“The truth shall set you free,” advises the old canon.
Unless you’re a criminal, that is. Then the truth will land you in prison. That’s how the justice system works, most of the time.
Roughly 40,000 convicts are presently locked away in the fifty-three federal and provincial prisons scattered across Canada. The vilest of the perps (the murderers, the rapists, and the pedophiles) are punished with lengthy consignments to the most secure of these institutions; eight federal maximum-security prisons are needed to house them all – and almost all of them are men.
Women commit crimes too, but at far lower rates and attended by much less violence and predation, a fact reflected by the lower security and gentler living conditions typical of female prisons (there’s not a single dedicated maximum-security institution for women in Canada). The Institutional Mother-Child Program even allows incarcerated mothers to raise their children in prison until the age of four. Read the rest of this entry »