A Comment and Colby Cosh on Blane MacDougal: Dangerous offenders don't belong in minimum-security prisons

"As a side bar, Ontario, which generally houses the least dangerous offenders, does not have minimum security institutions. Indeed, Ontario only has maximum security institutions except for a few older institutions which are medium security simply because they are not up to current maximum standards.

A maximum security institution need not be uncomfortable or lack rehabilitation resources -- it merely needs to provide security to staff and be very very hard to escape from. But there is a financial cost -- prisons are not cheap. There are many non dangerous offenders incarcerated who would be better kept elsewhere, especially as it seems the truly dangerous are left, to a degree, to guard themselves. "
JCM

Posted: April 25, 2008, 12:18 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Colby Cosh

On Wednesday, The Vancouver Sun disclosed that the Ferndale Institution, a lightly guarded minimum-security federal penitentiary in Mission, B.C., houses a remarkable 10 inmates who have been designated dangerous offenders and are thus subject to indefinite detention under Canadian law. Technically, of course, the number is nine right now. Blane MacDougal, a 60-year-old rapist, murderer and unreformed deviant, walked away from Ferndale on Saturday. It was not difficult for him to do it; Corrections Canada explicitly depends on the Ferndale inmates to police themselves, for fear of collectively losing the famous privileges that won the prison the monicker of "Club Fed" (back in the days when it featured a nine-hole pitch-and-putt golf course, as well as the tennis court it still boasts).

The escape of a vicious criminal represents an extraordinary breach of faith by a corrections agency that has repeatedly had to reassure the community surrounding Ferndale of its commitment to public safety. MacDougal won his stripes as an outlaw 40 years ago after he and an accomplice escaped from a juvenile pen and went on a U.S. robbery spree in which one victim was dumped in a field and left to perish. Convicted of murder and sentenced to life, he earned day parole in 1979,making use of the privilege to kidnap and rape two women. Full parole followed in 1989: so did another rape.

Minimum-security federal prisons are supposed to contain only those prisoners who are deemed to present both a small risk of escaping and a small chance of inflicting harm if they do escape. MacDougalls parole board reports, however, cite his "uncanny ability to hide difficulties from intimate partners, parole officers, sex-offender therapists and clinicians who did prior assessments." It appears that one reason he was trusted to live at Ferndale this time around was that he had stopped seeking parole outright, supposedly because he was "afraid of all the changes out in the world after decades of incarceration."

Turns out MacDougal is willing to take his chances, and now the women of British Columbia will have to take theirs. Perhaps some corrections shrink bought his story after seeing The Shawshank Redemption one too many times.

It is baffling and discouraging that there would be any dangerous offenders at Ferndale at all. At last count, there were fewer than 400 Canadian convicts who had cleared the high procedural and constitutional hurdles to earn the title. They are the hardest of the hardcore, violent men (all but a handful are male) who have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for human life and the law. After the 1994 escape from Ferndale of Timothy Dennis Cronin and Michael Kelly Roberts, who committed a murder in Washington State while at liberty, Corrections Canada promised to clean up its act. The department held an inquiry and agreed that in deciding whom to house under minimum security, it was placing too much emphasis on psychiatrists assessments of risk and not enough on the actual criminal histories of the inmates.

Apparently old habits die hard — as does the perennial tendency of Corrections Canada to regard its convicts, rather than the public, as its true clientele.
James Morton
1100 - 5255 Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario
M2N 6P4