The federal Tories have politicized a prison space crisis in a bid to make emergency spending look like economic development, charges a Liberal MP. Conservative MPs and ministers have begun criss-crossing the country, making campaign-style announcements at each one of 35 federal penitentiaries where new cells will be built to accommodate an exploding inmate population. “The Conservatives don’t miss an opportunity to try to turn anything into pork barrelling and so what they’re doing of course is masquerade this outrageous and outlandish prison spending as somehow being a stimulus to the economy,” Ajax-Pickering MP Mark Holland told me Wednesday. Holland is the party’s critic on corrections issues.
Tories convert prison crisis into “pork barrelling” opportunity: MP
September 2, 2010 By 2 Comments
Briere, Bernardo get new pal – Canada’s worst rapist
August 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Michael Briere raped and murdered 10-year-old Holly Jones because he was consumed with desire after looking at child pornography. Paul Bernardo was driven by deviant fantasies of torturing women. He murdered teenagers Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy and raped dozens of other women. Selva Subbiah drugged and raped hundreds of women to feed his sexual perversions. Now these predators have something in common. They’re together in the same miserable cellblock of maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary that houses the lowest of the low, the sex offenders, child molesters and killers who can’t survive among their own kind.
Parole of axe murderer Clancy extended
August 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Axe murderer Francis Clancy threw “temper tantrums” and was resistant to a drug treatment program in the community, but the National Parole Board has decided to extend his parole (doc after the jump) anyway. He’s now living at a halfway house on Victoria Island, in British Columbia, far from Ottawa, Ontario, where he savagely murdered 29-year-old Iain Irvine in 1983. The board says Clancy is “highly motivated” to succeed on release, although when he’s been confronted about the murder that put him in prison for life, he can’t really explain why he did it.
Col. Williams among Quinte’s quintet of accused multiple murderers
August 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Among Quinte’s quintet of accused multiple murderers, Col. Russ Williams (above left) appears to be making a concerted effort to have his day in court first. Williams, the former Canadian military airbase commander accused of two murders, two sexual assaults and dozens of other crimes, waived his right to a preliminary hearing during a court appearance yesterday, clearing the way for the setting of a trial date.
Prison service paying off staff who sued
August 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
More than 360 people who worked at a federal prison in Kingston, Ontario, will get at least $1,000 each after a precedent setting six-year legal fight over a breach of their privacy. “This has been a long odyssey,” Christopher Edwards, the Kingston lawyer who represented staff in a lawsuit, said Wednesday.
VIDEO: ‘Don’t let me out’ – Prisoner rejects early release
August 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In September, a razor-wire topped gate at Bath Institution will slide open and inmate Bill MacNeill will walk out, a free man. Not willingly. MacNeill is scheduled for automatic, early release after serving two thirds of his prison sentence. He doesn’t want it. “I was sentenced to two years and I want to do the two years,” the 45-year-old life-long criminal told me in an interview at the medium-security prison just west of Kingston. (MacNeill explains his strange request, in a video after the jump).
Child killer imprisoned nearly half century ago dies behind bars
August 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Foul play is not suspected in the death of an imprisoned child killer who was convicted nearly half a century ago. Robert Harold Billyard, 63, died Thursday night at 7:45 p.m. after collapsing, Corrections Canada says. He was rushed to Kingston General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
For the record: A catalogue of every crime in Canada
August 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Canada’s official crime statistics, the numbers released annually by Statistics Canada, have undergone a historic, but virtually overlooked, transformation. For the first time in nearly 50 years, the stats reflect raw data provided by virtually every police department, meaning StatsCan is able to release a more complete inventory of crimes. In the past, some offences were rolled into broad categories, meaning, for example, that you couldn’t see how many criminal harassment cases came to the attention of investigators – more than 20,000 last year (see the entire list after the jump).
Prison bosses change their rules to expand double bunking
August 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Faced with an exploding inmate population because of a raft of Conservative get-tough crime initiatives, federal prison authorities secretly hatched a plan to cram many more inmates into shared cells and to suspend rules meant to restrict the practice. Even though Corrections Canada believes the measure is an “inappropriate” way to house prisoners, senior officials of the Correctional Service of Canada issued an internal bulletin Wednesday that changes a policy governing double bunking, a practice in which two inmates live in one cell.
An outlaw biker, makeshift barbell and a big lawsuit
August 12, 2010 By 1 Comment
Corrections Canada says it’s not legally liable for injuries suffered by an imprisoned outlaw biker because he was exercising with a makeshift barbell built with bags of water. The claim is contained in a statement of defence filed last week in a Kingston court in response to a lawsuit launched in May by Carl Thomas Bursey, who is behind bars at Kingston Penitentiary for drug dealing. The Bandidos outlaw bike gang member (symbolized by the Fat Mexican wielding a gun and a machete) is suing the federal government for $5 million, claiming he suffered a crippling injury because he got substandard medical care from prison staff after he hurt himself while exercising.
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