Rik McWhinney spent almost 35 years in prison, 16 of them in solitary confinement: this is his story

Rik McWhinney was in and out of jail since he was nine years old when he was sent to a provincial “training” school for trying to steal bullets to shoot his stepfather, who was brutally beating him and his mom. He went on to spend almost 35 years in prison, including on two counts of murder, 16 of those years in solitary confinement — a place where prisoners would intentionally harm themselves just so they could have some human contact. During that time, he kept writing: poetry, letters, grievance forms. McWhinney died before the book was published, but as editor Jason Demers notes in his introduction, it was an important story to tell: “prisoner accounts don’t simply add to what we already know about the prison system — they provide a completely different perspective,” essential to understanding the crisis in Canadian prisons. Those writings, in addition to interviews between Jason and Rik, create a narrative of a life and became “The Life Sentences of Rik McWhinney.” Here’s an excerpt of one of the interviews between the two.

Jason Demers: But you’re an advocate for restorative justice — which is part of the reason why you talk about how real change comes from within, and in spite of the system. In restorative justice, it’s dialogue that’s productive, that’s educative, that helps one to understand the effects they have on other people — you believe that opening up these channels for dialogue would be much more productive than caging.

Rik McWhinney: Exactly. Dialogue — and that’s where the empathy enters into it, you know? You’re hit with a realization of the enormity of your offence and the effect that it had on the victim, and they in turn come to understand the situation that led up to that offence, you know, or what led you to that offence. And these are myriad because there’s so many different reasons why a person would go down a particular road. I mean, social, economic — and most importantly, mental health.

There are many, many — too many people who are in prison because they’re basically non compos mentis, you know? They don’t have the mental ability to effect change in their lives, and they fell through the cracks somewhere along the line. A lot of people would be surprised by the wide range of mental health problems that exist in prison today.

FASD — fetal alcohol spectrum disorder — is a big contributor. When a person who suffers from that malady falls through the cracks, what do they do in order to survive — without a job, without social supports or coping mechanisms? They run afoul of the law, end up in prison, which just exacerbates the situation — makes it even worse. If they survive that, they don’t come out any better. In fact, in most cases, they come out worse, because prisons aren’t designed or equipped to deal with these issues regarding mental health. Ashley Smith is a good case in point, you know. Boy, there are thousands, literally thousands of Ashley Smiths in Canadian prisons today as we speak.

The prison system has made some headway in terms of at least recognizing it as a problem, and making some lame attempt to address it, but by and large it remains the same — or worse. Nothing good comes of these thousands of interactions. People either end up dying in prison, or if they happen to survive the experience, they’re released back out into an unsuspecting community and society, much worse for wear.

Once people enter the system, the penitentiary system, or the correctional system, as it is — and it’s sort of a misnomer, but — they become locked into it, you know? They basically don’t see any escape for themselves. Some of them accept it for what it is, and some lash out at it and become a problem not only for themselves, but for other people around them, and for the system in and of itself. They become what they like to term a “disciplinary problem.” They don’t care for the rules or regulations, or anything like that.

It’s a very sad situation. A lot of it is based on class: you see very, very, very few millionaires in prison. People always talk about the deterrent factor — that’s a misnomer in and of itself. I mean, what does it mean to weigh one’s need to escape their past or present circumstances against any deterrent value whatsoever?

Some guys are quite comfortable in prison because they feel secure, and they establish their own relationships to a point that they never achieved outside, living on the streets.

You take a look outside here, you see these guys outside here (the Salvation Army), and they’re basically homeless, you know? For them, prison may be a relief — it might give them some sense of security, you know? They’ve got shelter, a roof over their head, and three meals a day, if you choose to call them that. I ran into a lot of people that were in prison who lacked the social skills to deal effectively with the problems that they encountered. They’d have a number of issues — like with anger, you know, anger management issues, which are compounded by substance abuse issues, and an anti-social sort of attitude — and that all feeds into it. For the most part, they can’t help themselves.

Prison, yeah — I mean, you just have to take a walk through a prison and you’ll see the over-representation of the Native population versus the white population, the poor versus the rich, people with mental health issues — you can’t escape the fact that these guys for the most part were just cast aside at some point in their lives, at an early age, you know? And they said, “Well, I’ll just live this way, you know, and I’ll choose to live this way, and to hell with everybody else,” you know? “I’ll do what I want.” I mean, you just have to take a look around in prison, and you can see that it’s very — crime is very class-driven, you know? Like I said before, there’s very, very few millionaires in prison. So few, in fact, that you could probably discount them altogether.

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