Down Inside

During his career with Corrections Canada, Robert Clark rose through the ranks of the Canadian prison system from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada's most notorious prisoners, including Tyrone Conn and Paul Bernardo, and he dealt with escapes, lockdowns, murders, suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes.In Down Inside, Clark takes readers into prisons large and small, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for the mentally ill and the notoroious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. He challenges head-on the popular belief that a "tough-on-crime" approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation and for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement.