The woman is dressed in white A-line pants and a long-sleeved white blouse over what appears to be an orange tank top. She looks like a young nurse. The room is cold; she fidgets, rubs her wrists, takes in her surroundings, glances briefly at me. We’ve spoken but never met. She is slim, fine boned, and taller than I had imagined, with a straight back and a heart-shaped, solemn face and bright brown eyes. She is very beautiful.
Her name is Renée Acoby, and she is considered by the Correctional Service of Canada (csc) to be one of the country’s most violent women. She rarely goes anywhere without her legs shackled, her hands cuffed, and between two and five armed guards beside her. She is in this sunny courtroom because the attorney general of Ontario has agreed to an application to have her classified as a dangerous offender, following a series of hostage takings at several different jails, particularly a 2005 incident at the nearby Grand Valley Institution for Women.
Born in 1979 in Manitoba, Acoby went to prison in 2000 on charges including trafficking in a scheduled substance and assault with a weapon. Her sentence was three and a half years. Since then, she has accumulated an additional eighteen years of time for offences committed within the corrections system, putting her in the tenth year of a twenty-one-and-a-half-year sentence. She has never been paroled, nor even applied for parole. The only time she leaves the segregation unit of one of the numerous Canadian prisons in which she has been incarcerated is for court appearances like this one.
On the phone with me, Acoby has revealed a mercurial disposition and a sweet, light voice and laugh. She has another voice, too, which I’ve never heard. I’ve heard her speak in desperation but not in anger. She admits to a volatile temper, though, and says she is “pigheaded.” She has spoken to me of having been “blinded by rage” in the past.
The judge takes note of her obvious discomfort and indignation in the prisoner’s box, and remarks that she need not be handcuffed. The prosecutor and the police officers hastily intervene. She could grab a weapon; she could grab a pen and turn that into a weapon. “She has a history of using improvised weapons,” one of them says. The judge orders that ordinary handcuffs be brought in instead. Eventually, they are.
Only two women have ever been labelled dangerous offenders in Canada. The first, Marlene Moore, committed suicide in the Prison for Women in Kingston in 1988. The second, Lisa Neve, had her sentence overturned in 1999. For Acoby, classification as a dangerous offender would mean an “indeterminate” sentence, and life on parole were she ever released. The fundamental questions being asked in her hearing are deceptively simple: Is this inmate likely to reoffend? And if released, could she control her violent tendencies?
These are difficult questions, in part because most of Acoby’s criminal history has unfolded deep within the country’s corrections system. She has lived almost entirely in solitary confinement for nearly six years, spending twenty-three hours each day alone in her cell. In 2004, she became one of the first to be placed on csc’s Management Protocol, a special category of punishment designed for women prisoners who have been involved in a major incident causing serious harm or threat while in the system. This anodyne-sounding regime consists broadly of a three-step program of segregation, partial reintegration, and, finally, transition to a regular maximum-security cell for at least three months. Offenders must earn their way from phases one through three and then off the Protocol, largely by avoiding aggressive behaviour. Most fail to do so — too many snakes, not enough ladders.
As of fall 2009, Acoby was one of four women covered by the Management Protocol. All are aboriginal, from among the almost one-third of women in federal penitentiaries who are of aboriginal descent. Seven women have been on the Protocol since it was created — one was taken off it last fall, perhaps not coincidentally after threatening a Charter challenge.
In his 2008–09 annual report, federal corrections investigator Howard Sapers wrote of the Protocol, “I have very serious concerns about the impact of this form of harsh and punitive confinement on the mental health and emotional well-being of these women. They need intervention and treatment, not deprivation. I think most Canadians would agree that in the 21st century there must be safer and more humane ways for our correctional system to assist a handful of high-needs women offenders.”
But the debate over the Management Protocol comes at a time when Canada’s attitude toward crime and punishment is hardening, with the federal government engineering a hastily designed retrofit of our justice and penal legislation that will affect everything from sentencing to parole to segregation to judicial discretion. A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety, the Conservatives’ bible for their populist “transformation” of csc, is described by academics Michael Jackson and Graham Stewart in their critique A Flawed Compass as “deeply regressive,” based on a vision that will have a “great detrimental impact on the protection of human rights and effective corrections.”
Indeed, the Roadmap never once mentions the human rights of prisoners, and deals only perfunctorily with the issue of segregation, or solitary confinement (a major component of the Management Protocol), which Michael Jackson calls “the litmus test of legitimacy for csc, because it is the hardest thing to get right.” This superficiality is especially troubling because, in the fall of 2007, while the Roadmap was being finalized, nineteen-year-old inmate Ashley Smith committed suicide in a segregation cell at Grand Valley Institution, witnessed by several corrections staff. Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (caefs) says, “The level of confinement in isolation is so dehumanizing it is a violation of the Charter, security of the person, and international human rights standards.”
Concerns about the human rights of Canada’s women prisoners in turn raise an important practical question: is it possible that the policies and practices of federal institutions for women might actually be helping to create the criminality they’re designed to prevent? In other words, has the system helped to create Renée Acoby?
