Con Game: The Truth About Canada's Prisons

by Michael Harris

Michael Harris’s book about life inside prison is hard-hitting, hair-raising, and certain to be hugely controversial. Con Game shows us that Canadian penitentiaries are effectively run by their inmates. Behind bars, gangs control the booming drug trade and mete out their own rough justice to inmates who break their rules. Guards sit by, prevented from interfering by a succession of court rulings that have limited their authority. Wardens and bureaucrats at Corrections Canada, intent on keeping their desks clean, allow prison murders to be written off as suicides.

In this sorry state of affairs, too many people in charge of the corrections system are happy to see inmates kept quiet by illegal narcotics; too many are fudging the figures on recidivism; too many are doing nothing to break up the violent social order that prisoners have formed behind the high walls and razor wires that separates “them” from “us.”

Most Canadians know very little about our prisons and have no idea how they function. Michael Harris believes that the top levels of bureaucrats have systematically concealed what is really going on. As a result of his investigations, the truth is now out – and our penal system may never be the same.

Genres: Nonfiction, Crime

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

One of Canada’s top investigative writers, Michael Terry Harris was winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best true crime book for The Prodigal Husband: The Tragedy of Helmuth and Hannah Buxbaum. Formerly the publisher of the Sunday Express in St. John’s and later the Executive Director of News and Current Affairs for the Newfoundland Broadcasting Corporation, Harris has also been Queen’s Park correspondent for the National Post, and a national affairs columnist for the Sun News Service. Today, he host’s his own radio program, “Michael Harris Live,” on CFRA in Ottawa.

Harris’s previous books consist of the award-winners Justice Denied: The Law versus Donald Marshall (1986), Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel (1990), Rare Ambition: The Crosbies of Newfoundland (1992), The Prodigal Husband (1994). The Judas Kiss: The Undercover Life of Patrick Kelly (1995), was made into a television movie starring Paul Gross, and Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery (1998) was a national bestseller. To date, his work has sparked four royal commissions of inquiry.

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the book is 15 years old it exposes the sad state of affairs of the CSC and the federal prison system. It quite rightly focuses and places the blame on the senior managers who routinely are more focused on the rights of violent and habitual, chronic, repeat, career criminals and not that of society and the correctional officers inside the institutions. All Canadians should read this book. As well as being more respectful and appreciative to those front line correctional officers at the CSC. They do their best to help keep us safe despite the asinine bureaucracy and moronic ideas of their national senior managers.

[Jadybaby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this book down! It was so captivating and eye opening to what happens in Canadian prisons.I was astonished and it totally reeled me in.I cannot believe more people have not read this as its definitely a great book with Kingston Penitentiary and Millhaven talked about alot and all the going ons!!

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Years ago, I was part of and supportive of the restorative justice system. I had no idea at how incredibly mismanaged the Canadian correctional system is, or how ineffective restorative justice seems to be. But perhaps that has less to do with the principles , and a lot to do with how the ideas were implemented. A clear case of the monkeys running the zoo.