This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  Behind Collins Bay and not distinguishable as a separate prison from the street, Frontenac Institution was a much smaller facility consisting of unremarkable two-storey brick and stucco buildings and several barns. Opened in 1962 and intended to house 132 inmates, it was originally the Collins Bay Farm Annex. With the prison farm still in operation, minimum-security Frontenac was what I came to think of as “a walk-away prison,” usually referred to by both inmates and staff as “camp.” It had no perimeter fence, no stone walls, no coils of razor wire, no looming guard tower except for the one at the back corner of medium-security Collins Bay that overlooked Frontenac as well.

  Once or twice a year, an inmate does walk away from one of the minimum-security prisons in Kingston, and the resulting news articles always refer, sometimes in graphic detail, to the crime of which he was convicted. Many members of the public are outraged to discover that murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals are housed in “minimum security.” The term seems to suggest that the men held there must have committed lesser crimes, that they are just petty thieves, non-violent burglars, computer hackers, and other white-collar criminals. I thought that too before I met Shane. In fact, very few long-term inmates, even those serving life sentences, will spend the entirety of their time in maximum security.

  The Canadian prison system operates on the principle of graduated release, with federal institutions being designated at three basic security levels: maximum, medium, and minimum. Inmates are housed at each level according to the risk they pose to staff, other inmates, and the public. An inmate in maximum can be moved to medium if he’s done the required programming and generally behaved well. From medium he can then be moved to minimum, again if he has fulfilled his requirements and behaved himself. Having earned his way to a lower security level, he must continue to stay out of trouble in order to remain there. Inmates who successfully make their way through the security levels are said to be “cascading down through the system” as they work towards the ultimate goal of release back into society.

  People are also confused about what a life sentence actually means. A person convicted of first-degree murder in Canada receives a life sentence with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. In a second-degree murder conviction, the parole eligibility date is usually set at fifteen years. When the media reports on these cases, members of the public are often outraged and aghast. “He’ll be out in twenty-five years!” they cry. “With good behaviour, he’ll be out before that!” Part of this confusion arises because, generally speaking, we are more familiar with the American justice system than our own. In Canada, there is no such thing as getting out early on a murder charge for good behaviour or for any other reason. The practice of statutory release by which an inmate may be freed after serving two-thirds of his sentence is never applicable in a murder conviction.

  A life sentence with no chance of parole for twenty-five or fifteen years does not mean the offender will be released automatically at the end of that period. There is nothing automatic about it. What it means is that at that time, the Parole Board of Canada is required by law to give him a hearing. It does not mean they have to or will grant him parole. It means they have to read his case files, question him, listen to him, and make their considered decision.

  In Canada a life sentence really does mean life. Although not many murderers will spend their entire lives in prison, those who are eventually released on full parole will be forever under the supervision of the Correctional Service of Canada, must abide by all conditions imposed upon them by the Parole Board, and must report regularly to the Parole Office for the rest of their lives. They will never be entirely free. As stated on the Parole Board website, offenders serving life sentences “can only successfully complete full parole by dying.”

  ON THE DAY OF OUR VOLUNTEER TRAINING, Laura and I were met in the parking lot by the session leader, who took us to the main building to sign in at the front desk. Already I could see that prison, at least at the minimum-security level, wasn’t at all what I had expected. It did not feel menacing or dangerous. It was not grim and dark like a dungeon. It was not quiet. Why had I imagined it would be quiet? In fact, it was a busy bustling place, with inmates, officers, and other staff members all heading to wherever they were supposed to be, some laughing and calling out to each other as they passed. Laura and I were then taken back outside and across to the programs building. A large food truck was backing up to the loading dock of an adjacent building, with half a dozen men waiting to unload it. A pair of inmates in shorts and running shoes were jogging around the building. Three briefcase-carrying men in suits were coming up the road. These, I would understand later, were members of the Parole Board there to conduct a hearing.

  Laura and I spent the afternoon learning what would be required of us as citizen escorts. There were pamphlets to be read and forms to be filled out. Having watched Sister Frances in this role for all those months, I had no doubt that I could do it too. Our numbers were added to Shane’s telephone list. The session leader explained that an inmate was allowed to make calls to a list of approved numbers, land lines only, cell phones not permitted. His calls would be collect, at the cost of seventy-five cents each. Laura and I had our pictures taken for our official escort IDs, and then we were done. Once the paperwork was completed at their end, our escorting duties would begin.

  LATER THAT WEEK, I made my second trip to Frontenac for an entirely different reason. In the summer, Shane and Lenny had rescued an orphaned kitten from the prison farm and were allowed to keep him in their unit. They knew this was a temporary arrangement, and they’d now been told they’d have to find him a home, or he would be euthanized. There were more than enough feral cats on the prison grounds. Shane already knew me well enough to know that it wouldn’t take much persuasion for me to agree to give their kitten a home.

  When I drove up to the main door that Friday afternoon, Shane, Lenny, and a guard were waiting on the steps. Nestled in Shane’s large hands was a small grey tabby with a white bib and big ears. I lifted the cat carrier out of the car and straightened the blanket in the bottom. Shane held the kitten to his face and rubbed his cheek on its fur. Lenny did the same. Then Shane slipped the kitten into the carrier and shut the door. The kitten began to yowl as I put him in the back seat and got back in the car. Lenny and Shane stood there, waving and teary-eyed, the guard grinning beside them, as I drove away.

  Shane called twice that evening and twice more over the weekend to see how the kitten was doing. Knowing they wouldn’t be able to keep him forever, Shane and Lenny had never named him. I decided to call him Sammy, something of a short form for “San Quentin.” My old cat Max sniffed him a couple of times, let him eat out of his dish and pee in his litter box without complaint, and then proceeded to ignore him. My little dog Nelly was overjoyed to have a new playmate, one much friskier than old Max, and Sammy had already figured out that if he got up on the back of the couch, she couldn’t reach him. All was well.

  AS SHANE’S ESCORT, when I picked him up at Frontenac in the morning, I had to go in and sign for him at the front desk, called the “horseshoe” because of its shape. When I brought him back after lunch, I had to go in to the horseshoe again, sign him back over to them, and write a brief report on how things had gone while he was in my care.

  Together in the car, we talked about all manner of things, especially books. Being an avid and intelligent reader, Shane credited books and all writers in general with having helped him do his time for all these years. He said one of his happiest memories was of the time he and his second wife, Brandy, were reading together in the same room, not talking, just reading, and he’d never felt so peaceful in his entire life. This took place during a PFV, a Private Family Visit, what used to be called “a conjugal visit,” during which an inmate and his family and loved ones can stay overnight in a trailer designed for this purpose on the prison grounds.

  Over time he told me many other things about Brandy too: how he met her when she came
to visit her brother in the same prison, and they soon got married inside when he was forty-five; how, two years later, shortly before his parole eligibility date, he had escaped because he thought she was screwing around on him, and, sure enough, he found her in bed with the landlord. But it was the image of the two of them reading together that most stayed with me, an essential part, I think now, of what hooked me in the first place. Why did this simple recollection make my heart sing? Perhaps because the peaceful picture he drew encapsulated my idea of the perfect relationship. Maybe this is all I really want: someone I can read with, not talking, not touching, not interacting, just reading separately but still together. Perhaps this is my idea of perfection. Maybe what I want most is someone with whom I can share a companionable literary silence.

  When not talking about books, we talked about ourselves, trading bits and pieces of our lives back and forth the way all people do when getting to know each other. The twenty-minute drive between the prison and Vinnie’s didn’t give us nearly enough time to talk, and within a week, he was calling me in the evening too, so we could continue the conversation. An inmate could not receive calls, but there was no limit to the number he could make. For the seventy-five-cent cost of each call, we could talk for an hour, and then, after a three-minute warning on his end that I couldn’t hear, the call was automatically terminated and the line went dead. He could, however, call me right back and talk for another hour for another seventy-five cents. We both tended to be rather loquacious once we got going. Our conversations were meandering, convoluted, labyrinthine, an intricately braided laying bare of ourselves. At Vinnie’s we were still teasing and flirting and joking around, but alone in the car or on the phone, we could be serious. In this first rush of telling him about myself, I felt there was nothing I had to hide from him, nothing I needed to be embarrassed about or ashamed of, nothing about me that he would judge and find wanting.

  For each significant event from my life that I offered him—graduating from university in Thunder Bay in 1976 and going to The Banff Centre to study writing; moving to Canmore that fall; publishing my first book in 1984; giving birth to Alex in 1985; moving to Kingston the following year and buying my house the year after that; publishing more books in 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, and 1994; winning the Governor General’s Award for Forms of Devotion in 1998; publishing three more books since then—he could say without hesitation which prison, including Kingston Penitentiary, he’d been in at the time. He’d been shipped back and forth across the country so many times, I lost track of how many institutions he’d been in. Inmates are moved frequently, sometimes due to a change in security level, sometimes because of conflict with another inmate, and sometimes, he said, just because it seemed like CSC didn’t want anyone to get too comfortable.

  WE TALKED ABOUT GROWING OLDER. Shane was in perpetual mourning for the loss of his young, strong vigorous body. He lamented the damage done by all that high-school hockey and football he’d been so good at, his right knee broken, all his teeth knocked out. Those perfectly straight white teeth of his that I had admired and secretly envied were, in fact, false. He worried that back in those days, helmets were not required and what if he’d suffered brain damage from multiple untreated concussions? He was bitterly resentful about the whole irreversible process of getting old. I said that was understandable, given that he’d spent all of his adult life in prison.

  Rankled by my comment, he was quick to correct me. “Most,” he said. “I’ve been in prison for most of my adult life. Not all.”

  He spoke often of the glorious day to come when he’d be “living on the street.” This phrase puzzled me at first. To me it meant being homeless, sleeping at a shelter or in an alley or a park, panhandling downtown in front of Shoppers Drug Mart or the Dollar Store, eating lunch at Vinnie’s and supper at Martha’s Table, one of the other hot meal programs in Kingston. But to Shane, I soon realized, it meant being out of prison, no longer incarcerated, living out here with the rest of us in the so-called free world.

  WE TALKED ABOUT OUR CHILDHOODS, me growing up in Thunder Bay, him in Kenworth, a small town thirty kilometres northwest of Kingston, both of us in working-class families, me an only child born relatively late in my parents’ lives, him the eldest of three. Both our mothers had left something to be desired in the maternal nurturing department, his considerably more than mine. His mother still lived in Kenworth; mine had died twenty years ago of cancer. Both our fathers were dead now, his of heart failure sixteen years earlier and mine of Alzheimer’s just two years ago. They were both Second World War veterans, having fought as young men in Italy, Holland, and Germany. According to the established mythology of Shane’s family, it was the war that had turned his father into a brutal, violent, alcoholic philanderer who terrorized his wife and children. He wanted me to say the same was true of my father. Yes, mine was also a heavy drinker, but we never thought it had anything to do with the war, and he was never violent, instead receding deeper and deeper into himself with each glass of rum and Coke.

  Despite the drinking, the beatings, and the affairs, Shane’s father had been posthumously elevated to the role of good parent, while his mother, still alive and acrimonious, had become the monstrous root of all familial evil.

  In his telling of it, the neighbourhood where he grew up was a nightmarish Deliverance territory in which all the mothers were whores, all the fathers were violent drunkards, and all the children were physically and sexually abused. Like he was. He figured my neighbourhood in Thunder Bay must have been the same, and he called me naive when I said no, it wasn’t like that at all, and none of my friends were ever abused. He laughed grimly, saying just because I didn’t know about it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

  He told me about his first marriage, to a girl named Penny, when he was only twenty-one. He’d already been in some trouble by then: breaking and entering, petty theft, drugs. He said Penny only married him because she wanted to piss off her father, who was a cop. They had a son, and then Penny left him, left them both. He said he was happy looking after his son alone. He worked steadily and stayed out of trouble for five years. After Penny remarried, she sued for custody and won. Since then, he’d had only intermittent contact with the boy, had now not been in touch with him for ten years or more. He said the last he’d heard, his son, now in his late thirties, was in prison too, doing time on a drug charge.

  It was the loss of his boy, Shane said, that had turned him back to drinking and drugs and crime, more serious crime this time, and before he knew it, he was twenty-seven years old and serving a four-year federal sentence for bank robbery. The difference between provincial and federal time, he explained, is based solely on the length of the sentence. Anything under two years is provincial, anything over is federal. And so he went to the big house.

  WE TALKED ABOUT SEX. Actually he talked about sex, and I listened. Sometimes it seemed he was trying to shock me with his stories of multiple and frequent sexual encounters with other men in prison, furtive acts he called “oil changes.” I was not shocked. He had also had a long relationship with another inmate named Victor, who became his accomplice in murder. I was not shocked by this either. He said he had never loved Victor. I said there was no reason to deny loving this man. Still, he insisted.

  HE TALKED ABOUT THE MURDER. I already knew the details from the CSC paperwork he had handed around at Vinnie’s in the spring. It was the summer of 1981, and he was thirty-one years old. Just two months before warrant expiry, when his sentence for bank robbery would have ended and he would have become a free man, he escaped from Bath Institution, then a minimum-security prison. He couldn’t explain why he’d done such a thing when he was so close to getting out.

  “They call it ‘poor impulse control,’” he said. “I call it being young and stupid and stoned. I didn’t think about the consequences. I couldn’t resist the temptation to run.” He went to Toronto to meet up with Victor, who’d been released to a halfway house there on mandatory supervision.


  After a week-long binge of alcohol and speed, they were picked up in a park by an elderly man named Philip Bailey, who offered them money for sex. They went back to his apartment. Later Shane passed out in the bedroom. Later still, Philip Bailey caught Victor going through his stuff looking for something to steal and threatened to call the police. He didn’t know they were convicts on the lam. Victor called out to Shane for help. Shane killed Philip Bailey with a hammer, then strangled him with an electrical cord to be sure he was dead.

  Shane was overwhelmed with emotion as he told me the story—the first time and every other time he talked about it in the coming years. He knew he had done the worst thing any person could ever do. He always called Philip Bailey by his full name, first and last. He held himself entirely accountable for what he’d done and would never let himself forget exactly to whom he’d done it.