Description

“Deprived of a Fighting Chance” is an Education Coordinator’s memoir of 2½ years she worked in a maximum security detention centre. The work involved delivering correspondence courses to inmates, networking between security, volunteer tutors, and the Ministries of Corrections and Educataion and Training from a broom closet which correctional officers told her was the only room in the building that could not be locked. Her supervisor warned her to hide her telephone at night from the correctional officers. Efforts to provide educational opportunities to the inmates were regularly subjected to harassment or vandalism by correctional officers whose view of detention as a punitive process clashed with her efforts at education and rehabilitation. Nevertheless, eventually the smarter officers came on side, and told her what a positive impact the program had made. There are many stories of inmate students in the center, the challenges they faced, and the beneficial changes that their educational experiences made possible in their lives.