Acoby was put on the Management Protocol in July 2004, after two assaults on fellow prisoners. Over the next six months, she worked her way into the third phase of the regime, which meant she was no longer in segregation and was sometimes allowed to go unshackled within the maximum-security unit. According to Acoby, she was scheduled to get off the Protocol in January 2005, but the deadline was altered (several times, she says), and her fury at what she saw as a betrayal of trust ignited the hostage taking at Grand Valley.
According to court documents, on August 22, 2005, Acoby and another inmate captured two staff members and tied them to chairs with electrical cord and bandages, then put belts around each of their necks and gauze over their eyes. The inmates force-fed medications to the hostages and threatened to cut their throats and gouge out their eyes. Acoby brandished a shank made from a toothbrush and a sewing machine bobbin. She burned the arm of one of the hostages with a cigarette, then poured water down the woman’s arm to ease the pain.
After the incident, she told one of the hostages that it had not been “personal” — that their anger was directed at the institution. The other inmate was sentenced to three and a half years; Acoby pleaded guilty and now faces the dangerous offender application. Since 2005, she has committed one additional hostage taking and a few minor offences, all of which have been introduced into the dangerous offender process (which will resume in September 2010).
Acoby’s record of offences in prison is striking in that it is almost entirely about perceived injustices to her or to other inmates. “As far as I’m aware,” Pate says carefully, “every incident in which Renée was involved was preceded by her using every other mechanism available: complaint, grievance, appealing to the warden and to anyone else in authority. Every single incident was preceded by her trying to use all the legitimate mechanisms first.”
Pate believes Acoby is motivated in part by a “righteous rage” born of the banishment of her child. Since their separation, she has only seen her daughter — who does not know that Acoby is her mother — once, a visit during which she was shackled and handcuffed. “Many women in prison, when they have that kind of devastation, will implode, start self-injuring, get depressed,” says Pate. “Some have suicided. But Renée is a survivor. She learned from a very early age that you have to fight back and never show your weakness. So instead of weeping or being depressed and asking for meds and slashing and trying to kill herself and every other woman, she acts.”
In my experience, Acoby is well spoken, intelligent, and articulate. She reads voraciously, writes well, and takes correspondence college courses that, according to her lawyer, she typically all but aces. She has a sophisticated understanding of prison policy, commissioners’ directives, and research papers. And she knows the Management Protocol practically by heart. In 2008, she wrote in a notebook, “One need only look at the durations the women have spent on the Management Protocol to deduce it is not a successful OR humane model of confinement. I find it reprehensible that [those] who designed the Management Protocol with the ‘special needs of women offenders taken into consideration’ cannot even meet with us. Perhaps they don’t want to confront the ghosts of women their brilliant Protocol has reduced the women to.”
The systematic incarceration of Canadian women dates back to the 1830s. For decades, female prisoners were housed in sections of penitentiaries for men, where they were placed in separate wings and made to work in the kitchens and laundries, subject to the same discriminations they experienced in Canadian society. By the 1920s, reformers were arguing that women should be housed apart from male inmates and guards, ultimately leading to the creation of the Prison for Women (p4w) in Kingston. The new institution opened in 1934, and started coming in for criticism not long after.
Between 1938 and 1990, p4w was condemned in no fewer than fifteen different reports. Famously described in 1977 as “unfit for bears, much less women,” the prison was, in Madam Justice Louise Arbour’s words, an “old-fashioned, dysfunctional labyrinth of claustrophobic and inadequate spaces.” Programming was poor, inmates were far removed from their families, and the morale of inmates and staff was abysmal. Lockdowns were common, and suicide and self-mutilation occurred with worrying frequency; between 1988 and 1991, six inmates committed suicide there.
In 1989, the commissioner of csc set up a task force to examine the treatment of female offenders and review the future of the prison. The task force consisted of corrections officials and civil servants, as well as such non-governmental representatives as caefs (which co-chaired) and the Native Women’s Association of Canada. The debates that arose from this unusual and idealistic bipartisan arrangement resulted in some significant silences in the task force’s final report, Creating Choices, notably with respect to high-needs/high-risk offenders. The task force was unanimous, however, in recommending that p4w be closed and replaced with regional prisons featuring cottage-style housing — an approach partly designed to ensure that inmates could be housed in facilities near their own families and communities.
Four years after the release of Creating Choices, on April 22, 1994, with work under way on the new facilities, a violent clash between p4w inmates and staff resulted in an extraordinary intervention by an all-male emergency response team. The men pulled prisoners from their cells, conducted strip searches, and left the women in body belts and leg irons, naked save for paper gowns, on the floor for several hours. In 1995, a videotape of the confrontation surfaced after being suppressed by the csc, prompting Solicitor General Herb Gray to order a Commission of Inquiry into the incident. He appointed Arbour to lead it.
Arbour’s 1996 report catalogued the “ongoing infringement of prisoners’ legal rights at the Prison for Women over many months” and probed the “cruel, inhumane, and degrading” treatment of inmates. It also denounced csc’s decision to enforce a “seriously harmful” eight- to nine-month segregation period at p4w after the clash. “If prolonged segregation in these deplorable conditions is so common throughout the Corrections Service that it failed to attract anyone’s attention,” she wrote, “then I would think that the Service is delinquent in the way that it discharges its legal mandate.” Her overarching conclusions were unequivocal: “The absence of the Rule of Law is most noticeable at the management level... there is nothing to suggest that the Service is either willing or able to reform without judicial guidance and control.”
Between 1995 and 2000, when p4w finally closed, federally sentenced women were gradually transferred to other institutions, including five new ones: the Edmonton Institution for Women; the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan; Grand Valley Institution for Women, in Kitchener; the Nova Institution for Women, in Truro, Nova Scotia; and the Joliette Institution, in Quebec. (In 2004, a sixth, the Fraser Valley Institution, opened in Abbotsford, BC.) However, with new prisons came new problems, especially when it came to the most difficult-to-manage inmates.
University of Alberta professor Stephanie Hayman, who published a book in 2006 on the implementation of the ideals and objectives of Creating Choices, found that the entrenched bureaucracy and practices of the prison system had triumphed over the good intentions of reformers. Those “good intentions” reflected a bias toward the notion that women who have committed crimes are themselves victims. Because of philosophical differences within the task force, Creating Choices had neglected the possibility that some women offenders might require “enhanced” security. As Hayman noted, “In refusing to deal fully with the difficult-to-manage women, and in being reluctant to accept that women’s violence was not always linked to their victimization, the task force presented csc with the opportunity to define the problem and to decide upon the solution.”
