—likely inflating numbers as they went along. After a year in minimum when the news and its COVID updates no longer interested me, I started the mornings off by watching CNBC. The backbone of the updates still ran through the COVID lens, but it was far more interesting than getting the latest count on the vaccination race. Removed from society, it was wondrous to see that people took advantage of the Universal Basic Income provided to them not by hunkering down and learning a new language or skill, but by investing their newly-found wealth into Gamestop stock or crypto.

If magazines taught me how to slow down and appreciate the written word for the window it provided into a segment of society, CDs gave me an appreciation for what music said about a moment in time. In an almost throwback fashion, music sharing and discovery took on a more personal manner when the medium became physical again. You take for granted how easy it can be to slide from one era to another when you use Spotify to go from ’06 Jeezy to ’12 Pusha T to ’01 Jay Z. When you need to go through the work of getting a CD and placing it in your Walkman just to find a single song, you end up appreciating the artists who took the time to make a cohesively sequenced project. There’s a huge difference between getting lost in a Jay Z CD that has a concise narrative running through it, and listening to ‘Culture 2’—which is simply a collection of songs.

As far as the selection went, everyone seemed to have access to the classics. Wayne, Pop Smoke, G Herbo and DaBaby had their music thoroughly represented within every institution, which was as far as new music from American artists went. Prison was the only place in my life I’ve seen people cape for Toronto rappers, though it was seen in equal parts as a proclamation of wealth and neighborhood loyalty. As far as non-rap music, I was in the minority when it came to wanting to hear modern pop. I had the Fiona Apple CD sent in, but couldn’t find anyone who had any HAIM, Partynextdoor, Tame Impala, or even “artsy” rap like Travis Scott. There was no Frank Ocean, and all my requests for his music were met with the kissing of teeth and the utterings of “battymon.”

8: The Magical World of Racism

Alright, so boom. Racism.

If you’ve made it past the last update without unsubscribing in a fit after reading my thoughts on HBO shows and how magazine are cool, you’re in this for real. This is an inherently sticky topic where nobody comes off looking good, but oh well. Unlike any of the media’s portrayals having to do with prison, there aren’t a number of race-based gangs scattered across the yard lifting weights together. This is likely because the prisons you see in the media are American and have literally 10x the population of even Canada’s biggest institutions. In medium security, the block you’re from determines who you hang out with and who you oppose—to the point where some institutions are dedicated to specific neighborhoods and completely unsafe for others. However, in minimum the makeup reflects a more Torontonian experience where cultures will coagulate most of the time but also comfortably split up to mix among the population. This makes for outward-facing niceties between groups and hyper-specific insults whenever backs are turned.

There was no shortage of divisive racial topics throughout my time in ’20 and ’21, and every time an issue made itself known on mainstream media, the lifers would ask for an explainer from me in the hopes of understanding how the world works from a “boots on the ground” point-of-view. As a contrarian, I always take the other side of an argument whenever a topic surfaced. This led to me defending the stance of BLM to some rednecks who wondered aloud why it wasn’t “All Lives Matter,” as well as going to bat for the LGBT movement in a room full of Jamaicans and Muslims.

Any argument that I remembered as originating from Twitter in 2014 that I would re-purpose to support protesters after the killing of George Floyd fell on deaf ears. The closest I made to progress was when I said that “BLM” was just a new way of saying “fuck the police,” but even that argument went awry after the word “defund” started entering the lexicon. Someone who has lived in an institution their whole lives knows that cutbacks to the budget are the last thing you want when your livelihood depends on said budget. To paraphrase one lifer, the money is never taken from the officers; it is only taken from the parts of the program that help people who need it.

After the NBA entered into the playoff bubble and adopted the social justice slogans on the back of their jerseys, some people were upset by the fact that they felt their face was being rubbed in an issue that had nothing to do with them. In their mind, why should a Canadian basketball fan have to atone for the wrongs of a police force in another country? Furthermore, if these slogans were to be removed later, didn’t it make it seem as though the problem they sought to address had been solved? The pageantry of it all cheapened the movement that the media had tried so hard to solidify in the months leading up to the playoffs.

After RuPaul hosted SNL one week, I decided to watch my first episode of ‘Drag Race’ on the living room TV. After that, I made time each week to catch a new episode, as I found the show to be dramatic and dependably funny. My viewing of the show led to disgust by some inmates, as one country-bumpkin sack of potatoes wouldn’t even look at the TV when he’d pass through the room to get to the kitchen. This personified wholesale-sized jar of mayonnaise was convinced that even glancing at the screen would be enough to awaken some latent urge in him that no amount of bible study would be able to suppress again. Inevitably, my viewing of the show led people to question me about my own sexuality, which led to conversations about their relationship to LGBT issues.

These dialogues started off tense, but with enough patience and humor I was able to get to the heart of their issues. Simply put, seeing men emasculated on TV made them uncomfortable. The black inmates had an issue with the fact that black characters were often the ones portrayed as gay, and that every new show seemed to have space for one trans character. It goes without saying that none of the inmates had a problem with lesbians. They took stock of how shows like ‘P Valley’—which featured an abundance of strippers shaking ass—made sure to make one character especially flamboyant in what they felt was an effort to feminize black men.

When I tried to introduce words like “cisgender” into their vocabulary as a way of understanding the new shape society is taking, every single person thought that I was just making shit up.

Overall, I can confidently say that not a single mind was changed by my attempts. My ending argument when dealing with lifers ended up being something along the lines of “well, the world is just blacker and gayer now than it was when you were out there, I guess.”

There were some interesting points made by inmates that are hard to discount, even if seen through a modern lens. The idea of embracing people’s “lived experiences” has become popular recently and should cut both ways when it comes to understanding people’s emotions towards a group. Most of the whites who didn’t like black people had never encountered them during their sheltered country upbringing until they’d entered the system. Upon being incarcerated, they quickly found that black people stuck together inside and took advantage of anyone who didn’t look like them. Their lived experience didn’t discount people because of what they looked like, but for what they’d done to them in the past.

Black people have their run of the jail system, from the provincial buckets, to assessment, all the way to the mother institutions. It doesn’t matter if they’re Jamaican, Haitian, Guyanese, Somalian, or just Canadian, black people will always stick together. The nice way of referring to a range or unit with a predominantly black population would be to say that it’s “dogged out” or full of the “mandem,” the impolite way would be to say that it’s full of “wizards”—a slur invented by white inmates to be able to say The Word without saying it. No matter how much they would try, white inmates were never able to band together in the same way black ones were to run a range. Blame it on the fact that a lot of the white inmates were on methadone and suboxone, or the fact that most of them were on a bad beef and unable to stand up for anyone lest they expose themselves in the process. But if you weren’t riding with the dogs, your stay at any CSC establishment would be a long and defensive one.

Despite these enforced castes, all inmates are technically on the same level when it comes to any informal hierarchy within CSC. While it helps to be a worldly person and friendly with all pockets of people, groups do form based on ethnicity. Nothing unites people more than having common opponents, which is why Natives stick together and talk shit about white people, Italians stick together and talk shit about Blacks, and Jamaicans stick together to talk shit about the gays. But when you move up a level, you see that CSC and its employees, from the correctional officers to the parole officers and all the people in between like food service workers, have a deep racial animosity for “the other.” There’s no way to tell if this is borne from the CSC worker’s “lived experience” during their time working in penitentiaries, or from them simply being born and raised in the same small towns where they end up working.

All of the penitentiaries in Ontario are found in either Campbellford, Kingston, or Gravenhurst—none of which are known for having a diverse population within the small towns. Alternatively, a significant portion of the population within the confines of these institutions are Torontonians from different ends of the same metropolis. The divide ends up being not by race, but among the lines of power and class (as informed by freedom) between the staff and the inmates.

9: Everyone’s a Millionaire in Prison

In prison, power is measured not by what you have but by what you can do while you’re federal property. You can only have $1500 worth of property in your room, which means there’s no point in getting your Rolex collection sent in if you’ve found yourself jailed for millions worth of fraud. Similarly, because you can only spend $90 every two weeks, there’s no way to flex your wealth in comparison to others. Regardless if you were on welfare or a millionaire while you were on road, everyone is entitled to the same pot of wealth while inside. Because of this fact, everybody you meet says they’re a millionaire. One neighbor of mine claimed he bought $10,000 worth of Moderna stock when it was $5 a share (we later found its lowest price was $11). He also wore the same grey AND1 basketball shorts the whole summer, to the point where they had a hole in their left pocket exposing his leathery thigh. The power lies with those who have enough connections within the institution and on the outside to bring in contraband, whether it’s through bribing the staff to import, using drones to drop packages in, or by simply dropping bags off by the road and paying someone to run and get them.

Just because the minimum-security jails don’t have walls or fences, doesn’t mean they aren’t monitored. HD cameras on 40-foot poles are strategically placed along the perimeter of each institution. The view of these cameras is fixed to the spots where the jail meets the roads that civilians can drive upon, or the woods that people can hike through to meet inmates. These cameras are always on in the hopes of catching anyone in the act of picking up a package dumped from their car window or thrown into the woods. Since the institution has an informal hierarchy of risk based on release times, lifers have the most to lose by going to pick up a package, while those on short sentences and stat cases (those doomed to be released on their statutory date—two thirds into their sentence) have the least risk associated with getting caught.For every millionaire you meet, there’s at least two red seal chefs who swear they can cook the finest of meals, but they’re just missing one or two of the right ingredients. What ends up happening is that all the chefs make the same banana bread recipe as everyone else, and distribute it according to the politics they’ve aligned with.

“Spite-baking” is a popular activity in minimum-security institutions, where passive aggressive behavior is the only type of aggression allowed. When they frown upon beating people up, the logical secondary show of force is the exclusion of baked goods. Some people who have actually mastered the art of creating exquisite brownies, cakes, and pies, will monetize their passions by selling trays of the stuff for canteen or “road cash.” That’s the safest way for people to make money in jail, as it doesn’t involve doing anything illegal. For those who don’t mind taking the risk, you can always run to the road.

For some, the power that comes from being well known as a good baker, or being the guy who can flood the institution with anything from tobacco to cellphones to MDMA, is an unattainable sort. That’s why many choose to exercise power by becoming informants for the same staff that keep them contained to the institution. I’ve never understood why people rat—it’s not as if their sentence is reduced, or they’re allowed more privileges as a result of ratting. The rumor has always been that rats get free money added onto their phone card every month, but the $10 top-up is only good for three hour-long phone calls to your people on road. And in an institution with a 500-person population (250 in minimum), word spreads quickly about who’s talking to the guards for too long or sending kites up to the duty office about other inmates.

There used to be power simply associated with the crime that got you landed in jail, but that’s gone by the wayside as things became more tribal over the years. In Pittsburgh, a cop-killer deferred to a serial pedophile in the social order of things, simply because there were more sex offenders than anti-authoritarian types in that institution. Back in the day, the best thing you could be in jail was a Hell’s Angel, or another type of motorcycle club, member. As the influx of criminals changed, Muslims began to run the institutions.

Over time, they ceded their ground to different gangs and neighborhoods that people wore on their sleeve as they entered jail. In minimum institutions, hood politics don’t carry the same gravity as they do in medium, and it’s not uncommon to see someone from Galloway playing Ludy (a dice game where you have your pieces go around a square grid) with someone from Malvern once you get to camp. But when you’re in a medium, the institutions are segregated according to where you’re from. Collin’s Bay is designed for gang members from Regent Park, Galloway, and Jamestown. Warkworth is for the gang members who don’t see eye-to-eye with those sects, namely those from Driftwood, PO, and Eglington West. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend, as some foes will have a common nemesis and still not co-operate with each other. For example, I’ve yet to figure out who people from Falstaff align with.

Power is more than just a soap opera executive produced by 50 Cent. It is the ability to co-exist with people you may not agree with while still maintaining your pride and not sacrificing who you are. Power can be bought, but the stakes are high when dealing with individuals who see no shame in selling out their fellow cons for some phone time. Humility leads to connections, and connections lead to trust. Trust can be manipulated into power, but gaining trust is a political maneuver that not everyone can finesse. Regardless of the situation you find yourself in, it’s always a good idea to listen more than you talk, and look for common ground more than you try to tease out differences.

10: Lol This Sucks, Actually

It took until the 10th iteration of this newsletter (or Medium post, or whatever cooler blockchain-driven delivery method materializes between August 2021 and now) to talk about my emotions.

Reading back on some of these posts, I can see that I’m not really communicating how much prison truly sucks. That’s probably because focusing on the positives is one of my coping mechanisms–I can’t help but see life through the silver lining. Removal from society is one thing, but with COVID precautions all but eliminating contact with the outside world, I may as well have been doing time in Australia instead of Muskoka. Before COVID there were opportunities for inmates to go into the community to work, for their family to visit them, and even for them to get weekend passes to go some unescorted for 72 hours. I never experienced this, save for a 3 month stint working at a thrift store run by Habitat For Humanity in which I’d load old couches into and out of trucks all day.

If not for the phone calls I had with the people I had on my list who I would schedule in for weekly updates to stay afloat of how life was going on the outside, I think I’d have slipped into the same fog that engulfs lifers. If you don’t focus on life beyond the fence, you can get lost in the high-school gossip that drips throughout minimum security. When it’s difficult to place yourself in the big picture of what’s going on in the world, you revert to obsessing over the minutiae of your surroundings, wherever you are.As my parole date draws closer, the days seem to expand in length. I may have the same amount of hours in my day as Beyoncé, but the only thing it feels like I’m getting done is making it through the calendar. No amount of activities seemed to fill the 18 hours in each day that made up my sentence; not playing N64, not reading magazines, not watching movies, not listening to CDs, not doing homework. As all of these activities fell into routine and lost their novelty, they became boring.

I`m writing this on my 21st month incarcerated, with around 7 months to go. I’m in the communal room on the computer, while a group of Chinese inmates are talking loudly on the couches while Trudeau delivers his campaign message on the TV ahead of the election. By all measures, as far as punishments go, this is not that bad. But I still miss my friends, I miss my family, and I miss my freedom. I long for the simple freedom of playing GTA 5 while searching up some obscure Azealia Banks song on YouTube. All of the benefits of minimum just highlight how good life on road is. Sure you can play Madden 2001 on PS1, but after the novelty wears off it just reminds you how good the version that came out 20 years later probably is.

I think I just get bored of anything after 20 months. That’s how long I was in Montreal before I got arrested, and how long my serious relationships usually last before I perform an emotional audit to see if they’re truly working. I started writing this when I had 365 days to go, thinking that the diary would help me pass the time. There are currently 240 days left (or 13 more canteens!) and I’ve run out of shit to do. I’m in the best shape of my life, but my shoulder and ankles are tweaked, I fear permanently, keeping me from aiming to max out my bench press or playing proper defense in ball. I can speak passable French and understand a lot of the rules associated with it, at least enough to watch the news twice a day on TVA. But no amount of self-improvement changes the fact that I’m still in jail, surrounded by people who have lost all hope. This place is fucking depressing.

There’s a guy here who came in when he was 17, got out to a new world and said “fuck this” and took another life. He’s been in for 44 years, and has no intention of leaving since he loves the shit out of this little gated community in which someone cleans for him, his groceries are delivered to his door, and he never needs to go shopping for clothes. Ever since I read a review in the Economist about a book that dealt with cults, I’ve asked myself if this place is more of a cult than a prison. There’s certainly an order, words you can’t say, and a deprivation of wealth for the purpose of evening things out. The one thing that keeps it from being a cult is that some people want to leave, but even that’s not true of the entire population.

I wrote down themes for each iteration of this newsletter, but this one I just went full freestyle jazz mode. Truly, this is all first verse. The Chinese guys are talking very loudly and have taken their shoes off, and Jagmeet Singh is now on the TV making promises. This shit changes very gradually, and always for the worse. The silver lining is buried somewhere, I just have to look for it. Maybe it’s just being grateful that I’m in Canada and not in Kabul? That feels like a cheap grasp for positivity.

Everyone I befriend ends up leaving, which is amazing for them but just underscores how long I’ve been in. People feel the need to explain the minor characters that appear on 6ixbuzz, thinking that I’ve been in here long enough to not know who Debbie is when they tell me about the post where she pulled up to Drake’s mansion, or that she overdosed a few months later. It’s amazing how TMZ has become the most trusted news source around, as they are the only ones who talk about the people and things I care about. What do you think rings more bells for people who are getting out in two months, the bombing in Kabul or the fact that Kylie is pregnant again?

True happiness is hard to find here. The only times I’ve felt it was when something really funny happened, like when I watch the American versions of ‘Drag Race’ or when someone tried to fight a wild turkey and it actually flew at him after he squared up. But who knows if that’s happiness or just joy? Maybe happiness is just a lack of sadness. I’m never sad, I’m just anxious all the time. It’s hard to vent to people in here about my issues without entering into some sort of Olympic contest about who has it worse, so I just keep all of this inside. Prison is supposed to suck, just because I’m not in an American institution where the day-to-day is something straight out of ‘Oz’ doesn’t mean this is fun.

That said, anyone who says it’s impossible to make friends in your 30s should try jail.

11: Health is Wealth

When wealth no longer allows you more freedom than it does the next person, what good is being rich? In most of the population inside federal institutions, the way that wealth manifested was not through material things but through lifestyle choices. When everyone is a millionaire, the way to cut through the noise is by focusing on how people look. Cliché intact, health was wealth in federal. There’s no way Mr. Five Cent Moderna Stock makes the money he does looking like an inside-out barrel of beef jerky. The people who are certifiably rich, those who can talk about their portfolios and world issues with the breezy confidence that seems to be innate only in the wealthy, obsess over the fact that they want to look better after leaving here than they did coming in. To me, there is no greater mark of fortitude than to be able to maintain your discipline in the face of despair.

It’s very very very easy to get fat in jail. Not only are there whole sects of people who bake to pass the time and share the goods politically (see: spite baking) but it’s a pretty sedentary lifestyle if you don’t push yourself to get active. Furthermore, canteen is primarily stocked with candy, pop, and chips that end up filling pantries for two weeks at bulk. The more health-conscious items are more expensive, and require spending more of your budgeted allowance to stock up on. It’s easy to get some sugary items with $90, but that same amount can only get you creatine, fish oil, and some high-end oral care items before you max out and have to wait another two weeks.

The first thing I did upon learning that there’s a 18 month waitlist to see a dentist in prison was cut out all sugar from my diet and become an obsessive flosser. Someone had fashioned some mint-waxed string into a garrote wire at some point before my arrival at Beaver Creek, so dental floss was banned and needed to be ordered special from the catalog. I bought six. Teeth are one of the most important signs of health in a person, as bad oral hygiene betrayals your worst habits. Misshapen or black teeth likely mean the inmate has a bad substance abuse problem. Bad breath isn’t a huge giveaway of anything, but when you’re constantly in close contact with someone and talking a lot, it’s easy to pick up on. One inmate we called Five Teeth was clearly on the business end of a beating at some point during his life bid and had his whole top row of teeth knocked out of his head. My pearly whites would remain pearly and white come hell or high water.

If you want to stay in shape, federal institutions can work to your benefits in some respects. Sports is a constant pulse that breaks up the week, with volleyball, soccer, baseball, basketball, tennis, badminton and hockey going on in the gym. On both sides of the gymnasium are two weight pits that are not only well equipped but stocked with enough people that can inspire you and are happy to give you advice on how to start or target a specific muscle. At one point, I was working out during the night shift with two guys who weighed 270 pounds. The one who was 6”5 was nicknamed “The Fridge” and the shorter and stronger one was “The Mini Fridge.” Nicknames are vital for shooting the shit with people you’re on friendly terms with, and most of these short forms are borne out of one’s physical appearance, quarks, or criminal charges.

The aforementioned canteen did allow you to put together some semblance of a skin-care routine while in custody. Although there are no Khiels lotions or charcoal face masks, you can put together something that works for you. I personally had a combination of Pears Soap, apricot facial scrub, and St. Ives lotion that preserved whatever youth I had left. For many people, jail keeps them looking young since there’s no alcohol or tobacco to speed up the aging process.

Giving up on your body is the first step towards giving up on your future. Penitentiary time proved that discipline can be built regardless of your conditions, and that there is no limit to what you can do with your body, whether it’s inside a box or not.

12: Missing the Internet, Mostly Just Google

It took just three months of not having a phone for me to start noticing an improvement in my memory. My digital detox is one of the other unseen benefits of my stay here. I’m in an odd scenario because, unlike the people who have been here for 14 years and recently been released, I know what I’m missing and how trivial it is. I feel for the guy who discovers YouTube for the first time in his life and slips into a K-Hole of Ed Sheeran propaganda after looking up a music video. But I know what I’m missing, and I don’t feel particularly empty for missing it.

There’s something to be said about forming your own opinion about books and music without getting things bounced at you from the depths of Twitter’s echo chamber. It’s also interesting to reflect those pieces of culture through your own lived or learned experiences, such as watching a documentary about ‘Midnight Basketball’ and the US Crime Bill through the viewpoint of someone in prison. One of the best things about being a reformed Hot Take Exporter is realizing, in hindsight, how ephemeral the idea of something like live tweeting award shows was. Culture now has a stake in being controversial, which makes the mundane out of what was once shocking. When everything is clickbait, nothing is clickbait. The only thing I really missed out on was TikTok, which I can’t say is fully true since it appears to be a version of Vine that’s plugged directly into the mainstream, as “celebrities” from the platform seem to have less friction than ever when it comes to transitioning into cable shows. Everything also seems to run on the blockchain now, which is better not only for authenticity’s sake but also because it folds into my interests.

This is easy to say when I don’t have access to a device, but I’m probably only going to use my phone for social media purposes an hour a day once I touch road. The feeling I got from being online and being “surrounded” by information was a former justification of mine for staying online. But after spending my day in a library, I realize that that feeling is transferrable into the real world too. This may seem like a dumb realization to have, but the idea that information exists offline is something that it took coming to jail to click-in. Discussing an idea or an article with someone for 10 minutes in person is more fulfilling than arguing with strangers about it online.

The beauty of taking a criminal justice sociology course in here was that I was able to bring a lot to the table when it came to the readings. When I went to Laurentian University the first time at 19, all I wanted to do was finish my day and leave to go smoke popper’s in Joey’s garage. Now, more than 10 years later, I relish doing the reading because it provides an academic vocabulary to thoughts that have been jumbled around the periphery of my mind for the years I’ve been in. Having that stream of information available to me eventually became a channel for me to route information and culture through. It’s like when you’re learning a new language, you begin to see it everywhere in your daily life (like how “camouflage” is just French for “hidden”), picking up a new interest re-maps your brain to absorb information through new pathways. In hindsight, the only thing Twitter provided was a stage where culture and events could be processed to answer the question of “how do I condense this event into an ironic joke that expresses apathy but still sounds smart?”

There are times when having a phone is imperative, but they’re mostly for the purposes of trivia items or when you need to remember an actor’s name that’s on the tip of your tongue. But most of these things can wait until you call your people and ask them to Google “Kevin Connoly IMDB” and read the non-‘Entourage’ items. There were also a few times we just asked a guard to search how many titles Udonis Haslem had won in order to settle a bet, and he’d come tell us the next time he walked through the unit. The cool thing about there only being like 12 websites now is that I know exactly what I’m missing, and it’s not much. The loss of access to knowledge is balanced out the lack of illusions around the fact that what you’re doing when you’re wasting time is actually “researching” something.

13: Bad People Don’t Exist, Karma Isn’t Real

Despite all the time I’ve spent in prison, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who self-identifies as a bad person. Putting aside all of the legitimate psychopaths and people who wear the negative stigma of criminality as a badge of honour, there’s two reasons people find themselves in jail. The nicest way of packaging those two groups are “lazy entrepreneurs” and “those who suffer gravely from mental health issues.” A more corrosive type of terminology is used by sociologist Steven Spitzer to label the groups “social junk” and “social dynamite.” According to Spitzer, jail’s primary purpose is to handle the “human wreckage” constantly produced by the stresses capitalism places on families, communities and individuals.

Those who are dynamite/lazy entrepreneurs decided to play the game of life using their own rules and took some shortcuts to wealth and happiness, sometimes because they didn’t know any other way to accrue wealth but mostly because they knew, and found the alternative more alluring. Those in the junk/mental health group aren’t criminal-minded, but just snapped on someone at some point in their life and made a life-altering decision in the process. If asked, neither grouping would say they’re a bad person, just that they made some bad decisions.

Buying into this same logic, “good” people don’t exist either. People simply make good decisions to avoid negative consequences whether they be tangible and based in legal rule, or intangible and based on religious doctrine (karma falls into this category). Obviously, there’s a wide range on this morality spectrum. Not everyone who finds their wife cheating on them goes on to kill her, and not everyone who finds a wallet returns it with all the money intact.

But why do people put themselves in the “good person” bucket so quickly? Most people know that they do not deserve to be there if they perform any sort of internal audit on their actions, but that doesn’t stop them from self-diagnosing. If people in prison don’t refer to themselves as “bad people,” then where are all of the bad people hiding? If anything, my time has shown me that good and bad people don’t exist at all, and the moral dichotomy is something that was created by Hollywood to sell us propaganda masked as tropes.

Reform is framed through applying a Marxist lens to criminal justice because the current system of punishment has roots in neoliberal economics. Viewing crime through an economic lens means that some believe that if you exact a high enough price for committing crime, people will not do it. This flies in the face of the evidence that offenders are not thinking about the consequences of their actions when they commit crimes. Since neoliberalism paints all social problems as individual problems, and individuals are solely responsible for fixing their own shit, law and order needs the dichotomy of good and bad in order to function. The two social institutions that neo-liberals believe in are the “free” market, and law and order, so a look at the foundation would potentially shake the very structure of their beliefs.

I think the reason most people are so quick to label themselves as good is because it demonstrates that they’ve succeeded at playing the game using the rules society has agreed upon. It’s a philosophical question to ask why we don’t question the way things are and why we’re here, so it is easier to just not do this and follow the rules. Most people who leave prison (the dynamite types, not the wreckage types) go on to live a life where they get a union job, learn a trade, and perform manual labour in order to make their parole officers—an instrument of the neoliberal state—happy.

Bad people don’t exist at the numbers the incarceration rate would have you believe, only lazy or sick people who commit bad actions do. The faster society understands law and order through this lens to apply restorative instead of punitive systems, the better it will be for everyone.

14: Working for “The Man”

There’s two main ideological camps in penitentiaries when it comes to working attitudes: Those who say they’re not going to work for CSC by any means, and those who will happily go the extra mile in whatever menial labour gig they get assigned. Those in the former group are likely short-timers who don’t see the point in doing something that could benefit their oppressors in any way. They will find whatever excuses, medical or otherwise, to keep from having to go to work each morning. The second camp is mostly made up of lifers who seem to believe that a shining letter from their boss is going to be the difference maker when they go up to see the parole board. Many live in the middle ground, doing just enough to not piss off the authorities while still making sure they maintain autonomy over their schedule. For many who have been incarcerated for a long time and lost support from their family, the $4-$7 they earn per day is the only hope they have of sustaining themselves.

None of the jobs presented at the institutions are difficult. For the first 18 months I worked as a butcher, cut and stamped facemasks, upholstered furniture for the army, loaded donated couches in and out of moving vans, and worked as a farm hand tapping trees for the syrup harvest. Most of these jobs have been for CORCAN, a subsidiary of CSC that handles its manual labour and acts like the manufacturing arm of corrections. CORCAN doesn’t just makes clothes and furniture for institutions across Canada, with a compartmentalization that means that one institution ends up making all of one product for the rest of (fun fact: a women’s prison makes all of the men’s underwear). It also uses inmate labour to provide goods for the army, the post office, and government offices across the country.

That means inmates can be tasked with making gun lockers for the military barracks one week, sew up mail bags the next, and then construct aluminium cubicles to be shipped to some bureau in Ottawa.

The last third of my sentence was spent taking University courses in Sociology and a French correspondence course. Both of these endeavors were self-funded and completed without any assistance from the institution. I had to find my own spot in the library and work independently, and since there was nobody else in my course, discussions were limited to the two helpfully smart lifers who worked in the library. Although, since one of them was a staunch libertarian and the other was a Soviet studies graduate from University of Toronto, their worldviews were pointed in a way that didn’t always provide me with the answers I needed.

I was under the impression that one could learn a trade while incarcerated, but apparently, those programs ended under Stephen Harper in the mid-2000s. The only schooling available was for inmates who didn’t complete their Grade 10 education, and the classes were taught by exceedingly patient teachers who came three times a week just to help out. Although the library was well-stocked, there was no guide on where to start reading specific materials or curriculum. Plus, to be completely frank, most of the population was comfortably dim and uneager to do anything but watch TV and eat snacks all day.

Most of the skills that can be imported into the real world don’t come from anything that CSC does for inmates. To be fair, most of these restrictions are caused by inmates screwing it up for others by taking stupid risks. For example, there was once a table saw in the hobby craft room until an inmate sliced his hand in half. The thing about freedoms and privileges is that they’re easy to take away but are never really reinstated.

All of the things that Stephen Harper took away are still missing, despite the fact that Justin Trudeau talks a good game about criminal justice reform.

The true benefits I’ve seen for inmates only kick in one they become ex-cons. For lifers who get out, they have to spend a mandatory two years in a halfway house, which has a set of rules that mirror the authority of prison, but are still a place within a community where you can go out and rebuild your life. At a halfway house, your rent and groceries are covered. Whenever you get a job, you can stack up enough money to get on your feet after you complete the two years in the hallway house. Since you’re required to submit to a piss test every month, blowing all your money on drugs is out of the question. If you get a trades certificate and become a tradesperson, it’s very feasible that after two years you’ll have enough money for a place of your own.

I think the problem is that everyone is striving for exponential growth. Nobody wants linear success anymore, they want to do One Big Thing that will bring them all the fame and fortune that will keep them from having to be in the rat race. Nobody sells drugs as a career plan, they do it in anticipation of the one big score after which they’ll be able to retire.

You can’t make someone a hard worker. That ethic is only self-installed after the alternative presents itself. Sloth builds complacency and mediocrity, and bad decisions are always made when looking for shortcuts. Being in jail doesn’t force anyone to change, only the promise of a better life does that. If you see that the guy beside you is living better than he was a year ago after doing a few easy tasks, you can decide to level yourself up in his image. But you need to make that choice for yourself, and a lot of people see jail as a way to network in the wrong direction and get caught up in dumber shit than what landed them here to begin with.

15: Bobbing and Weaving Through COVID in Corrections

One afternoon, while waiting for canteen in a line with a group of inmates, I heard a guy who had been in jail for 20 years tell everyone that the only time he was happy to be incarcerated was during COVID. Not only do you know that you’re in a sequestered island away from society where you can take the proper steps to ensure your dealings with “the outside” are protected, but you also have the “freedom” to exist alongside others who are safe from harm.

It’s an interesting experience being isolated from society when it came time for society to isolate from each other. While the general, not incarcerated population was asked to stay inside with only their friends and family, inmates were segregated into pods with people they had never met. The lack of alternative news meant that everything that came through was from the mainstream lens of doom, gloom, and body count tickers on the TV. Security measures were introduced seemingly at random, and enforced briefly if at all. Guards didn’t wear masks, temperature checks were re-done until the right reading showed up, and the only thing that was maintained through every sectional lockdown in the jail was yard time. For some reason, even after it was proven that it was an airborne virus that could spread from person to person but not via object, the wiping down of door handles remained high on the list of concerns for CSC staff. I managed to move from Joyceville Assessment five months before they suffered the worst outbreak in Canada, with 60% of the institution getting infected as a result of—allegedly!—a kitchen steward bringing it in. I worked in the kitchen at Joyceville and let me tell you that as far as rumors go, this one is very easy to believe.

Four people died as a direct result of this negligence. A government body was instructed with maintaining the welfare of people in its care, and it failed. Over ten percent of the inmate population in Canada got COVID. By comparison, only 2% of the Canadian population had contracted the disease by that time. This is just federal statistics. The numbers for provincial jails, which seemed to suffer outbreaks at a pace of one a month for a year, are much harder to find.

These grim numbers only reflect the people who died from the virus. As a result of lockdowns, many people in provincial jails and medium security federal institutions overdosed on contraband, brought on by either boredom or deteriorating mental health. We may never find out the true body count brought on by COVID hitting corrections, which is a scary thought in a country as advanced as Canada.

I know the common refrain will be “they’re prisoners, they made bad decisions and hurt people, who cares if they die?” But consider the fact that the worst offenders, the high profile ones who have their mug shot on TV and have their name become eponymous with some heinous era in Canada, are the ones best protected from the virus. The Church Street Killer and the Minivan Incel are on 23 hour lockdown in maximum security, they don’t interact with anyone long enough to catch an airborne virus. Those who suffered COVID’s effect were the medium and minimum inmates, the ones in for drug dealing, a driving while impaired charge, or for fraud. Nobody deserves to die from COVID, but the man who defrauded a business partner and was sentenced for 2 years in custody shouldn’t receive a death sentence via negligence.

The way that the government of Canada handled COVID in Corrections might go down as one of Trudeau’s greatest embarrassments—which is saying a lot for that guy. It didn’t help that the minister in charge of our health and safety was Bill Blair, the former police commissioner for Toronto. But the personal silver lining through all of this was the fact that I’ve never become so civil-minded and engaged in politics now that it had a direct hand in the life-and-death decisions that affected those around me.

16: Corrections Needed

So you’ve been found guilty and sentenced to federal time. What’s next? Immediately after the judge reads out how much time you’ll be expected to spend as federal property, you’re taken to a holding cell where you’ll be held until it’s time to ship you to the provincial institution closest to the courthouse. Once there you’ll be stripped and equipped with a kit of clothing, including an orange one-piece jumpsuit. Since you’re technically federal property, the provincial institution needs to alleviate themselves of you within 14 days—a delay that’s been exponentially lengthened due to COVID-19 and has resulted in federal inmates being housed in provincial detention centres for up to six months.

During your time in provincial, you can expect to double or even triple bunk, sharing a toilet and a small table where you’ll each take your meals during the times you’re locked up. If there’s no staffing or safety issues in the entire institution, you may be allowed out of your cell for a few hours a day, but if they’re even one person short or a “code blue” is announced on the speakers marking a fight somewhere in the building, you’ll be locked up all day. According to some rumoured legal standard, an inmate must be allowed out every 72 hours in order to bathe and use the phone, which is exactly what takes place after three days of lockdowns as a guard escorts two inmates at a time for 20 minutes to do both activities.

Once you hear your name called for the wagon to Kingston, your time as federal property starts in earnest. You arrive at an assessment institution where you’re meant to spend 70 to 90 days in order to meet with a preliminary parole officer and figure out what sorts of programs you’ll need to take during your time, and where you’ll be stationed for the remainder of your sentence. Your “criminal recidivism index” score decides your programs, and which mother institution you’ll do a majority of your time in is judged according to your “security intervention risk” rating. It’s at this level where you’re given a patina of individuality, as you’re no longer made to wear orange and can have some personal effects sent in.

Since assessment is a mandatory stop for everyone’s path of progress, there’s a mixing of offenders as maximum and minimum security individuals are all housed on the same range. For anyone with a life sentence, maximum security for two years is a non-negotiable stepping stone in the journey. Those who have been prescribed a set of programs will be assigned an institution that can facilitate those needs, provided they have no incompatible inmates. As Ontario is home to nine institutions of various security levels, everyone will find a home eventually.

The goal for everyone is to cascade down the various levels of security until they can end up at minimum security—colloquially known as “camp.” At the mother institution, you are housed with between 200 to 500 other inmates, depending on the security level. To avoid overcrowding and maintain safety Correction Service Canada has a mandate about keeping one guard for every four inmates in maximum security, one for every eight in medium, and one for every sixteen in minimum. The way to graduate and progress through security levels is to take programs that address everything from an inmate’s attitude to substance abuse issues. These programs involve a classroom-style situation where a group will walk through a PowerPoint deck featuring the vocabulary necessary for them to address the issues that led to their index offense and crime cycle.

As long as an inmate maintains perfect attendance and doesn’t antagonize the class, the program is considered successful and a box is ticked on the offender’s correctional plan. During the regular meetings an offender is meant to have with their Parole Officer, progress is demonstrated and marked in the hopes of qualifying them towards a lower security level, and eventually conditional release. The worst of the worst are unlikely to see release, especially if they never show any remorse or apologize for their actions, or if they continually neutralize their actions by reframing them in a way that the parole officer doesn’t agree with.

Doing time in a federal institution isn’t difficult if you come into the experience respectful of all cultures and keep your thinking from being too rigid. Loss of autonomy is subjective—while reframing the experience as a “digital detox” may be a way of neutralizing your offense and the retribution you’ve incurred for it, it’s also a coping mechanism that proves useful for some. If you enter the institution with strong social ties to certain groups that may provide safety on the inside, like a religious sect or street gang, you’re more likely to see the experience not as a punishment but as a necessary crucible in your professional development.

The biggest hurdle for anyone to get over is the boredom experienced by not being able to leave a certain building for a majority of your day and having to be put onto a set schedule. The warehousing era of criminal justice in Canada may not be as applicable under COVID, during which federal institutions have been purposefully keeping numbers low, but the push for turning offenders into “zombies” or “robots” is evident in the prescription drugs that healthcare prescribes. Anyone experiencing trouble sleeping will be given Trazadone, Ramron, or Syraquil—medications that are actually SSRIs with sedentary effects. By keeping the offender’s mood dampened, they are kept docile and mild-mannered. This may make the jobs of the guards easier, but it can also be seen as a soft punishment and a form of retribution.

There are no longer any punishments of the body, but there are codes and cultural tropes one must be mindful of while living in prison. Some of them have been around so long that they can be classified as indigenous, if only because they help establish the line between the inmates and the guards. For example, inmates are to never whistle, as that’s what guards used to do when they brought an inmate to be hung back in the early days of Canada’s federation. Similarly, one should not jangle keys, as that is also guard behaviour. Words like “goof” are triggers to fight, though nobody knows exactly why such an inoffensive word in modern parlance became such a trigger on the inside. There’s also a number of imported cultural tropes which have come in waves over the years as different cultures drifted through the institution, leaving their imprint upon the place long after they left.

The Muslim contingency that made sure there’s a twin “pork-free” cooking apparatus in each kitchen, the Jamaican groups that made homophobia the norm to the point where you need to say “yellow fruit” instead of “banana.” These linguistic tics have seeped into the walls to the point where they are ingrained in those who have spent enough time in institutions that they’ve grown “prisonized” and self-censor. These can be seen as mental punishments, for they create an additional mesh of censorship that needs to be forever present in an inmate’s mind in order to move without conflict in the institution.

Most of the people in prison are misguided. The terms “social junk” and “social dynamite” are overt in their categorizations. To put it simply, institutions are filled with either lazy entrepreneurs or individuals with mental health issues. Those who fall in the latter camp need to receive the sort of constant care that correctional guards can’t provide, and are best suited to mental health institutions than criminal ones. However, the lazy entrepreneurs would be the ones that would benefit most from a rethinking of the neoliberal idea of prison, and would absorb any of the skills that could be taught to them during their time incarcerated. As it stands, their entrepreneurial mind-state is put to use networking with other criminal individuals who are also bored.

The explicit purpose of Correctional Service Canada is to protect society by removing guilty people from public life, to deter future criminal acts by punishing offenders, and to rehabilitate inmates. It’s tempting to say that none of this works, but anecdotally I can attest to the fact that nobody I’ve met during my time has decided to change their ways as a result of something CSC has instilled in them, through programs or otherwise. Neutralization techniques can help anyone cope with the lack of privacy and loss of family relationships that occur during their time incarcerated by reminding themselves that it’s temporary. The sophisticated methods of surveillance aren’t used to keep inmates safe as much as they’re used to keep the guard’s jobs easy and keep contraband out from the institution.

At every step, it is evident that the guards are not responsible for the social welfare of the prisoner, so moral bankruptcy and deterioration can very easily fester when an institutionalized person sees that nobody cares about their well-being. This flippant attitude is apparent in the guard’s actions, who regularly tell inmates that they are just there for the paycheck and are “doing time” just like them, counting down the days to a retirement pension from the federal government.

Privatization has led to some dangerous and deadly effects in America, but keeping Canada’s correction system in public hands while adding a unionized layer to the staff in charge of inmates has created a unique set of problems. Like most unionized workers, CSC staff expect to see their wages and workplace standards rise in perpetuity. Nobody in a union job will ever sign on to go the extra mile and do more work for free, especially when it could make them into a class traitor or scab in the process. Similar to police unions, guard unions can use their power as a voting bloc to keep legislation favorable and vote in Members of Parliament who are tough on law and order. They can go on strike if they feel like their needs aren’t being taken seriously, in which case the primary losers are the prisoners who depend on the guards in order to be let out of their cells.

Corrections are needed at some level of Correction Services Canada, but the only question is where to point the solutions and where to find money for it. “Privatization” has been a dirty word in Canadian politics ever since the Penetanguishine experiment, but to look at the system as it exists today and see it as being in full working order is naïve. To borrow terminology from the tech sector, corrections presents a vast pool of untapped human capital and with the right guidance could venture into novel technological frontiers. Maybe the best way forward is to take a bold step in an experimental direction, because as it’s set up now it doesn’t seem to be working for anyone.

17: What is a Perfect Prison?

Let’s imagine a world in which we have a “perfect” correction institution, and what that would look like practically. This institution would be one that not only serves the desires of the public’s need for safety from dangerous offenders via removal from society, but also one that rehabilitates those people who have been underserved by society. It would need to provide inmates with the skills they need to be ready for life on the outside, while allowing them to make amends for the mistakes that brought them to prison in the first place. It would keep inmates from feeling “institutionalized” by allowing them to maintain some level of autonomy over their lives, while still prioritizing the safety of the other inmates, as well as the correctional officers meant to watch over them.

Canada is the ideal place to try this, since it’s a country that wants to reform its criminal justice system, has a large number of incarcerated individuals, and has had negative experiments with privatization of prisons, which in turn would motivate it to try something new. The best place to start would be minimum security, which is already the last step before many inmates are allowed back into society. Minimum security inmates already enjoy things like decreased barriers to working in the community and the ability to shop for and cook their own food, so improving these institutions would be easier than reforming any others. In an effort to keep from participating in the prison industrial complex, the solution can’t simply be to build more institutions meant solely for federal inmates. The ideal shift would be to add a forked path at the end of the existing pipeline, where inmates within two years of release can transition towards two streams: High-skilled information labour, or military service.For this system to work, we’d have to operate under the assumption that the existing system that places inmates in the proper institution based on their security score works.

As it stands, lifers must go in front of the parole board for a decision any time they are to be released into the community, even if they are to be escorted the entire time by a correctional officer. We’d have to also assume that the parole board makes the right decision one hundred percent of the time, and everyone who “graduates” to minimum security deserves the right to be there. With these assumptions established, the last step of corrections would kick in only when someone Is within two years of their day parole eligibility—a date set at one third of a federal sentence, minus six months. Parole officers would be the ultimate arbiters of choice in this matter, and could hold someone back from this program if they believe they aren’t a good fit or need more time in a structured environment before being granted the privilege of embarking on these next steps.

The newly created ‘Correctional Reserves’ stream would ship inmates to an army, air force, or navy barracks for them to serve out the remainder of their sentence. Under the watchful eye of commanders and sergeants, inmates would serve as full-time on-site reservists, existing far outside of the military organizational chart. They would be charged with maintenance of the grounds and equipment, and not be given access to any weapons or classified information. Inmates would sleep on-site and eat with the cadets, enforcing pro-social behaviours and reducing the effects of institutionalization that may have crept in. Since inmates don’t return daily to their institution, the smuggling of contraband isn’t an issue and is monitored in the same way it currently is on the army grounds. Upon completion of their sentence, inmates who participated in the Correctional Reserve program would be eligible to enter the Reserves officially and potentially work their way up the military hierarchy starting from the bottom. This stream would be most beneficial for anyone who has the classifications of a low-skilled labour employee, but lacks the discipline to self-motivate their way into entrepreneurship.

The ‘Correctional Technology Training’ stream of the program would ship inmates out to a federally run institution that would be closer in environment to campus than to prison. This institution would provide advanced learning programs for anyone interested in data infrastructure, coding programs, website development, or mobile application creation. Funding would come partly from a technology partner, who would equip the institution to act like a “Smart City” where data is mined from an individual’s daily mundane interactions within the space in an effort to find avenues for optimization. The most drastic change from existing minimum-security prisons to this Smart Institution would be the fact that not only inmates are housed on the property.

Teachers would be able to enter and exit freely, and any civilians who choose to pursue this advanced learning would be able to live on campus as well, provided they adhere to the same rules around contraband as the Correction’s Officers would (no smoking on the property, for example). All inmates would be required to equip themselves with some sort of wearable technology in order to monitor their movements, while the civilians would not. Upon graduating from the Smart Institute, any inmate who chose to pursue the Correctional Technology Training stream would be able to apply for an internship with the technology partner involved and work their way up within the ranks of the organization.

These additional streams would act like training grounds for labour, reducing recidivism rates by giving inmates something to strive for and some sense of purpose. Harper-era mandates removed the ability for inmates to learn skilled labour trades in the institution, and this would be a remedial effort to equip inmates with something productive to take from their time incarcerated. Not only are inmates given some tools to start anew with, but by regularly interacting with civilian populations, they can begin the reintegration process of being released into the community without the jarring effects that post-release life can have on people now.

As it currently stands, Canada’s correction system doesn’t prepare the incarcerated for life on the outside. Since life without parole doesn’t exist in Canada, everyone eventually makes their way out—save for the most violent or dangerous offenders. Being released from prison means that you’re able to write a new chapter in your life, but you’re also constantly reminded of the fact that you’re starting at the bottom. This is a humbling experience, but it also lets you know that you have somewhere to climb to if you’re driven enough and given the right set of tools to make use of. It shouldn’t be a hopeless situation, and the way to keep it from being one is to make the most of the “social wreckage” as early on as possible in their rehabilitation.

18: Tall Poppies Syndrome

For a culture that’s in a constant state of self-assessment, Canada does offer a healthy dose of propaganda that it feeds its own citizens every November. The events are referred to as “Vimy Ridge” and “D-Day” for WWI and WWII, respectively. With poppies on, Canadians take a moment of silence to remember the lives lost in war. This practice is much more pronounced in places like Kingston than Toronto, as I found out when the whole store I was working in during my prison work release came to a halt at 11:00 AM on the 11th of the month.

Sociologist Jonathan Vance looked at the memorials Canada constructed after the First World War and found that they helped the country establish a “religion of state.” In this new secular religion of statehood the myth of Christ’s suffering and ultimate sacrifice on the cross was being replaced by the soldier’s suffering and ultimate sacrifice in the trenches. The national flag was replacing the crucifix. This new state mythology gave a ' purified' narrative of the Great War ' free of complexity' and re-cast the trauma of the war in the larger mythology of democracy, Empire, and the birth of the Canadian nation-state.

When I first enrolled in elementary school in Canada and it came time to learn history, I understood the way the war ended in a different way than how my mother did. She came of age in the USSR, and had never heard of “D-Day” in her life. Her teaching had taught her that WWII had come to a halt in Stalingrad, where troops were frozen into surrender. The version I learned in history class re-centered the war through the eyes of Canada and cast the trauma in a mythology of democracy. The idea being that “Canada” wouldn’t be possible if not for the battles its soldiers fought in at the end of each war.

With no wars taking place between now and then, this “religion of state” has extended to slain police officers in the following decades. Though Canadians seem to be going through a fraught relationship with their local police forces right now, there is a general level of appreciation for the federal force of RCMP officers, or ‘Mounties.’ No other country in the world is so globally identifiable by their police force. When one of the biggest cultural exports of Canada is our police force and the greatest coagulation point for our patriotic feelings is the remembrance of fallen soldiers, calling out someone for being un-Canadian means calling someone out for not loving the police. Especially in a secular nation like Canada where religion is considered less and less of a comfort, the religion of the state is all that some people have left to look towards for common ground. Canada is a land of immigrants with no culture to assimilate into. This can lead to sticky situations, like what happened with Don Cherry.

Don Cherry was a hockey commentator with loud suits and gruff opinions. In 2019, he said that new immigrants to Canada don’t recognize the gravity that comes from wearing a poppy. His abrasive opinion ended up getting him fired from ‘Hockey Night In Canada’ while making him a folk-hero in the eyes of the people who make sure to honor the moment of silence every November 11th. But Don Cherry was right: New arrivals to Canada don’t understand the religion of the state that comes from knowing about two indecisive battles that meant little in the grand scheme of the wars, but are vital to Canada’s understanding of Canada. His opinion was dumb, but correct, because the whole situation is dumb and hard to disagree with.

You can’t begrudge new immigrants for not knowing who we fought 100 years ago. Maybe the solution is new ops, a new set of challengers to take on. At the very least, we need something new to rally around, something that unites people all over Canada. Maybe the solution is to take down all the statues and replace them with new statues of pop stars: Bieber, Mendes, Drake, Abel. These can be our new lodestars—those who valiantly marched into America and came back famous—not old fallen troops.

19: Freedom vs. Order

The paradox of order versus freedom sits heavier upon society than ever before. As the world seems to take on a new reality annually, the question of who enforces novel laws always follows in the wake of their creation. While topics like COVID have put society’s rules in a hyperbolic chamber where new regulations shoot up like sprouts from wet soil, order tries to leash freedoms we once took for granted. While there may not be a clear answer to how much freedom we can have under the threat of seemingly arbitrary laws, beginning to look at the police as a commercial enterprise and not a guardian institution would help us make sense of the decisions they continue to make. The society of 2022 cares infinitely more about the enforcement of mask regulations and vaccine protocols than it did in 2019, due partly to some’s concern for the “greater good” but mostly to the threat of punishment that shrouds would-be law-breakers. Order has been presented as the tonic, and freedom must be sacrificed for the common cause.

This is not a new phenomenon, but due to COVID, protests, and wars we’re seeing it play out over the series of months instead of years.

Anecdotally, the police have always been enforcers of order. They have limited the freedom of upstart entrepreneurs to pursue black market dealings that may have been legal at one point, or may well be legal in the future. A tavern owner in Ontario in 1915 would be akin to a local celebrity and would have earned an honest living from selling liquor to his neighbours. Three years later, that same barkeep would be a lawbreaker under the Ontario Temperance Act. Fast forward to 1924, our tavern owner would be able to operate without issue from the local officers again—assuming he only bought his goods at a licensed alcohol distributor. The introduction of liquor taxes allowed the government to monitor our tavern keeper, but it also transformed the police force into a commercial enterprise.

If the police are truly guardian institutions, they are expected to defend a “greater good” and operate with a sense of public duty. Commercial enterprises seek to “move fast and break things” in the name of profit. By changing the definition of “greater good” based on manufactured fears, and then resetting that change whenever there’s the possibility of turning a profit from it, the police undermine themselves. If guardians worried solely about profit, they would abandon the greater good.

The police and the labour movements have a fraught history that’s entwined at its origins but splits outwards and farther away as time goes on and police abandon class consciousness after making more money as a result of having the same strong unions that they fought to break up decades earlier. Commercial enterprises should still enjoy the protection of unions and collective bargaining. Problems arise when police use their unions to keep from having to follow new regulations set onto them by the federal powers. Police unions and associations want to maintain their own freedom from outside the thumb of the government who provides them funding, which seeks to enforce order onto the police force.

If society ran similar, to how a police force operates, it would be bedlam. We need to feel as though laws aren’t being created arbitrarily and haphazardly. Until we can see the police as something other than a commercial enterprise, we can’t trust them to maintain objective order.

20: pig emoji

Being a cop sucks and its always sucked. Back in the day, cops fought against unions and broke up strikes until they achieved some class-consciousness and got their own unions. Then those unions started to work so well, they were not just pushing back via collective bargaining against low wages and poor working conditions, but on rules that said they had to limit their use of force or wear a body cam. Once they started to make some money (look up how much of your city’s budget goes towards funding the police, then look up how much of that police’s budget goes towards salary and wages) they abandoned class consciousness and no longer saw themselves as part of the neighbourhood they’re supposed to protect.

Once cops no longer trusted anyone but other cops, policing the community hard became harder as they were no longer part of the community.This “us vs. them” mentality is enforced by the force as early as rookie training camp, where they have to go through hazing rituals and are essentially brainwashed into loving Authority Daddy. It’s hard to feel sympathy for a tool of the oppressor, but when the average officer goes through a gauntlet specifically designed to remove his objective morals and loyalties, how can you begrudge the decisions they make?

There’s no easy solution, but maybe the most drastic one would be to remove police unions and associations. I’m generally anti-union when it comes to organizing a group that has guardianship (such as police, corrections officers, and teachers) and I generally find unions to be an obstacle to efficiency and maturation for industries. Imagine the army had a union where basic infantry and foot soldiers could take steps to not only fight for better wages, but also negotiate the work they’re asked to do. If demands aren’t met, the army would go on strike. This thought-experiment would be near impossible to imagine, since in the army you’re a direct instrument of the government. With the police, you’re two or three steps away from being employed by the Empire of The State, but you’re essentially still a soldier.

Like most unions, police unions no longer serve a greater purpose as most of the things they fought for hundreds of years ago have become enshrined in laws. Is policing a dangerous job? Statistically, not very. In Canada, the rate of on-the-job fatalities for police officers is 14 deaths per 100,000. That’s well below manual labour jobs like mining (281), construction (246), pilots (137), truck drivers (38), and plumbers (31) Without a doubt, police officers sometimes face fatal risks. Without a doubt, police officers sometimes perform heroic deeds. But the dangers they face aren’t as great as they’d have us believe. Thanks to US popular culture, the idea that policing is among the most dangerous of jobs is axiomatic.

The police will still catch criminals if unions cease to exist, and the legal arm of criminal justice functions just fine without their own unions. The idea of a fraternity or brotherhood of police officers isn’t just a silly boys club mentality, but it also leads to actual danger for civilians. One of the worst mass-shootings in Canadian history was committed in 2020 in Nova Scotia by an individual who dressed up in a cop uniform and rode around in a car altered to look like a police cruiser. He was a dentist who failed to become a police officer in a past life.

We may never know the inner dealings that this individual had when he committed domestic terrorism. What we do know is that the clothes he donned while performing these heinous acts wasn’t a religious garb or a graphic t-shirt with his favorite website featured in stylized font, but a police uniform.

21: Police in Pop Culture

There’s a rule in jail that says you can’t watch cop shows on common room TVs. That’s a lot easier said than done since so many primetime shows somehow about law enforcement. But with this rule in mind, I would constantly sneak to my room and lock my door every day at noon to watch ‘Brooklyn 99’ on FX for an hour.What can the most popular cultural depictions of police officers tell us about respect for the government at any given time? Looking at only the dominant exporter of media (America, duh) we can trace an interesting arc that goes from ‘Keystone Kops’, to ‘Dragnet’, to ‘Dirty Harry’, to ‘24’, and ends at ‘Brooklyn 99’. Those are the main cultural totems when it comes to portraying the police in each era, though there are other smaller shows that exist within the umbrella of those.

There are also shows like ‘Law and Order’ and ‘CSI’ that have become such major franchises and self-contained universes that they have their own evolutionary arc when it comes to their depictions of the police over the years.

From the start of police in pop culture, the public saw them—and therefore, the nation-state which they represented—go from inept, to efficient, to being bad for good reasons, to being a tool that’s begrudgingly necessary. The fact that the depictions changed in line with major US-centric world events like WWII (‘Dragnet’), the Cold War (‘Dirty Harry’), and the War on Terror (‘24’) is a reflection of how the citizens of the government saw their leaders role in the bigger picture. More often than not, the message that each of these shows sent was that bending the rules is sometimes necessary if it results in the greater good being served.

‘Brooklyn 99’ is an interesting depiction of the police in pop culture because, by being created in the 2010s and existing in a constant state of flux, it tells us more about the general public’s respect for the government than it likely intended to upon its inception. Jake Peralta, the central character, grew up on a diet of cop shows and movies, openly praising the ‘Die Hard’ saga and other cop shows frequently. In one opening scene, the episode opens with the precinct discussing their favorite cop shows, something that establishes ‘Brooklyn 99’ as cop show with a Meta lens.

The show features a diverse cast of characters that’s meant to be representative of the New York precinct they serve, and there’s numerous arcs on the show where these stereotypes are poked at to highlight the human nature of the police and the community that cops are sourced from. The show also deals with issues like stop and frisk and racism within the force head-on, developing a humanity around the people who have to uphold laws that may be flawed.

While more liberal-leaning cop shows aren’t a new development, with shows like ‘Barney Miller’ and ‘Hill Street Blues’ existing in the zeitgeist at the same time as shows like ‘24’, the public’s reaction to ‘Brooklyn 99’ made it matter more than any show in the past. The show was temporarily cancelled, then brought back to a new network after a petition from fans, only to cease production in the wake of the racial upheaval that began the 20s. In its own way of existing in a constant state of questioning flux, ‘Brooklyn 99’ tells us more about the public’s respect for the government than it probably intended to.

Depictions of the police in media have existed for as long as we’ve had media. Police shows are a perfect vehicle for drama because not only do they deal with moral themes like good vs evil, they’re a good way to reflect signs of the times by keeping the public up-to-date with important issues. By focusing on the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, they can shift the focus away from the cops as central lodestars of morality.

In its attempts to tell funny cop stories while still being diverse, meta, and woke—only to still be taken off the air twice, ‘Brooklyn 99’ tell us about the general public’s respect for the government than it likely intended to.

22: Toronto is Gangland

This Toronto hood shit is almost Shakespearean. Imagine a constantly changing power rankings system in which gangs are constantly moving up and down based on notoriety levels. The top five spots would remain consistent over the past ten years (the Drake era) and maybe even beyond. In fact, a map of the highest rates of incarceration indicates that offenders come from Toronto’s most troubled neighbourhoods, including Regent Park, Kingston-Galloway, Jane-Finch and Jamestown—all of which have perennial placements on this power ranking system. While the data maps cleanly onto Toronto’s main ends it fails to take into consideration the infighting that occurs within those sectors.

There are no “gangs” in the American sense of the word, with primary colors and a milieu of members across a large plot of land banded together under a flag. Toronto’s groups are sectioned off by neighbourhood block, typically ones that contain low-income housing units and apartment buildings. Hundreds of feet could separate warring factions, or two rival groups could be kilometers apart on the other side of town. Most of the beef isn’t over territory—though some of it is, especially when it comes to dictating who can sell drugs on what blocks—but over generational grief. There’s no organization or narrative focus that would slot these wars into tidy tales, just a series of jealousy-driven offenses that go on to spark years of retributive justice. I’ve heard stories where a disagreement about a girl or a gun would go on to leave a trail of bodies for years, along with an increase in CSC’s institutional population.

Because a lot of these issues are generational, sons inherit the conflict of their fathers and nephews pay back their uncle’s killing in blood, as fights erupt over something that happened 10 years ago. Combined with the fact that gang life is a young boy’s game where you rise fast and fall hard, and it’s obvious why the arms race of collecting money and bodies is something that consumes people before they’ve fully developed as adults. The rise of Instagram as a platform to boast has made these cowboys into notorious figures in their community, while also being a catalyst for conflict whenever someone feels that a fallen soldier isn’t properly respected on the gram. Not posting someone from your block when they “drop out” can be just as political as paying respects, since it signals that they might have not been as solid as they made themselves out to be. Cropping someone out of a picture can be more damaging than arranging a hit on an individual, who has to live with that shame for the rest of their lives.

All of the technological advancements that have taken place in the “Drake era” have made it harder for the kids who are most easily influenced by seeing the wrong behaviour celebrated to even try and find a way out. That’s the most morose part of all of this: It’s not going to stop anytime soon. With the rise of streaming platforms, hood stars can monetize their clout by putting out songs. This only makes them a larger target, feeding back into the cycle of violence. The story of Houdini is made all the more tragic when you consider that almost all of it unfolded within a calendar year. Because so much of the hood culture becomes jail culture and pop culture, it’s hard to see a way out if you don’t look beyond what’s in front of you.

It’s not enough to say that pop culture celebrates a lifestyle, which encourages people to get into it. Pop culture is a reflection of reality, not a compass for it. To his credit, Drake doesn’t glorify or encourage cowboy behavior in a way that, say 50 Cent, did in the mid-aughts. More to his credit, Drake is a stand-up guy when it comes to taking care of people from certain parts of Toronto, regardless of how long their prison bid is. But looking to the pop star to fix structural and systemic damage is pointless, as is blaming the Raptors for an increase in gun violence. There’s not much that can be done about the seeking of retribution for generational trauma, or the allure of easy money for a community that runs on instant gratification.

If this Toronto hood shit was actually Shakespearean it would have a neat ending, but unfortunately right now is just appears to be a series of open-ended tragedies.

23: Looking for Pride in Ontario

I read about 60% of a book about Che Guevara in which he is quoted as saying “the soul of a nation can be found in its hospitals and its prisons.” This sounds very egalitarian and idealistic, but if true, it raises more questions about where I live, and where I will be living until 2028, than ever before. Canada’s identity and soul have been in question since the creation of our country, and nobody has been able to land on an answer in that time. The closest I’ve heard came from one Russian man I encountered in prison, who summed it up as “a socialist country that believes in private property and gay marriage.”

Being Canadian means asking America what they think of you. Very often, the answer is “not much.” Despite the fact that Canada has all of the dangerous aspects of life that America has, we like to pretend that gun crime and gang warfare is something that happens “over there.” We want to believe we’re the kind of people who always do the right thing, but that’s often just powerlessness masked as virtue. Canada is quick to rebuke a country with human rights violations (unless it’s a country we trade with) but doesn’t do much outside of the issued PR statement.

Because of their uncharacteristically long stays in power, you can look towards Canada’s past leaders and their accomplishments to see what’s been important to the temperature of the country. Stephen Harper’s main goals were to get tough on crime and balance the deficit, two pragmatic and puritanical mission statements that show Canada to be a disciplined country that’s willing to undergo some austerity measures as long as it means keeping basic tenants of Canadiana, like free healthcare. Justin Trudeau’s biggest and only accomplishment before COVID was the legalization of marijuana and a briefly gender balanced cabinet, both of which look nice in a tweet but lack gumption in regards to national identity.

Maybe the soul of our nation can never be defined because it was never defined to begin with. Unlike South Korea’s “hallyu” there was never a focused and well-defined movement for the country to take pride in, and unlike that country’s concept of “han” we have no shared cultural traits for people to be able to point to. The reason that so many immigrants have trouble assimilating into Canadian culture is because we have none. Outside of the fact that some of us play hockey and get our coffee from a now-Brazilian owned breakfast restaurant chain, Canada has nothing for people to get behind.

We have no mission statement, no purpose, and no power on the international stage. We have soft power galore thanks to movie directors, actors, musicians, and writers who break out into the mass media market via Hollywood, but because we create art in the same language and about the same topics as Americans, the line between the two cultures is dotted at best and non-existent at worst.

The closest Canada may have to a culture is what’s found in Quebec. That’s largely because they speak a different language but also because they invest so much into their stable of talent. Quebec has its own version of “The Masked Singer” that is on par with the American version as far as spectacle goes, but all of the celebrities behind the mask are unknown entities outside of the province. In my year and a half living in Montreal, I heard everyone refer to themselves as “Quebecois” with pride, but never in my life have I heard someone call themselves an “Ontarian,” let alone a proud one. The closest we may have is someone saying they’re from Toronto, but considering it’s the largest province and home to Canada’s capital, is it asking too much for it to have its own identity? Part of this struggle may be the fact that once we get close to being prideful, there’s a chorus of voices ready to shout us down. In Australia this is called “tall poppy syndrome,” and in Canada this manifests in shame towards anybody who may have been harmed during the making of this nation.

“Assimilation” has now become a dirty word in Canada, and there may have been a few readers who winced at the words “Ontario” and “proud” being so close together as it invoked memories of the housing developer-funded meme factories that helped get a Conservative premiere elected. The soul of a nation needs to be self-defined, manifest itself in our leaders, and be expressed using the culture that comes about as a show of our soft power.

Part of the problem may be that we focus more on the macro by asking “What is Canada?” instead of figuring out the more micro “What is Ontario?” but we can’t even answer that until we feel comfortable taking pride in what we’ve done and where it’s led us this far. History shouldn’t be hidden because it makes us uncomfortable, it should be examined to allow us direction to pivot into. Confederation happened about 155 years ago in 1867. Only 107 years before that, this whole mass of land was known as “New France.”

It’s okay for countries to evolve and change, but there needs to be something we’re aiming to change into. Every year we have more influential Canadians than ever before. The cultural exports that come from just Ontario have run the Billboard charts for over a decade. We have all of the tools at our disposal to brand the country in a way that doesn’t just boost our standing on the world stage, but gives new immigrants something to be proud of about their adopted land. Canada needs to be better, but before that, it needs to decide what it wants to be. Obviously prisons and hospitals won’t show you the ideal version of what the nation is, but it’s a cross section that helps you understand how the country serves its lowliest patrons.

24: Crime is Culture

What is culture, at its most basic, if not just an interaction between two individuals? What we talk about is what we’ve come to understand as culture, but sociologically culture is just the act of communicating and the nuances around that act. Content is culture, because it’s what we use to fill our time up in order to feel satisfied that we aren’t just wasting away and staring into the void. We look to content to learn more about the world or about ourselves, to pile so much trivia into our mind that we either becomes genre otakus about some niche, or to add textures to ourselves based on the implied reflections against individuals we see in on-screen characters.If content is culture, much of what has taken up oxygen in that space in recent years has revolved around crime.

I can’t even count how many four-part docu-series’ are centered around a deep dive into some heinous act in a small community and the fallout of it all years later. Crime is culture because it overlaps with universal themes like love, family, greed, betrayal, and justice. Crime creates definable heroes and villains, and offers potential redemption narratives for those involved.

Crime stories are a form of escapism, taking us across the world or into the mind of a troubled individual. Some of the stories I heard in jail would put any streaming offering to shame, and had they not often ended tragically they’d be prime fodder for media.I think one of the reasons people love talking about crime shows is because it lets them off the hook with doing the one thing you’re never really supposed to do in polite society: Talk about other people. Personally, most of why I care about a show has little to do with costumes or set design, and mostly about how the characters act and develop.

The reasoning for this is often selfish, since the act of comparing ourselves to others alleviates the guilt we have about our worst character traits. If the character you’re watching has been able to lead a fulfilled life while committing sins, it gives you hope that there’s no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle.

Stories about murder take up a lot of space in our culture, but stories about organized crime offer a more digestible and entertaining look at business logistics, operations, and supply chain management. I read 30% of ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ before growing bored, but anytime NatGeo had a show about the cartel I’d give it at least two episodes of my time. Fundamentally, it’s all the same type of story, you’re just subbing cookies for cocaine and leveraged buy-outs for assassinations. What makes the crime-centric stories more thrilling isn’t only the stakes involved, but the bravery implicit in going for broke.

Con-artist stories allow us to feel smarter than the victims as we tell ourselves that we’d never be swindled or finessed in the way these poor souls were. So though we may not see our whole selves in every crime boss, murderer, con-artist or street-level enforcer, we may recognize parts of our psyche that we’d only admit to having in private.Actively participating in culture is hard work. Back in the glory days of Twitter from 2010-2014 before Trump made outrage the base emotion you had to tap into if you wanted successful metrics on the app, creating content was the thing to do if you wanted to get attention online.

Those who stuck with it until today are either doing it as a creative writing hobby after work, recycling their collegiate papers in the hopes that someone other than the TA will read them, or supplementing the efforts of the PR team that handles their public facing career. To make content is to surrender yourself to the masses and strip yourself of pride in the process, but it’s also a noble act because it feeds culture. If it was easy, more people would actually do it and less would sit on the sidelines and in the peanut gallery of Twitter commenting on others living their life. I get that side of things too though, as I was also once 18 with a Twitter account—I did not let having nothing to say stand in my way of being vocal.

For better or worse, the rest of my life will be based on creating content. I’ve lived too many lives in order to keep them internalized. My life is an open book—albeit a heavily edited one—that might serve as an example to others, even if it’s as a cautionary tale. Crime is as much a part of my mythology as VICE is now—I will have been in jail 18 months less than my tenure at that company and it wouldn’t make any sense to hide away from it. I’m not sure how much of my day will be dedicated to building narratives and deconstructing biases, but if I don’t do anything with the time I spent inside, it will have all been for nothing. If crime is the lifeblood of content, and content is culture, then I’m in a unique position. The only way that this time would have been wasted is if nothing good comes of it, and I’m determined for that not to be the case. The fact that I’m restricted by Canada means I’ll have to fight twice as hard if I want to make it past the gate-keepers who decided ‘Run The Burbs’ is primetime TV.

As you probably know by now, I’m not great at conclusions when it comes to my life and my experiences. It’s hard to wrap a bow around a story that’s ongoing. All I know is that coming out of a situation like jail only to fall into the same patterns as before means that I’ll have truly wasted this time. Between the people I’ve met and the things I’ve learned while incarcerated, I have no choice but to make the most of this. One of my biggest fears about this time in my life was that I would miss out on life and on culture, but now that I’m out I understand that time has stood completely still for a lot of people these past three years. I thought the pandemic would have forced some people to roll up their sleeves and either help out their community by going into a valuable trade job, or moving out into a small towns and bringing their metropolitan ideals to a smaller sea, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. People kept toiling away, measuring their forward progress by how much content they’ve consumed. That’s the most ringing endorsement for content’s true value—that of an opiate.