Home on the Range

The "range" at headingly was a strip of territory six or seven feet wide and perhaps sixty feet long. Where Cell Block 8 ended, Cell Block 7 began, separated by another set of bars. So you could talk to the guys in the next cell block and even slip lozzies back and forth, but you couldn't fight with them.

There were ten cells in our block, six of them with double-bunks and four singles. I don't know what you had to do to qualify for a private cell. My cellmate was a big man who didn't seem to appreciate having a cellmate.

In Remand, you had to return to your cell for lock-down every other hour, which wasn't so bad because you could relax in the privacy of your bunk and maybe read a book. Headingly was different. If you went back to your bunk you'd have to step on the other guys bunk to get there. You felt like you were intruding on his privacy: "Why don't you go hang out in the range?", you could feel him thinking at you. At least in Remand, they locked you both in your cell so you had no choice. Here in Headingly, having the "choice" of where you wanted to hang out was much worse than having no choice at all. Here I was "free" to wander up and down the range for sixteen hours a day.

My new friend Pierce, whom I introduced in the last entry, took an interest in my story. A new inmate is naturally the object of some curiosity, and Pierce and his friend Mohammed seemed to enjoy my story of being arrested for trespassing. I already told you how Pierce fixed me up with a pillow, so then I asked him about some of the other privileges I had enjoyed in Remand. What about the phones?

Yes, you had free phone calls, but you had to declare a set of ten phone numbers which was all you were allowed (including two laywers). The authorities would check out the phone numbers and then give you a PIN number which allowed you to call only those where were approved. You could change your list once a month. What if I needed to look up someone's phone number? Tough luck. They didn't give you a phone book.

And what about phone access? All day, every day. Except there was only one phone in the cell block, for twenty inmates, as opposed to five in Remand. You could generally get on in the daytime, but in the evening, the tough guys hogged the phones. If you needed to make a phone call in the evening, you could buy time with a "lozzy".

And what about free juice, like we had in Remand? A cloud passed over Pierce's face as he paused before answering me: "They have juice, but you can't get it unless you pay". It seems the tough guys exercised a monopoly on juice access. Since supper was coming up, Pierce offered to fix me up with a little juice from his private stash. I had saved my milk carton from the bag lunch I'd been given downstairs, and I watched as Pierce poured me out a small quantity of...syrup!

Syrup! That's how it worked! In Remand, they wheeled in a big caddy of juice, and there was plenty for everyone. I have no doubt there was just as much juice in Headingly, but it was served out in the form of syrup. So the big guys could get there first and walk away with an enormous quantity of juice in concentrated form.

The guards could have put an end to this cartel in an instant if they had only watered down the syrup before making it available to the inmates. There is no other conclusion possible than that they know what is going on, and they approve of it. "Prison isn't supposed to be some kind of luxury cruise ship...it's supposed to make you pay for your crimes". That's the kind of attitude that makes people laugh all those systemic indignities which are imposed on the inmates. What those people are ignoring is that as usual, it's the little guys who suffer.

In the meantime, word of the new arrival had spread, and someone wanted to challenge me to a game of chess. Undoubtedly I was recognized as being of the "intellectual" class, and worthy of a challegne. I accepted, and defeated my opponent without much difficulty. But the game had hardly ended when word came from Cell Block 8...Dave wanted to play me.

Dave was a tough opponent, who played systematically and logically. Fairly early in the game, he suckered me out of a bishop. Now, when you are up a man, you can grind him down on points, and Dave certainly knew this. He even had a chance to trade queens not long afterwards, but it seems he was enjoying the game and decided to let it play itself out on its merits. He declined to force the trade, and the game proceeded. As a result, I had the opportunity to pull a pretty slick number on him in the end, and was about to make my final move when suddenly I was called back to my cell on urgent business.

It seems Pierce had decided something needed to be done about my sleeping arrangements, and had brokered some kind of deal where I would bunk instead with his next-door-neighbor Derek, whose cellmate Mohammed was being released the next day. I quickly gathered up my clothes and pillow and moved them to my new bunk. I looked in vain for my juice carton, which I had left sitting on the bars because there was nowhere else to put it. I was intensely relieved to find that my list of phone numbers was still there under the mattress where I had stashed it.

Before long, supper trays were served. In remand, meals were pleasant enough. We could eat in our cells...in fact, we had to eat in our cells, where Dean and I could both sit comfortably on the floor. This was not an option in Headingly. The cells were much too small. I found a patch of floor near the showers, and sat down to a lonely meal.

Shortly after dinner, I was startled to hear my name being called out by the guards. I jumped up and was quickly escorted out of the cells by two guards to a holding area. Glancing over my shoulder, I caught sight of a third guard making the tell-tale sign of a twirling finger pointing to his right ear.

It seems that Ernest was going to the psych ward.

In Which I Am Sent to Headingly

I still don't know why I was sent to Headingly. It happened suddenly, without warning. I was ordered to pack up my bedding and throw it in the laundry, and the next thing I knew I was being taken down the elevator with some other inmates. I brought nothing except my carefully-guarded list of outside phone numbers and my precious juice bottle. That was confiscated as soon as we got to the main floor. Wherever I was going, I was going to have to drink my juice out of milk cartons. But the worst of it was that I would have left it behind for Dean if I had known I wouldn't be allowed to keep it.

I did leave an unintended present for Dean after all. The previous night I had finally gotten around to exercising one of the few privileges available to inmates...a privilege which I had earlier been told was not available to me. As a consequence I left behind a wadded-up ball of toilet paper, which in the rush to leave I did not remember to dispose of. I'm going to guess that Dean was not happy to find that thing lying there in the upper bunk.

I was told that transfers are simply routine procedure to deal with overcrowding, but I suspect there might have been another reason. It's possible that I was transferred to my own safety. The previous evening I had commited the faux pas of stepping onto an exercise machine down in the gym to which one of the alpha males was recognized to have priority. When he shoved me off the machine, I turned back to him and said, "Don't shove me." He didn't seem to like that. I didn't say anything to the guards, but word of the exchange might have gotten around.

The next day there was a more problematic incident. One of the tough guys had left a free phone  temporarily unattended, and I had just picked it up to make a call. He suddenly came back and told me to give up the phone. I said, "Back off, it's my turn." I might have gotten away with this but then I noticed a guard approaching from behind. Emboldened, I repeated: "Back off, it's my turn". That's when the guy noticed that a guard was right there, so he had to back down and let me use the phone. That was my mistake. You don't run to the guards for protection from the other guys, even when the guards just happen to wander into the middle of something.

For whatever reason, I found myself shackled hands and feet and being trundled off to the Headingly Correctional institute. At least I was going to experience a wide spectrum of the total prison experience. In fact, the guys in my holding cell told me it was a step up from Remand. You didn't have to go back into lockdown every hour...you were allowed out on the range all day until lights out. Headingly was all right, they assured me.

When one of the guards told me they had guitars available on the range, I figured I was golden. This wouldn't be so bad. Finally they took me up to the range and led me to my cell. It was tiny. Then they introduced me to my cellmate. He was huge. He was in the lower bunk. To get to the upper bunk, I had to step on his bunk. In remand there was a kind of ladder giving access to the upper bunk, but not here.

The cell was as long as a bunk plus another foot or so, which might or might not have been enough room to put a plastic bin the size of a recycle container, which is where I would have to keep my few possessions (change of socks etc.) Except they didn't give me a bin so I had to keep my stuff on the bunk. And unlike Remand, the bunk area didn't have an extra couple of square feet for storage. It was just a bunk. Juice bottle, left-over toast from breakfast...whatever I had, I would have to sleep with it.

The cell was tiny. The toilet was two feet away from my cellmate's head. If I had to get up at night to take a pee, he would be getting the splashback. The idea of taking a dump was unthinkable.

The "range" in Headingly was very different from the range in Remand, where you felt free to stroll around the mezzanine, up and down the half-flights of stairs, or sit in front of the TV. Here you had a row of ten cells. The front of the cells was all bars, with cement walls separating them. Six feet in front of the cells, there was another set of bars. That strip of territory, perhaps sixty feet long and six feet wide...was the range! If you walked up and down the range, like I was inclined to do, you had no choice but to pass by the same guys over and over again. They stared at you and you tried not to stare at them. If you looked inside someone else's cell...well, that was the last think you wanted to be caught doing. So you kept your eyes pointed straight ahead and slightly downwards. Or else.

At my lowest moment, I was befriended by an inmate who told me his name was Pierce. He could see I needed a little help getting settled in, and took it upon himself to help me out. The first thing I asked him was about pillows. My bunk didn't have a pillow....how did I get one? "They don't really give you pillows. Maybe you can buy one from another inmate." Buy one??? How did that work? "Did you have any money when you came in?" Yes, I told him. "How much? asked an eavesdropper. "No, he doesn't have to tell us that", said Pierce. "Do you really have money? Maybe I'll sell you mine." How was I going to pay him? The answer: "Lozzies."

"Lozzies" are the de facto official currency of the prison system. Historically, cigarettes have always fulfilled that role, but in Manitoba prisoners are not allowed to smoke. Instead, they can buy nicotine lozenges from the prison canteen at nine dollars a pack. Pierce gave me his pillow on the undertaking that I would buy him a pack of lozzies when canteen came around. "But I need to know you'll come through", he said, "because I'm going to but some stuff right now, and I don't wanna be caught short later on." I assured him that I was good for it, and that was enough for him.

I don't know where Pierce was going to get another pillow for himself. But as events were to unfold, he probably didn't have to...

The Pecking Order

Life in remand wasn't so bad, once you got the hang of it. The alternating rhythm of one hour on the range/one hour in lockup helped make the time pass. You could pour yourself a coffee or a bottle of "juice" any time you wanted. You could stand by the window opposite the Law Courts Building and imagine the taste of freedom.   And while you were looking out the window, there was always the possibility that a Native girl would pass by on the sidewalk below and flash her breasts to give the guys a thrill.

The juice was a huge factor in terms of quality of life. It wasn't exactly Tropicana, but it was quite drinkable. I'd say it was somewhere in between Koolaid and Sunny D in terms of quality. Definitely good enough to wash down your ham on kaiser.

The food was generally quite OK. I already mentioned my bad experience with porridge the first day, but when they served Cream of Wheat a couple of days later, I made sure I had grabbed a handful of sugars from the coffee stand before heading back to my cell to eat. (You had to eat in your cell.) That made quite a difference. My biggest quibble would be with the egg salad. I guess they must have some dietician on staff who decides when you've had enough cholesterol and transfat in your diet, because whatever they used as an mayonnaise substitute in the egg salad had no taste at all. That kind of "we-know-what's-best-for-you" attitude that really pisses me off.

The other enormous benefit of life in remand was telephone access.  You could call whoever you wanted on the outside, whenever you were out on the range. There were five free phones on the floor, shared among twenty inmates. So in theory you had unlimited access to friends and family...in theory. I will return to this point later.

Recreational activities were rather limited. You didn't have access to things like a guitar or a scrabble board, although there were playing cards available and a computer monitor that would play chess. Of course the internet was out of the question. There was a single TV with limited choice of channels, and since you were only on the range for an hour at a time you could never see a whole movie. I was really looking forward to going to the gym, which was 45 minutes three times a week; but when I got there I was dismayed to find that it was only a workout room geared towards body-building. It seems they used to have ping pong and a basketball hoop but a combination of overcrowding and gang violence led them to cut out those activities.

On the whole I did not feel especially threatened by my fellow inmates, although there were a few hard cases in the group. There was a lot of talk about man-on-man sex but it was mostly harmless banter. One of the very disturbing things about the whole "get-tough-on-crime" attitude, especially in the United States, is the way people smirk at the idea of male rape as an accepted fact of prison life. Late-night comedians treat it as though it's something to joke about, as though it's not enough to deprive you of your freedom without also subjecting you to horrible indignities to drive home the point. Fortunately in Remand there was very little opportunity for real violence because you were almost always within eyesight of the guards in the "pod". Mind you, I was cautioned by a couple of the guys to be careful when I went into the shower area. And I should also note that the fourth floor was probably the most civilized of the cell-blocks. Eighth floor was "suicidals", and a couple of floors were reserved for gang members that had to be isolated from rival gangs...I don't know what all the other floors were for, although I suppose one of them was the female ward.

And yet there seems to be some kind of unavoidable law of social organization which decrees that in any society, there must be a pecking order. Even when you are stripped of all individuality and personal possesions, it turns out that some members of the group must assert their dominance over others. The question is: how? It turns out that this dominance must be asserted by whatever means available, no matter how scanty. Newspaper access was a case in point. Prisoners were given one newspaper to share among twenty inmates. The Winnipeg Sun would start its rounds with the trustees, and then pass from hand to hand according to a strict order. On my second day I commited the faux pas of leaning over a senior inmate's shoulder to glance at the Sunshine Girl. Without looking at me, he wordlessly turned the page to hide the picture until I went away. I got the paper in my turn, but the Sunshine Girl had already been clipped out by then. Other guys took the  Sudoku, the crossword puzzle, the horoscopes...well, at the end of the line you were just satisfied that you still got a paper to read.

It wasn't so much the deprivation as the indignity of it. The guards could easily have put an end to this system by giving out two or three copies of the paper; but the cure might have been worse than the disease. It seems that in a social group, you need to have some means of establishing dominance, and this nonsense with the newspapers probably fulfilled a useful purpose in that regard.

But even that wasn't quite enough. The alpha males had one other way they exercised their dominance: the telephones. With five phones for twenty inmates access should not have been a problem. But as soon as we got out of our cells at the top of the hour, the tough guys would be on the phones. It looked to me like it was more trouble than it was worth on their part; in any case, by the end of the hour you could pretty much count on being able to walk up to a free phone and dial out. But sometimes they would hog the phones to the very end, just to show who was boss.

Four days into this idyllic existence my life was suddenly turned upside down. Without warning, I was taken from my cell and told I was being transferred. The story will continue when we return.

In Which I Am Sent to Remand

The story of my legal battles with the University, on both the civil and criminal fronts, is thoroughly chronicled on the pages of this blog. For the next couple of days, however, I'm going to concentrate on the purely human aspect of my prison experience. Over the course of nine days I did time in three different cell blocks, starting with the Winnipeg Remand Center, across the street from the Law Courts Building on Kennedy and York.

After spending most of Thursday in the Public Safety Building downtown, I was finally checked in to the Fourth Floor of Remand around six in the evening. I had earlier turned down the chance to get bail from a magistrate, who would have seen me that same afternoon, in favor of a bail hearing the next morning before a judge. My theory was that a magistrate would be inclined to accept whatever bail conditions the police requested, whereas a judge would be more inclined to listen to my arguments.

That meant my only meal on Thursday was a bag lunch for supper, consisting of a baloney sandwich (no mustard, no mayo, just a slab of meat on bread) and a half-pint of milk. It would turn out that prison meals were generally better than this, but I didn't know that yet. My first breakfast in Remand didn't give me much hope for improvement, however: it consisted of a very bland porridge with no sugar, and two pieces of toast with butter and jam. I put the butter and jam in my porridge but it didn't help much.

Lunch was a corned beef sandwich on a kaiser bun, with a half-pint of milk and an apple for dessert. Condiments were provided on the side, so it was much better than the bag lunch of the previous evening. I still found it impossible to wash down a meat sandwich with nothing but milk. That's when my cellmate clued me in to one of the most important benefits of life in remand: free juice.

I noticed that there was a coffee station for the inmates when they let us out of our cells on Friday morning. I watched the other inmates serve themselves but I couldn't find any cups when it was my turn. Later I learned that cups were not provided. People would buy instant noodle soup from the canteen and then save their styrofoam cups for coffee later. In the meantime I would have to save my milk cartons if I wanted coffee. In the end I decided that prison coffee wasn't likely to be all that good for my digestive system, so I went without it altogether.

Juice was another question altogether. Supper came around and it was roast chicken on rice, with lemon pudding for dessert. This was actually first rate...but after picking up my supper tray and returning to my cell, I was dismayed to realize that I was locked in with no access to the juice. I realized that I had to make sure I filled up my juice container before they brought out the dinner trays. Once I caught on to the system, all of my subsequent meals were quite enjoyable....almost.

I still had to learn one more lesson about meals: they just didn't give you much time to enjoy your food. If you didn't tuck right in and start bolting it down, there was the prospect that you'd be called on to return your trays before you'd really finished. That only had to happen to me once; after that, I learned not to linger to long, and I was OK after that.

Life in remand on the whole was quite tolerable. Our cell block consisted of two levels, upper and lower, of ten cells each level, with each cell housing two inmates, and a common area consisting of a mezzanine and a TV lounge, and a shower area. I shared my cell with Dean, a nice guy who was picked up on a "breach". He'd been in a fight with his girlfriend had previously been released on conditions not to have contact with her. She ended up coming over a few weeks later, they both got to drinking, a fight ensued, neighbors called the cops...yada yada yada. Most of the guys in jail are guys like Dean...decent guys who are just trapped in a lifestyle which puts them constantly on the edge, always in danger of falling astray of the law. The system makes no distinction between guys like Dean and dangerous SOB's who are a menace to society. What people don't understand is that when the Conservatives make a big deal of how they're going to get "tough on crime", what they are really doing is getting tough on guys like Dean. The "hardened criminals" are basically facing the same conditions either way. Like everything else, it's the little guys who suffer.

The upper and lower level cell block inmates shared the common area ("the range") on alternate hours. They'd let the upper level out for an hour, and then they'd send us back to our cells while the lower level guys got out. So you'd never really get to meet the lower level guys except if you went to the gym...they'd take both levels downstairs together for gym time. (But only ten or twelve guys might choose to go for gym.) So with our cell block being not quite full, I met altogether about twenty guys while I was in Remand.

The alternating hours actually made the time pass pretty quickly. When I was out, I could walk around the range...there were stairs at each end of the mezzanine, so I could wander around a long circle to pass the time. Then when they'd send us back to our cells, I could pick up a book from the collection of worn-out paperbacks and relax in my upper bunk, which was like a little private sanctuary. Dean was a perfect roommate: he clued me in on things like the etiquette of the shared toilet and other details of prison life with which he was familiar from previous stints.

Dean and the other guys could tell right away that I was a rookie. The first morning I sat down at a table with some of the guys and one of them let on that he'd just been caught by the guards...well, you know...jerking off. I was shocked to learn that you're not allowed to do that in jail. This was an outrage. I promised the guys I would bring it to the attention of the judge when I had my bail hearing. Fortunately, I made a point of doing a little research before hand, the results of which were inconclusive. So I didn't bring it up at my bail hearing. The next day, still skeptical, the guys insisted I ask one of the guards. "Come here," they called to the guard, "this guy wants to ask you a question".
In response to my query, I was told: "You can do whatever you want in here as long as you don't hurt the other guys." Everyone had a pretty good laugh over that. The guard pointed to my grey prison sweater and his blue uniform: "Listen to blue, not to gray".

The Paper Trail Thickens

When I started this blog, I chose the name how-to-leave-a-paper-trail.blogspot.com. I've been in a fight or two in the past, and I know how important it can be to get the facts on the record. But that's only half of it. Even more important is to get the other side to put down their "version" of the facts. In the last month, I've made some pretty good headway in that regard.

It started in January when I was about to go ahead with my examination of the University...that's called the "discovery" process of the trial. I had named the former VP John Corlett as the University's designate, as is my right under the Queen's Bench Rules. Corlett had been deeply involved in the proceedings to expel me, and had in the meantime left the university on not the best of terms. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that he was frog-marched to the sidewalk on his last day, but not by much. I was days away from examining Corlett when the University, desperate to prevent Corlett from spilling any embarrassing information,  pulled a "hail-mary" play on me...they filed a motion for Summary Judgement, which could delay the proceedings for as much as a year.

The motion has little chance of success, but in order to give it some meat they filed an affidavit by Colin Morrison in which he goes through the details of the Non-Academic Misconduct proceedings against me. It's hard for me to understand where they're going with this: my lawsuit has nothing to do with the misconduct hearings. I'm suing them for removing me from the practicum at Gordon Bell.

But the interesting thing is the documentation that Morrison included with his affidavit. I made huge efforts to get disclosure last year while I was fighting my way through the internal process, and in the end I got nothing but dribs and drabs. The Freedom of Information Act was a joke. The FIPPA investigators in the Ombudsman's office are patsies who were willing to give the University any excuse to withold disclosure, and in the end, after six months of appeals, FIPPA ended up releasing to me exactly the same documents that I had already wheedled out of the University on my own. But Morrison's latest Affidavit gives me a wealth of new material to work with. I hope to elaborate on this in the near future.

But that's just the beginnings. The whole affair with the criminal charges and the illegal incarceration has had the unexpected side effect of bringing all kinds of new information to light. In particular, their are three new documents that I am in the process of getting:

1.  The police report of the alleged home invasion on January 11th which was the impetus for the renewal of the trespassing order and the subsequent criminal charges.

2.  The transcript of my bail hearing. Normally these hearings are a mere formality, but in my case I insisted on disputing the bail conditions, even though the judge was willing to free me on my own recognisance. Everyone said I was crazy (call me Ernest!) but as a result, the Crown Attorney had to make quite a detailed submission in which he catalogued my sins before the judge. That's going to be an interesting transcript when I get ahold of it.

3. In the course of his arguments, the Crown revealed the astonishing fact that the University had already been to court to try and get a restraining order against me! They were turned down, but I'm dying to find out what grounds they argued in their submission to the Court. Just one more set of transcripts for me to get my hands on.

Why am I so excited about getting all these documents? Because in the end, I expect the University's case to collapse amongst its own lies. The more I get on paper, the closer I get to this goal. Shakespeare said it best when he wrote:

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive".

The University's case was built on lies from the get go, and their day of reckoning is coming.

Who Is Neil Schipper Anyways?

I just got out of prison 12 hours ago and finally had a chance to check out my blog and see what Neil's been up to. Nice job, Neil! I knew you could write. I especially liked the way you linked up Lloyd Axworthy's sanctimonious bleatings about human rights with the way he got me thrown in jail for giving out leaflets on campus. Well done.

Anyhow, Neil, I'm sure our readers are wondering just who you are, so I dug this up from the Math with Marty archives. Enjoy...

Application Dismissed

In the last post, I mentioned that I didn't know the date of the failed university application for a protection order against Marty. Well, a savvy commenter demonstrated that it's easy to learn: you just go to www.jus.gov.mb.ca, and search by name. Nice!

The date is January 18, that is, three weeks less one day before Marty's arrest.

But there's more! The search results show that on that day, not one, but two such applications were made, and both were dismissed:

1

18-Jan-2013

Winnipeg-QB

APPLICATION - PROTECTION ORDER - DISMISSED

GEORGE BUSH

1

18-Jan-2013

Winnipeg-QB

APPLICATION - PROTECTION ORDER - DISMISSED

DONALD JAMES METZ

We can only imagine the disappointment of professors Bush and Metz, as well as that of the university's legal team, that these requests for protection were deemed inadequate.