John Howard is actually lots of independent organisations covering Canada, each John Howard Society being entirely self sufficient and autonomous. John Howard Toronto obviously serves the most populous city in the country and I had some insightful experiences and conversations with staff there. The model and structure of the organisation was recognisable to me as it follows the kind of voluntary sector charity/business model with which I am familiar. I was naturally most interested in how they approach issues of learning support among ex offenders and found there too that we were very much speaking the same language though perhaps with a more focussed edge.
Talking with their drug and alcohol worker, Peter, alerted me once again to the importance of recognising how every issue impacts upon every other. The likelihood of someone coming out of the prison system with an incomplete education is high. The likelihood of that person having some kind of learning support need is also high. The likelihood of substance dependency being one aspect of fall out from these experiences is similarly high, and so it goes on. So many of my conversations therefore, as in this case, have begun with the matter of learning disability and quickly moved on to questions around homelessness, employment, and, as here, drug and alcohol misuse. Peter described the kind of holistic philosophy that determines how he engages with someone, seeing the presenting 'issue' as a part of a whole life experience. How a person learns and the limitations that may impact upon that process are key to how they address every other factor and I found my conversation with him both illuminating and reflective in helping me to place even concepts like 'disability' and 'support' in a much wider perspective.
David of JHS Toronto's housing office kindly took me to two local prisons: one was the old Toronto Jail which has been impressively renovated into a functional office/heritage site, the other was the current remand prison. Displaying alternate skills as a tour guide he talked me through some fascinating local history, pointed out places of interest and peppered all of it with references to Coronation Street and Greenock Morton FC (on which two subjects his knowledge far exceeded mine.) Once in the working prison I had a very useful encounter with the educator there with whom I began what I hope will be a continued conversation by email across the Atlantic.
Gratitude to Greg, the Director of JHS Toronto, and all his team for their generous sharing of their time, experience and insight.
JHS covers the whole of Canada, which is not like covering the whole of Scotland. Obviously. Getting your head around what kind of distances and changes in landscape, climate and culture can be involved here is a challenge in itself when your idea of a long journey is Glasgow to Aberdeen. (I have met people here who do only slightly less than that to go to a gym!) One tangential issue (for me) which has emerged as a consequence of understanding this is the experience of the aboriginal people of Canada who are disproportionately represented within the criminal justice system here in much the way that African Americans are in the US system or the poor are in UK prisons. Among all of these groups in all of these societies learning/educational impairment, disability, difficulty, whatever name we want to give to it, runs through every other identifying feature.
I could have travelled to JHS Newfoundland or JHS British Columbia to explore this further but it is actually being highlighted as much as anywhere here in the lovely, and much closer, city of Ottawa. As the nation's capital it is here that many of the aboriginal and Inuit people are sent to complete sentences, are then often left homeless and unsupported far from all that is familiar and are unwelcome back home because of their ex offender status. JHS here is exploring how specialist support services can reach out to this extra marginalised group and how to address their particular learning needs.
While here I also had the instructive opportunity to speak with Jan who runs literacy programmes for JHS Ottawa and whose ARCHES project is making great headway into structuring access to employment for forensic mental health and learning disabled people. She and I talked with and about some of the people who receive these services and found a growing consensus around the idea that the more the individual is enabled to identify their own strengths and areas for development, the more likely they are to achieve. An echo of Canada's own research quoted below in a previous post.
As in Toronto I found people more than willing to discuss strategies, share experience and throw around ideas all of which has added hugely to my own thinking. How we provide better services for people with learning support issues in the criminal justice system is of course my first question, but increasingly I find it impossible to ask without also asking how our funding strategies might change, how we define and diagnose what an issue or a need really is, and, crucially, what our ultimate aim is. My thanks to Don Wadel and his team in Ottawa and JHS Ottawa's Board who kindly had me at their meeting, for encouraging and stimulating some wider thinking.
(How it used to be. Toronto's 'old' jail. How far have we come is the obvious question.)
Naturally Fyodor has been much in my mind through the last two weeks as questions of the why and wherefore as well as the practicalities have been sharpening up. Rodya has committed what he thinks is not only the perfect crime but a justifiable one. Does his desperation make it ok? Is society's inevitable retribution any more reasonable than the crime? Or is it also nothing more than a desperate attempt to stay in control and exercise domination? Some of my conversations in the last two weeks have wandered into the socio/political (well, they've made a B-line for it actually). Hardly surprising or avoidable when discussing crime and punishment. Probably enough simply to observe with Fyodor that we do better when we are as brave about asking 'what is right?' as we are about asking 'what works?'
