TW: This post contains mentions of murder, serial killers, sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised. There is also a list of resources available, linked at the bottom of this post.
As someone who writes about prison reform and inmate rehabilitation I often think about what I would say if someone were to ever ask me about people like Bruce McArthur or Paul Bernardo. People who have objectively committed really heinous, horrible crimes. I talk a lot on my blog about how I genuinely don’t believe prison/jail is the way, and how we should divert to other types of crime prevention like affordable housing, affordable food, and accessible medical care. So I do think it’s important to address this side of the criminal justice system while we’re having these conversations.
At this point, I don’t have the psychiatric training to make a definitive statement on whether or not people like Bernardo or McArthur should or could ever be rehabilitated and eventually released (my best guess is that it generally would not be safe. But again, not a mental health professional). However, I will say that the whole point of prison reform and inmate rehabilitation is to prevent crimes from ever happening in the future. At this point in time, we have enough data and evidence to see what kinds of behaviours count as “warning signs”. What Bernardo and McArthur did… Those were all, in my opinion, very preventable crimes. In fact, for a lot of notorious serial killers and predators, we can probably look back and pin point a lot of their warning signs, and look for those signs in other people who might do the same crimes. A lot of this can and should come from listening to women, minorities, and people in general when we say that we are being stalked, harassed, and threatened by others, and actually intervene with somei kind of rehabilitation/coaching before it escalates to something life threatening. I am not really sure what that would look like right now, but our criminal justice system needs to come up with some kind of intervention system before more people get hurt. Frankly, I am really sick of hearing police say “well, he hasn’t actually hurt you so we can’t really do anything” or “there’s nothing illegal about sending you 100 messages a day. They haven’t threatened you or anything”.
The other thing is, prison reform isn’t just about releasing people in prison back into society. I just genuinely do not believe putting people into an institution where they will 100% be abused is the answer to literally anything.
When I think about this topic it reminds me of an incident at my former high school. When I started grade nine, I was warned about the film teacher. He was the only film teacher at the school, and I knew I wanted to take film (which eventually led to me studying film in my undergrad). The problem was, everyone at my school knew this teacher to be a predator. There were rumours floating around every grade about how he apparently “hooked up” (sexually assaulted) students, before and after they graduated from high school. It wasn’t until about two or three years after I graduated that he was reported to police and the school board for his crimes against his students. Although I started high school in 2014, he began working at my high school in 2004.
For a couple months after he was reported to police, it felt like every single Instagram story I saw was posted by a girl I went to high school with talking about a creepy experience they had with him, ranging from inappropriate comments, a hand on the shoulder that lingered a little bit too long, to blatant, deliberate harassment. These incidents were later looked at as “tests” he would put his students through.
Why didn’t we report him sooner?
Well, as I’ve established, there was a predator walking the halls of my high school. If every single student at the school knew who this man really was, how was it even possible that none of the teachers overheard whispers about him in the back of their class? How was it possible none of the other teachers saw his hands on my classmates shoulders or backs? How was this allowed to happen? The reason he wasn’t reported sooner, in my opinion, boils down to the survivors of this kind of abuse, and the students at my high school in general not feeling safe. I mean, why would we feel safe when a literal predator was allowed to walk the halls? Even now, when I see women online come forward about the abuse they’ve experienced, their comments sections are filled to the brim with men commenting things like “this never happened” or “you’re a liar”. If we lived in a society that listens when people share their story and talk about what they go through, if I didn’t go to a high school that allowed a sexual predator to walk the halls for almost 20 years, we might be able to prevent crime before it escalates from a hand on the shoulder to something far worse.
As you might have noticed, a lot of my recent posts have directly pertained to the way prison and jail is portrayed in movies and television shows. While I still plan on writing similar posts, I do want to divert from that a little bit and get back to the core of why I started this blog; to talk about what prison reform and inmate rehabilitation is. Of course, access to art (movies, tv, music, etc) is a big part of that, but it is not the only part.
Going back a couple steps, I would like to talk about why I got into this in the first place. Prison reform benefits literally every single person in our society. Every single one of us. On the surface, you might read that and think “yeah, less crime= safer streets and less victims of violent crime”, but it is so much more than that. First of all, a big part of prison reform is affordable housing, affordable food, and accessible medical care. When people aren’t met with the decision to commit crimes just to get basic necessities, crime goes down. The benefit here isn’t just the reduction of crime but also the access to basic needs that everyone will get. When crime goes down, those tax dollars can go towards our education budget, investing in local infrastructure and much more. Then, with needs met, the pressure on our medical system goes down. Mental health facilities aren’t overrun, hospital wait times go down, people aren’t as overworked.
We also know that in a lot of cases, not a whole lot happens when people report sexual assault/abuse to the authorities. Even in this case, my high school film teacher was not charged. Sure, he lost his teaching license, but ultimately nothing else happened. This, to me, is further evidence that the criminal justice system doesn’t do a whole lot to prevent crime.
Of course, I don’t know what really caused my high school film teacher to commit those crimes or why he chose to take advantage of his students. I have no idea what was going on in his head. I do know it was preventable. Our government can and should put efforts into preventing crime before it happens. This doesn’t mean scootching past accountability when you hurt someone, it means holding people accountable in a way that actually holds people accountable.
In my next post, I go back to talking about the portrayal of prison in the media. More specifically, an episode of a television show that I think does a really good job portraying the back and forth debate I see a lot of people having when the topic of prison comes up. If you would like to be updated about the release of that post, please subscribe!
I know this was a really heavy post to read, and it contained a lot of really heavy subject matter. If you have made it this far, I genuinely appreciate it. If you were affected by anything written in this post, I have added a list of Canadian and (more specifically) Ontario based resources. They are all hyperlinked for you to click on down below, and I have added a phone number where applicable.
Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline: 1 833-900-1010
Ontario free and confidential hotline for finding resources: 211
Kids Help Phone: 1-800-668-6868
BridgeNorth (support for survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation): 905- 895-9065
Victim Services Toronto: 416-808-7066
Rise and Reform 
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