Inside the big house

The Building Bridges program sends volunteers,
nearly all female, into prisons to boost morale

OUTSIDE IN: Laval’s Leclerc Institution

COMMENTARY
by HEATHER ROBB

On my visit to Leclerc Institution, a medium-security men’s prison in Laval, a prisoner named Rod told me he was counting down the days until his release: 99 to go.

He has spent over 20 years of his life in prison, though not all in one shot. We were sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the prison chapel as other visitors and prisoners milled around us. After quickly calculating that he would be released sometime in July, I pointed out that he would get to enjoy a good portion of the summer on the outside.

I asked him what he was most looking forward to when he got out. After we both chuckled nervously for about a full minute over what I quickly realized was a silly question, I asked what was number two on his to-do list. Rod said he’d simply go for a drive in his car, an old, gas-guzzling Cadillac. His eyes lit up as he mused over what a fortune it was going to cost to fill up the tank.

I visited Leclerc as a participant in Building Bridges, a program facilitated by the prison’s Protestant chaplain David Shantz, wherein volunteers meet and talk with the inmates. The idea is that it helps inmates retain contact with the larger community and helps volunteers better understand what life in prison is like.

A group from the Concordia Chaplaincy, led by Brian McDonough and Bernard Glover, started up the Building Bridges program in the 1970s, and has been organizing visits at various prisons in the area since that time. I heard about the program because Sheila Das, a fellow teacher at Vanier College, created her own group comprised of Vanier students and teachers. They have been participating in bimonthly meetings at Leclerc, along with the Concordia group, for the last year-and-a-half.

I was a bit skeptical when I first heard that Das was taking volunteers—of course, college-age and, incidentally, all women—to Leclerc. Leclerc holds around 500 inmates; its status as a medium-security institution means that the inmates have a minimum sentence of two years, and pose a “moderate escape risk,” according to the Correctional Services Web site. I asked her, “Why not take the girls to visit senior citizens?”

Das suggested that while her initial motivation to go into the prison was curiosity, she continues to go because she simply enjoys the exchanges: “I had not fully comprehended how human and tender these people could be. It’s easy to write off people that you’ve never had contact with,” she said.

Shantz suggested that the prisoners have “a profound respect” for the volunteers. “In the 33 years that I’ve been coming into prisons, I have never heard of a volunteer being insulted, belittled, intimidated or endangered,” he said.

GENDER AND JAIL

On the night of my visit, the topic for the roundtable discussion—agreed upon during the previous visit—was gender roles. The conversation eventually turned to relationships, and then to the challenges of relating to women after long periods in the near-exclusive company of men. One inmate, Steve, confessed that after being released from prison at one point in his life, he rode the metro for three hours just to take in the smell of women’s perfume. He added that it took him three months to work up the nerve to actually talk to a woman. (Incidentally, as I listened to this, I watched two sets of inmate eyes following the movements of Gabrielle, the Vanier student sitting in front of me, as she fixed the barrettes in her hair.)

Another inmate, Maurice, who has been incarcerated since 1976, said he reads everything he can on the topic of the opposite sex. He out-and-out gushed about his admiration of modern women—their health-consciousness, their success in academics and in the workforce. If given the chance, he insisted, he’d be honoured to share the domestic work with a partner.

I admit that listening to the guys express their appreciation for those ordinary pleasures of which they’ve been deprived, as well as their aspirations for better relationships in the future—combined with the warm welcome with which they greeted us—did leave me with a kind of buzz. It is difficult to reconcile this feeling with knowledge of the crimes they’ve committed (some are quite open on that subject) and that some may even offend again. But the point of Building Bridges is to engage with the men as they are, in this particular moment, and enjoy the insight they have to share.