Con Game : The Truth about Canada's Prisons

by Harris, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780771039621
• ISBN10: 077103962X
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Summary

Michael Harris's book about life inside prison is hard-hitting, hair-raising, and certain to be hugely controversial.Con Gameshows 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. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

One of Canada’s top investigative writers, <b>Michael Harris</b> was winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best true crime book for <i>The Prodigal Husband: The Tragedy of Helmuth and Hannah Buxbaum</i>. Formerly the publisher of the<i> Sunday Express</i> 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 <i>National </i>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.<br><br>Harris’s previous books consist of the award-winners <i>Justice Denied: The Law versus Donald Marshall</i> (1986), <i>Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount