Decrepit jail preferable to living on the street

Housing crisis is shortening return to prison across nation

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. Michael Keough has to pause in the middle of his phone call from Newfoundland and Labrador’s largest jail to cough and wipe his eyes — there’s black mould on the wall where the phones are, he explains, and it irritates him after a while.

The 37-year-old is back at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s after declining a bail hearing in September and consenting to be placed on remand in the 164-year-old crumbling building, where an ongoing rodent infestation led to an inmate being bitten in his sleep.

The conditions inside the penitentiary are horrific, Keough said. But outside, he said, they’re worse. Keough is homeless, and he was living in a tent and panhandling before his current stay at the penitentiary. When someone stole his tent and he had nowhere left to go, he started stealing food again, waiting to be picked up by police and sent back to jail, where he’d at least have meals and a bed.

“If I was released on bail back in September, I would have been back in the same boat. I would have had no resources to help me get on income support, or anywhere to be housed in. So I would have been just under the same circumstance, building up more and more criminal charges,” he said, adding that there are “several” other men in the penitentiary on purpose, because they were homeless on the outside.

“This is the system I’m submersed in,” he added.

The housing crisis gripping the country is having a profound effect on the justice system, speeding up the well-established carousel between homelessness and incarceration, according to people who work with incarcerated people.

Inmates in provincial institutions are already released with few supports in place, said Ontario lawyer Beth Bromberg. But now, as homeless encampments spread across Canada, programs that find vulnerable people a spot in low-income or supportive housing are overrun.

“It is more and more difficult — actually I’d say it’s impossible, at this point, to get people housing,” Bromberg said about her efforts to find recently incarcerated people a place to live.

So they go back to shelters or sleep rough, where it’s hard for support people to stay in touch with them, and where they’re more likely to fall back into mental crises or addictions, which probably landed them in jail in the first place, she said. And that makes them more likely to reoffend.

“People cycle in and out of the provincial systems because they don’t have their needs met when they are released,” Bromberg said. “That costs our communities a fortune in incarceration, and in hospitalizations and in ambulances.”

In St. John’s, Keough has been in an out of incarceration for years. He’s lived much of his life alone — his mother is dead, and his other family members have turned him away because of his drug addictions, he said.

He would like to break the cycle but says he can’t get the help to do it. “I do genuinely want to move forward.”