My best analogy is when I look at the typical suburban kid, the 19-year-old or 20-year-old young adult, who does something bad, and the supports they have. In some ways, if we're going to have the same results, we need to mirror those supports. You need education, and that exists to a degree, but you need real trade skills.
When I go to EIFW, Edmonton Institution for Women, the women's facility in Edmonton, I see a whole bunch of sewing. If I go to Bowden, they have this horrible food that's boiled in a bag, and you don't need all these offenders to work in the kitchen. What are they doing? You walk in and there are 30 offenders and they're trying to give them something to do, but there's really not a lot to do.
CORCAN was a great idea, but a lot of the times, whether it's based on sales or purchasing.... They have state-of-the-art woodworking shops, state-of-the-art welding shops. At Edmonton Institution, they closed it down, because they were having issues there.
The inmates, whether male, female, aboriginal or not, need real job skills. Many of them have never worked. Just getting up and going somewhere for us is pretty insignificant, but for them it's like a milestone. You got up and you actually went somewhere and you did something. Then with school, I can't tell you the number of drug dealers who've come up to me and said, “Zef, I got 99% on my math test.” I said, “Well, it didn't surprise me, because you were pretty good in math to begin with from your other vocation.”
When everybody here says, “Oh, the programs, the programs”, if these programs were so great, CSC could be self-funding. They could have one to make fat people skinny and they'd be self-funding. We get broken people 19 and 20 years old, and we think that in four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, we're going to reverse years and years of....
It's all those legs of employment, education—and then out in the community....
We have backlogs. We have inmates approved at Bowden to go to minimum from medium—backlogged. Where do you go? Where do you put someone?
When you say to your kid who's 18, “I'm kicking you out of the house; go to Edmonton on Monday”, they have no jobs and no money, but they've known these other dysfunctions. Would you think they'd succeed? I think maybe not.
We have people who are at the far other spectrum and we wonder why they return. They come in and they see their relatives. They see their uncles. They see brothers, cousins. Going to prison is a family reunion, and that's horrible to think that's happened.