Con Game.(Book Review)

"Canada's prison system is in crisis," reads the first sentence of Con Game, the new book by investigative journalist and CFRA host Michael Harris. Violence and drug abuse are exploding, Mr. Harris claims, and released offenders are committing new crimes at a shocking rate. The soft, liberal approach of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), the department that runs the prisons, "neither reforms criminals nor protects the public," Mr. Harris concludes.

Con Game was something of a surprise to me when it was released in April, 2002, just a little after The Ottawa Citizen began publishing a lengthy series of articles I had written called Crime and Punishment. The research for my series took more than a year, during which I visited prisons of every imaginable shape, description, and security level in Canada, the United States, Russia, and Finland. And the more I saw and read while doing that research, the more I admired this country's criminal justice system in general and the federal prison system in particular. Rather uncomfortably for someone who is a critic by nature, I found myself concluding that in many ways, though certainly not all, the Canadian way of crime and punishment is a model for the world.

But with the publication of Con Game, one of Canada's most famous investigative journalists was saying precisely the opposite. And many were persuaded: Con Game generated stellar reviews and commentary throughout the media, including glowing praise by the Globe and Mail's top investigative reporter. Police associations endorsed the book, and political parties waved it like a bloody shirt. It even had a good run on the best-seller lists.

This was perplexing to me, so I turned for an explanation to the many criminologists, psychologists and others who study criminal justice. And that's when I discovered an odd thing. While the media have been almost uniformly positive about Con Game, the experts are just as uniformly negative. Paul Gendreau, a University of New Brunswick psychologist, called Con Game an "ideologically driven rant." Michael Jackson, a law professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the recently released Justice Behind The Walls was so incensed by Con Game, he wrote a lengthy attack on the book and posted it on his website (www.justicebehindthewalls.net). Even experts cited as authorities in Con Game take a dim view of the book. These include Queen's University psychologist Edward Zamble, who told me "when I started reading at random, I could not get through a page without finding a major error."

After many conversations and still more research, I came to my own conclusions. I believe that Mr. Harris and his many fans are wrong. Con Game is rife with errors. Some are simple factual mistakes, while others are the result of key information being omitted. But perhaps the most critical reason why Con Game comes to false conclusions is the author's almost total lack of awareness of the problems faced by prisons in other places and times.

First, here is a selection of the many factual mistakes in Con Game.

* Mr. Harris claims that CSC deliberately misinterpreted the 1980 Supreme Court of Canada in a case called Solosky, as standing for the idea that, as Mr. Justice Brian Dickson wrote, "a person confined to prison retains all of his civil rights, other than those expressly or impliedly taken from him by law." Mr. Harris claims this was mere "judicial rumination," of no legal force at all, and that CSC improperly latched onto it to push its prisoner-friendly philosophy.