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Sandra Wachholz Professor, Criminology & Social Justice , St. Thomas University Good Morning. I am pleased to be speaking today in memory and honour of Dr. Abdul Lodhi. Pursuant to the topic of community based corrections, Gayle MacDonald and I will be raising a number of questions today about the underlying issues and widely held beliefs that surround this correctional initiative. Each of us will speak for approximately ten minutes. At the fore, I would like to note that ideologically I support the concept and theory of community based corrections. I completed my Doctoral studies in the deep south, and through this experience I submit to you that I have walked through and have sat in some of the darkest and most dismal prisons in North America. For years I studied in an office with a window that looked out, just one block away, on the prison walls where the lethal injection executions took place. I am deeply troubled by the hurt and despair that prisons foster, but I do not embrace community based corrections with unbridled enthusiasm, but rather with a cautious and critical eye. Like so many initiatives that appear within corrections, there is a substantive difference between the theory and the reality of the operations and practice of community based corrections. One of the widely held beliefs and assumptions about community correctional programs is that they can be used as an alternative to placing offenders in prison. They have been promoted as a means to foster decarceration. Their ability to effectively foster decarceration has been called into question by numerous studies and by numerous scholars. Research tells us, for example, that such initiatives as intensive probation, community service orders, residential controls and treatment orders have widened rather than reduced the formal net of social control. The literature assessing the net-widening practices associated with community based corrections suggests that individuals, who have received unenforced probationary supervision rather than prison or jail, are being targeted for various community based programs. Such practices have made programs like probation "stronger, wider, different". For example, rather than serving as an alternative to jail, the community sentence order option that was introduced in Ontario in 1977 is now attached as a condition in well over one third of the probation orders in that province. Sadly, certain forms of community based programs, such as for example electronic monitoring and home confinement, are thought to be incapable of fostering decarceration as they are simply alternative forms of incarceration. These programs are part of a larger trend toward "transcarceration". It is these concerns, and others like them, that place barriers around my enthusiasm for community based correctional programming. The challenge as I see it is to talk carefully and cautiously, and with restraint about the promise of community based correctional programs. The challenge as I see it is not to summarily dismiss the utility of community based corrections , and in turn not to ask too much of this initiative. Community based correctional programming is after all, part of a correctional system, part of a system which is a depository for the social injustices and social problems of our society. Finally, the challenge as I see it is to recognize and to deeply reflect upon the fact that this federal and provincial initiative finds its way into our arena in a context of a society that is undergoing deep and substantive attacks to its social welfare safety net. This challenge to the safety net poses substantive barriers and challenges to the life chances of the poor - the poor who are in our system and who will be in our correctional programs.
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© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University |
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