December 18, 2010
Thomas O. Hueglin
We have read in this paper about Renée Acoby, a 31-year old Aboriginal woman incarcerated at the Edmonton Institution for Women.
She is considered to be one of the country’s most dangerous women by the Correctional Services of Canada. Because of her part in a violent hostage-taking in Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women in 2005 — one of five or six incidents of this kind since her initial incarceration — the prosecutor now wants her to be declared a dangerous offender.
It seems to be a straightforward case. Acoby has been in conflict with the law since she was 12 years old, and according to a study of 1,200 incarcerated women in Canada she has one of the highest scores for psychopathic behaviour.
Yet reading about her raises the troubling question whether she belongs in jail at all. Obviously, this is not a popular question at a time when the Stephen Harper government plans to pour an additional $155.5 million into prison expansion.
By most accounts, Acoby turned aggressive and violent when she learned, at the age of nine, that the woman raising her was not her mother but her grandmother. Her mother had been murdered by her father.
She first entered the prison system when she was 20 and pregnant. Two months into her initial 3½-year prison term, she participated in the first hostage taking. The women demanded sanitary napkins, coffee, and to see a mental health nurse. Three more years were added to her term.
Acoby gave birth in prison, but her 11-month-old baby daughter was taken away from her when she was caught taking drugs she got from other prisoners. That’s when Acoby took a correctional officer hostage for the second time, in an attempt to escape prison. Her sentence was extended to 10½ years. Meanwhile, she has racked up 21½ years, and has spent most of the past six years in solitary confinement.
University of British Columbia law professor Michael Jackson has called this form of segregation “the most individually destructive, psychologically crippling, and socially alienating experience that could conceivably exist within the borders of the country.”
According to Kim Pate, executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada, every one of her hostage-takings came after she had exhausted all legal means of improving her situation, like getting her security lowered so that she could write a birthday card to her daughter.
That’s right: solitary confinement does not just mean a lack of sanitary napkins – it may also mean no pen and paper. As Marian Botsford Fraser reports, the Canadian Chair of International PEN’s committee for writers in prison, Acoby put pen and paper to good use whenever she had them. She writes poems:
There are times when I covet so much
The comfort inherent in a mother’s touch...
Infinite memory, suspended yet rushed;
Fleeting vulnerability... whispered, clutched.
Freedom slips away every time I get near it,
Deprived of intimacy so long, I almost fear it;
The song of North Wind, I long to hear it...
I search for peace to still my transient spirit.
According to Botsford, Acoby also wrote out several grievances for another young woman denied pen and paper at the time, who was stashed away next to her in solitary confinement: Ashley Smith. Smith is the most notorious recent casualty of the Canadian prison system. According to the warped logic of the Correctionla Services Canada, the grievances were dismissed because Smith had not written them herself.
Serious questions arise. The prosecutor thinks Acoby’s indefinite confinement as a dangerous offender is required because her violent behaviour already began well before she entered the prison system. But the correctional prison system obviously failed to “correct” that behaviour.
Taking away her baby daughter as a punishment for taking drugs obviously had the most devastating effect on Acoby’s tormented psyche, but it could be asked whether the ubiquitous availability of drugs in the prison system is not part of the problem.
And then there is the question of sexism. As reported, a psychiatrist noted that “Acoby offends in ways that are more common to men than women.” Is she being punished for not acting womanly enough?
It seems obvious that what Renée Acoby needs is not indefinite incarceration but serious psychiatric treatment. What comes after that must not necessarily be letting a “psychopath out into the community without controls,” as the prosecutor puts it.
Being able to care for her daughter again would be an important control mechanism for Acoby — as would be an environment where she can hear the “north wind” again, and where she can develop her talent as a writer.
Thomas O. Hueglin is a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.
