Today's episode is a special one. I am sharing an episode of Ben Perrin's podcast, Indictment: the Criminal Justice System on Trial which can be found here: https://indictment.simplecast.com/ In the most recent episode of Indictment, Ben shares Harold Johnson's final public talk - and what a gift it is to listen to Harold one more time. For more info on the Justice as Trauma Conference, please check out: www.justiceastrauma.ca Below is a copy of Ben's show notes from the original Indictment episode: Powerful. Unflinching. Visionary. Hear Indigenous lawyer and author Harold Johnson (1957-2022) deliver his final public lecture powerfully indicting the Canadian criminal justice system and making an impassioned case for Indigenous justice. A member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation, Harold was a Harvard-trained Crown prosecutor and criminal defence lawyer who quit practising law because of the harm it was causing Indigenous people. Instead, he devoted the rest of his life to advocating for Indigenous justice and developing and implementing initiatives to bring healing and restoration in Indigenous communities. This special episode was recorded live on November 8, 2021 at the UBC Peter A. Allard School of Law in Vancouver as Harold spoke to the entire first year class. Harold Johnson passed away three months later on February 9, 2022. His legacy and words live on. Content Note: discussion of trauma, intimate partner violence, violence, suicide, death by impaired driving, substance use, colonial violence against Indigenous people including residential schools and incarceration. There is also mention of sexual violence. Click here for mental health support resources if you need support. Harold's book include: Harold Johnson, Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada Harold Johnson, Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours) Order your copy of Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial (Aevo UTP, 2023). Visit www.benjaminperrin.ca for the latest news and upcoming events. Thank you to Joan Johnson for permission to share this lecture.
Today's episode is a special one. I am sharing an episode of Ben Perrin's podcast, Indictment: the Criminal Justice System on Trial which can be found here: https://indictment.simplecast.com/ In the most recent episode of Indictment, Ben shares Harold Johnson's final public talk - and what a gift it is to listen to Harold one more time.
For more info on the Justice as Trauma Conference, please check out: www.justiceastrauma.ca
Below is a copy of Ben's show notes from the original Indictment episode:
Powerful. Unflinching. Visionary. Hear Indigenous lawyer and author Harold Johnson (1957-2022) deliver his final public lecture powerfully indicting the Canadian criminal justice system and making an impassioned case for Indigenous justice. A member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation, Harold was a Harvard-trained Crown prosecutor and criminal defence lawyer who quit practising law because of the harm it was causing Indigenous people. Instead, he devoted the rest of his life to advocating for Indigenous justice and developing and implementing initiatives to bring healing and restoration in Indigenous communities. This special episode was recorded live on November 8, 2021 at the UBC Peter A. Allard School of Law in Vancouver as Harold spoke to the entire first year class. Harold Johnson passed away three months later on February 9, 2022. His legacy and words live on.
Harold's book include:
Harold Johnson, Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada
Harold Johnson, Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours)
Order your copy of Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial (Aevo UTP, 2023). Visit www.benjaminperrin.ca for the latest news and upcoming events. Thank you to Joan Johnson for permission to share this lecture.
🎵 AUDIO/MUSIC CUE🎵
>> Myrna McCallum: Since we're coming up on the holidays, I've got a treat for you today. Instead of another Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast episode, I am sharing with you an episode from a friend's podcast. Not that long ago you heard from Ben Perrin. He was on my podcast talking about his book, Indictment the Criminal Justice System on Trial. Since that time, he's been on a quite a successful book tour and he also released a companion podcast to go along with the book. He featured a lot of folks on that podcast, including me. If you want to hear more from me, you can just go over to Indictment the Criminal Justice System on Trial podcast and you can hear an interview with me. You can also hear from Gabor Mate and today band dropped an episode featuring a friend of mine who passed away last year, Harold Johnson. Harold Johnson was many things, including a best selling author and a former crown prosecutor. he used to prosecute in northern Saskatchewan and, and he was a friend and a husband and a, ah, trapper and all these wonderful things. Probably about a year before Harold passed away, he and I had a conversation when I was thinking about giving up this podcast and he really encouraged me not to and that the work I was doing, my voice was really important. And today when I heard him on Van's podcast, I just started to feel his presence around me and I really thought, you know, he would be so pleased at what I'm doing. And even though in this episode that you're going to listen to of, Ben's, you hear Harold criticize conferences and justice conferences, calling them stupid, maybe a waste of time. And I just thought, you know, the justice is Trauma conference that I'm putting together is one that I believe Harold would not only support, but participate in, because we're not just talking about justice, we're talking about healing and we're talking about trauma. And I don't think you can have a conversation about justice without talking about healing and talking about trauma. That is why this conference is going to be so incredibly successful, because it is the first of its kind and it's bringing together so many people from so many disciplines. Not just, not just lawyers and not just judges and not just police officers, but so many folks, including a real intentional, focus on bipoc voices. Why? Because in these systems, those are the voices that we don't hear enough of. And if we're ever going to change the way we deliver justice to do no further harm, then those are the voices we need to listen to. So Van Paren is also going to be there delivering a keynote. Gabor is going to be there with us for half a day. So many wonderful folks are showing up and participating and lending their voice and their expertise to this event. If you're interested in the justice is Trauma conference, all you have to do is Google justice is Trauma or go to justicest Trauma CA or Google my name and you're going to get information. Currently, we have early bird rates on and the conference takes place in Vancouver at the Vancouver Convention Center, April 3rd to 5th of 2024. I hope to see you there. For now, we're going to have a listen to Ben's latest episode where he is spotlighting Harold Johnson's incredible voice.
>> Benjamin Perrin: I'm Benjamin Perron. In this podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes of my new book, the Criminal Justice System on Trial. You'll hear from people who are imprisoned, survivors of violent crime, whistleblowers, insiders and investigators. You be the judge. Join us as we expose injustice, challenge the system and explore a new transformative justice vision. I'm Benjamin Perrin and this is is indictment. While researching my book Indictment, I met many people that I'll never forget. One of them was Harold Johnson. Harold is a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation, a Harvard trained crown prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer. He quit practicing law because of the harm he saw it causing Indigenous people. Instead, he devoted the rest of his life to advocating for Indigenous justice, developing and implementing initiatives to bring healing and restoration in Indigenous communities. He authored many books including Peace and Good, the Case for Indigenous justice in Canada and How Alcohol is Killing My People and Yours. This special episode was recorded on November 8, 2021 at the UBC Law School. To the entire first year class, Harold passed away just three months later on February 9, 2022. This is his final public lecture, his last words, his closing Making the Case for Indigenous Justice. A content note. Today's episode includes a discussion of trauma, intimate partner Violence, suicide, death by impaired driving, substance use, colonial violence against indigenous people, including residential schools, and incarceration. There's also mention of sexual violence. So please, if you need support, check out the show notes for resources.
>> Harold Johnson: I'm extremely honored to be here. Last time I was at this law school would be about 27 years ago. I came for an Indigenous Bar association conference. I heard Michael Jackson speak there. I was impressed. So it's good to be here. And it feels like I'm being honored that I get to come back after that length of time and stand at this podium. Sometimes I sort of feel like I don't deserve to be here. I got some things to say. I practiced as a defense counsel first, and I told myself, I'm keeping aboriginal people out of the justice system. And then I had this client hired me. He'd hit his wife. and I flew to his far north community, and he paid my fee and my airline ticket, my accommodations. I got rid of the charge for him, and he hit her again and again. He hired me again. He paid my fees and accommodations and transportation, and again I got rid of the charge. Third time he hit her, and it felt like he thinks he can beat her up anytime he wants. And Harold Johnson's gonna get him off. And I flew into his community this time, took him out behind the community hall. We were holding court, and I said, buddy, if you hit her again, I'm, gonna kick the shit out of you. Now you go in there and plead guilty, and I'll keep your sorry ass out of jail. I don't know if he ever hit her again, but he never hired me again. I sort of felt like I was on the wrong side. I had many reasons for going over to prosecutions.
The biggest one was 2008, and the economy collapsed. And I'm old enough to remember 1981 and that big recession and how all the miners and loggers didn't have work. I figured my little law practice wasn't going to survive and took a job over with the Crown. When I was with the Crown, I told myself another story. I said, you're defending the victims. 98% of the people in court in northern Saskatchewan were aboriginal. And all of the victims were aboriginal as well, and they were mostly women. I was able to tell myself that story for a long time, that I'm, defending the victims. Until it became so abundantly clear that I was making things worse. I was making our communities worse, sending people to jail. And we know this, we know. We send someone to a provincial correctional center. They're going to come back because they always come back. They're going to come back angry and we send them to a federal institution, they're going to come back angry and mean. We're just bringing that anger and meanness back into the community. No matter how much I try to convince myself, that I'm protecting the communities from their bad actions, that by sending them to jail I'm giving the community a reprieve, took a while, took a decade till I saw what I was doing. If you're visibly Aboriginal, you're more likely to be stopped by the police. If you're stopped by the police, you're more likely to be arrested and charged. If you're charged, you're more likely to be denied bail. At this point, many Aboriginal people plead guilty just to get it over with. and yes, there are many people in prison today who are not guilty. They just know the system is so stacked against them there's no sense fighting. When they do go to trial, they're more likely to be found guilty. And if they're found guilty, they're more likely to be sentenced to a period of incarceration. And if you're sentenced in Saskatchewan, your prison sentence will be twice as long as a non aboriginal person charged with the same offence. Once you're in jail, you will be assigned the highest security rating. You're more likely to serve your sentence in a maximum security institution. You're more likely to be denied bail or denied parole. And you're more likely to be found a dangerous offender. For every year of incarceration, you lose two years of life expectancy. In the 10 years. As a prosecutor I made recommendations for incarceration many times and it didn't add up all the years that I asked for. The life expectancy of an Aboriginal person in Northern Saskatchewan is 60 years. If I asked for 30 and the judge agreed with me, and he usually did, I took a life. It took an accumulated life, but it was still a life. We began locking up Aboriginal people in Saskatchewan. Noted increase in about 1960, Ovid Mercury told me he attended his first justice conference in 1970 on a boat on Lake Winnipeg called Indians and the justice system. So by 1970 we knew something was wrong. By, the 1990s, Canada recognized there was something wrong and over incarceration of Aboriginal people and started talking about it. In 1995, Canada changed the Criminal Code, added section 718 2, telling judges to take into account the unique circumstances of Aboriginal people at sentencing and to use Jail as a last resort. Nothing changed. Incarceration rates continued to climb. In 1999, the Supreme Court came down with a decision of R v Gladue. And they said, hey, judges, pay attention. You have to abide by what the legislation says. You have to take into account the unique circumstances of Aboriginal people. And nothing changed. The incarceration rates continued to climb. Our defense counsel in La Ronge and I dared to make a gladue argument in front of a judge. I hadn't heard it made in a provincial court in the north ever before, and I didn't know why I made my arguments. And that judge got angry at me, like, how fucking dare you tell me to be a racist and give this Indian a lesser sentence? And I know he gave my client a more severe sentence than he would have received if I had not made those arguments. In 2012, the Supreme Court came down with R v Ipele and very bluntly told judges, you damn well pay attention to what we said in Gladue. And nothing changed. The incarceration rates continue to climb. We can't tinker with the system. Requires fundamental change.
Today we're locking up more women and children than at any time before. 95% of men and 97% of women, incarcerated today were physically or sexually abused as children. That's what we're dealing with. We're still holding stupid justice conferences. I was invited. The last one I went to. I, can't do that anymore. The last one I went to was in Winnipeg by invitation only. Oh, they had a good spread, man, there was hors d', oeuvres, big goddamn shrimp, and your choice, red or white wine. And people gave speeches. And there were deputy ministers of justice from the provinces and the feds, and there were leading judges and there were professors there and me. And, man, they made some good speeches. People spoke because they wanted people to hear their voice, but they never said a damn thing. And I just wanted to go down to the street, middle of winter, get an Aboriginal, woman, bring her upstairs, feed her some of that hot food that was at the back of the room. There was something hot to drink. Get her to tell these leading thinkers from across Canada what it feels like to be an Aboriginal woman on the streets of Winnipeg in the wintertime. You all heard about residential schools. Residential schools were designed to take our culture away. They did a good job of it. Problem is, they never gave us a replacement culture. It was assumed that we would assimilate, into white culture. Only problem was, we weren't welcome there. Started locking up Indians Started giving them a new culture, jailhouse culture. In jail, you learn that the institution's going to feed you, give you a bed and a roof, and learn to disrespect authority and learn that violence solves problems, and learn the tough guy's the hero. You'll be exposed to different sexual experiences. Like I said, they always come back to the communities. They bring that jailhouse culture back. We've been doing it for decades, Generation after generation. And now we've got youth who believe that jailhouse culture is aboriginal culture. We would not have a gang problem, if we did not have jails. That's where gangs formed. That's where they began. That's where they grew. That's where they continue to grow. And that problem, too, comes back to the communities, brings all of that other culture with them. I see this justice system locking up aboriginal people, Not just destroying those that they incarcerate, but damaging our communities. And I don't see a way out of it, a way to stop it, but it's destroying us. We become that cycle that just feeds the system. And nothing anybody has done or thought of, in 50 years of conferences has made any damn difference. Supreme Court can't solve it. You guys have to. Trauma. 95% of men, 97% of women. That's where it is. We started to learn about trauma after the Vietnam war. First came across the phrase ptsd. There's a case study. Tom. Tom was in Vietnam. His platoon got ambushed in a rice paddy. His buddies were killed years later. When he's talking to a psychologist, that's not what he wants to talk about. He wants to talk about what happened the next day when he went into a Vietnamese village and he murdered unarmed villagers, including children, and he raped a woman. The atrocity that Tom committed traumatized him more than the atrocity committed against him. As a prosecutor in northern Saskatchewan, I prosecuted 1500 files a year. Let's say a thousand of those files documented a trauma. Well, multiple traumas. Not just the woman who got the shit kicked out of her, but the five children who watched and also the man who did it. You take my thousand files a year, and you multiply them by 11 prosecutors for northern Saskatchewan, and you have 11,000 files, each documenting multiple traumas. There's only 38,000 people there. It doesn't take long until the entire population is traumatized multiple times. But it began a long time ago, this trauma thing. We like to think it began with residential schools, but it began before that, with the introduction of disease. We lost Huge chunks of our populations. We lost leaders and thinkers and medicine people and our artists and our hunters and our warriors. And then we lost the buffalo. By the time we got the treaty, we were beaten, traumatized people. And then shortly after treaty, we get an Indian act in residential schools and the trauma load just multiplies exponentially. And then people get out of those places and they come home and they bring it back. Then I got to deal with it. There's symptoms of trauma, anxiety, depression, overwhelming sense of sorrow, shame, grief. You got PTSD, you got a trauma load that's 7, 8, 9, and it's there all the time. You go out for a drink Friday night and it goes down to two or three, and that feels really good. That's what you think normal people feel like and you want to be there all the time. Alcohol alleviates all of the symptoms of ptsd only while you're intoxicated.
The biggest problem with it is in the side effects or after effects. You quickly develop a tolerance to it and you need more and more. And along with alcohol consumption, we get higher rates of violence in our community, continue to increase that trauma load on ourselves. I saw that 95% of the people in court were intoxicated by alcohol at the time they committed their offense. And I quickly realized we are not dealing with criminality, we are dealing with substance use disorders. And the law isn't prepared to deal with that. They don't want to talk about it. Most of my court points were in the far north, up, close to the Northwest territory's border. And we'd fly into a community old court all day and it was always alcohol. And we get back on the plane to fly back to La Ronge. And at the back of the plane there's a cooler. And in that cooler there's beer, bottles of wine, always a, 12 year old single malt scotch whiskey. And as the judge and the prosecutors and defense counsel and the clerks are getting back on the plane to get themselves something to drink. And then when they get to La Ronge, they get in their vehicles and drive home. And if you're consuming, you can never see that there's anything wrong with it. Can't be anything wrong with it. I use it right, must be okay. It has to be the people who are fucking up. It's not the alcohol. It's the rationalization process. Tell you a story about this trauma and alcohol and how it works together. Young man. And I know him really well. he lived across the lake from me. He was a good Bushman when he was young. He's in a relationship. too young to be in a relationship. He didn't know how that worked. And him and his girlfriend walk out of the community late at night, and they've got a bottle. They walk down the highway, and they're standing on a bridge having a lover's quarrel. And she jumped in front of a semi to prove that she was serious. And he stayed with the body for three hours until the police and the ambulance arrived. And, yeah, he's traumatized. He's having feelings. He's having thoughts he can't describe. He doesn't understand. He goes to somebody older, somebody wiser. He talks to his aunt, tells her about these feelings and thoughts that he's having. Her advice? Go and get drunk and forget about it. So he does. he gets drunk and he stays drunk. One beautiful July morning, he's sleeping in his car. Police are knocking on the window sometime during the night. He doesn't even remember driving around drunk. Ran over his cousin, killed his cousin. Found, the cousin's DNA underneath his car. More trauma, more grief. More. More reason to drink. And we've got this wheel of trauma and grief and drinking and trauma and grief and drinking, and it's rolling over top of us. The only spoke in that wheel that I can imagine knocking out is that alcohol, spoke. Maybe if we do something there, we can slow this damn train down. Law can't fix it. Law talks about intention. If you're traumatized, little reptilian part of your brain, the amygdala, and it makes decisions that don't go through the rational part of your brain, the frontal lobes. You don't think, you just act. And it's fight, flight, freeze. Another story. Young, another young couple in their 20s, they're having a few beer. They're not drunk. They've only had a couple. They're sharing a cigarette. And he reached over and took the cigarette out of her mouth when she wasn't ready. And something about his fingers touching her lips triggered her. And the next thing she remembers is giving the knife to her aunt. She'd stabbed him seven times, didn't kill him. And all justice can do to deal with that, put her in jail. So we got traumatized people committing atrocities and traumatizing themselves more by the atrocity they committed. And we bring them into the justice system, and we run them through a preliminary hearing, traumatize them some more, and we run them through a trial, traumatize them again, and we send them to jail, where we know they're really going to get traumatized. Then we release them, send them back into the communities and ask them if they learned their lesson. We got this thing in the criminal code, one word, deter. Deterrence doesn't work. Not when your migda m is making decisions before your rational brain. Not when you're drunk. You're not thinking about what a judge is going to say six months down the road or a year and a half or however long it takes to get to trial. You're in an ancient profession. The first criminal code that we know of, was Ethelbert's about 600 A.D. we've had this system of punishment at least since then. And never in that 1400 years have we ever proven that deterrence reduces crime.
All I see it doing is attacking the poor and the marginalized people. And today in the courtroom we know, we know it doesn't work. Especially at bail hearings. Somebody's asking for bail and we're arguing about whether it's safe to keep this person in the community. Prosecutor brings out the criminal record and says jail on there. This guy's been to jail before, your honor. And we all know, you've been to jail before, you're more likely to commit an offense. We're going to keep you in jail. We know, jail doesn't cure criminality, it increases it. And everybody knows that because we argue it every goddamn day. Then when we finish arguing that, we argue that he should go to jail for rehabilitation. And that just seems to end up a continuing insanity. Like I said before, we know when they come back they're going to come back angry or they're going to come back angry and mean. And they bring that anger and meanness back into the community and more people get hurt. But it can't leave you there, can't leave you hopeless. I know that, the problem is primarily alcohol and we send people to treatment 28 day programs. You know why 28 days? When there's discern that alcohol was a disorder. Insurance companies had to pay for the treatment and they refused to pay for anything more than a 28 day program. So they made all the programs 28 days. That's the only magic in that number. And they don't work. The success rates are between 2 and 5%. 2% for the treatment centers, our people go to 5%. You spend thousands of dollars a week and come to Vancouver. I have this friend, he also lived across the lake from me. I've known him a long time. When he was 15 years old, he was down at the beach partying with his friends. They decided to go back into the reserve. they were all riding in the back of a half ton truck. One of the young boys fell out, hit his head and died. My friend's grandfather came and got him, took him out of the reserve, took him to the trap line, taught him to learn respect for nature. Taught him to be self sufficient, taught him how to survive out there. He grew up, did good. Eventually came back to his home reserve. He's doing so good they elected him as a counselor. And on council he saw there was a lot of problems in his community. A lot of vandalism. Those kids, kids were destroying stuff. They built him a new community center, skating rink, weight rooms and a pool room. And the kids broke in and vandalized it. They did tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage. He's thinking, well what the hell's wrong with these kids? Didn't their grandpa teach him respect? He decided to take 11 of them that were getting into the most trouble. And he took them out hunting and they each shot a moose or an elk and they came back to the communities and they butchered those animals and they went around and they distributed the meat to the elders, people in the community who needed meat. And he saw that the vandalism in his community went down. Then he heard about Kuan Lin Dun up in the Yukon land based treatment. They flew up there, go see what's going on. They saw that Kwanlin Dunn was an eight week program in the summer and it was quite small. And they came back and they said we can do better than that. And they applied to the federal government for funding and the government said no, they said well fuck you then we'll do it ourselves. And they built Camp Hope. Just went out to a little lake nearby and built some cabins. And they hired a woman who, she's aboriginal but she's been trained in western trauma counseling. And the two of them went to work. And I heard about it and I knew about it. And then I heard Camp Hope is having a 70 plus percent success rate. And I called my buddy up and I said, what the hell you doing? What's going on? And he said Harold, you won't believe it. When I bring people back at the end of the day sometimes they're crying. They say I'm an Indian, but I never said a fishnet before. I'm an Indian, but I never said a rabbit snare. And I saw what he was doing. He was giving Them their identity back. I'm an Indian. He was giving them a sense of belonging. I belong here on this land. And when you have that, you have an identity and you belong somewhere. You can begin your healing journey. Politics got in the way of his project and he moved on. But he started other projects. And I've left Northern Saskatchewan, moved to Gabriola Island. It's paradise. It's amazing that this community, where there is community and people plan and there's committees and it's slow, but things get done. And it's so different than Northern Saskatchewan where we can never plan. we're just reeling from crisis to crisis to crisis. You're always just reacting. And after a lifetime of crisis after crisis, you get to thinking that's normal.
There's hope in Camp Hope. There's hope in all of the treatment programs that are going land based now. And I left my cabin on my trap line. There was two cabins and a nice quonset. Oh, I missed that Quonset man had a cement floor in it. You can do mechanics and if you drop a nut, you're not looking for it in the gravel or the grass. I missed that. Montreal Lake. Cree Nation bought it from me and they turned it into a land based education center. so there's good coming from it. If you're in the north and you're talking to my people, and that's the only people I I'm talking for, I know that I'm on the west coast. My friend Terry Lynn is here and her culture is different than mine. So I don't speak for all aboriginal people. I only speak for the Woodland Cree. And I don't even speak for them. I speak from there. I do not speak for. Because when you speak for people, you silence them. So I'm only speaking from this small place. And from there I see hope. The possibilities around land based. So imagine instead of sending somebody to a prison, we send them to a land based program. We separate them from the community, but we heal them instead of traumatizing them more. And we give them their identity and their belonging back. There's hope there. The other bit of hope I want to give you, I call the give a shit factor. You care about somebody, it makes a difference as professionals. Seems like it's all professionals are told, be professional, don't get involved, keep your distance. It don't work. There's a woman who was working the streets of Edmonton, one of our people, and it was a horrible day. It was cold, miserable. She's standing on the street this man and a woman walked by, and the woman turned around and came back. Never said a word. Walked up to our friend and gave her a hug. That's it. Changed that woman's life. She walked off the street that day, and now she's working to get other women off the street. Just that. I go back to my own experience. And I'm going to leave you with two stories. I was prosecuting in the far north, and I got this guy, long criminal record, and he screwed up again. And his lawyer come and asked me if he can, if I can agree to release him on bail. I said, no fucking way. And he went talk to his client and he came back and he said, my client wants to talk to you. I said, I don't care. I'll tell him to his face. So I go back into the interview room. It's just a broom closet. Barely any room in there to sit down. I'm going back and forth with this guy, telling him, there's no way you're getting out. At one point he says, I've never been given a break. And I said, bullshit. Everybody gets a break. And I opened up his criminal record to show him all the times that he got a break and it wasn't there. His very first offense, he went to jail. I said, well, the RCMP are going to be angry at me, but in my book, everybody gets a break. I'm going to agree to your release on bail. And I loaded up those bail conditions, man, I tied his hands and his feet. Curfew, no contact, no alcohol, no nothing. You know what? He didn't breach those conditions. First time. First time for him, he did not reach.
The next one was after I'd left prosecutions, and I'm working at the Northern Alcohol Strategy, and we're trying to figure out what we can do in northern Saskatchewan to deal with alcohol. And I came across a case study out of the United States out, of South Dakota, called 24 7. South Dakota had this tough on crime stuff going on. And they got their jail so full, they didn't have room for anymore. And a district attorney came up with this idea for impaired drivers and domestic violence that you could stay, in the community, but you had to go to a police station every morning and every evening and blow into a breathalyzer to prove you were sober. And it worked. and the RAND Institute came and did a study. And what they found was the death rate in South Dakota went down. Heart attacks were down by 4%. Domestic violence was down by 12%. And second, impaired drivings were down by 9%. And the reason they know that it was because of the 24. 7 program was because each county went into it at different times and they were able to trace it across the state. And I thought, holy shit, we can do this in northern Saskatchewan. We can save some lives. 24% of all deaths in northern Saskatchewan are related to injury. Injuries, Car accidents, canoe accidents, drowning, stabbings, shootings, beatings, house fire, suicide, freezing to death. And we know that's all alcohol. If we can reduce that, maybe we can save some lives of that. So I talked to prosecutors, defense counsel and said, let's try this. And a prosecutor gave me a call and he said, I got a youth. I said, no, not a youth. We want someone who, but for their drinking would be safe in the community. And a few days later he calls me back and he says, what about Fast Eddie? Yeah, Fast Eddie would be perfect. The last time I prosecuted Fast Eddie, I asked the judge to give him a year. But this time Eddie had hit his mom. He was drunk, just lashing out and he hit his mom. And he was just charged with common assault. And normally if I'm prosecuting and you hit your mom, you get no sympathy. But this time, let's give it a try. And, I went to court that day and explained what the 247 program was to the judge, explained what we were seeking. And the judge says, well, what we're doing isn't working, so let's give it a try. And Fast Eddie had to go to the police station every morning before 8 o' clock and blow into a breathalyzer. And every evening by between five and six and blow into a breathalyzer. And we didn't have to put any other conditions on him except stay sober, not consume alcohol and blow into a breathalyzer. He didn't need a curfew. Who cares if he's out till 3 o' clock in the morning? If he's not drinking, he can go in the bar if he wants, go and play slots all night. Just don't drink. Because we know if he's not drinking, he's no problem in the community, could have contact with his mom because if he's sober, he's not going to hurt his mom. A year after the order, what we did was we gave him a six month conditional sentence order so that if he breached, he went straight to jail. so he did his six month order and then six months later I went and did a review and I talked to the police the staff sergeant. And they liked the order. They said Eddie showed up twice a day, every day. And if there's any signatures missing on that signup sheet, it's the police officer's fault, not his, because he was here every day. And then he went into the police computer and showed me that Eddie didn't show up anywhere in their system. Not only did nobody ever call the police on Eddie, he wasn't in the backseat of a car. They pulled over. He wasn't sitting at a party that they got called to. He was just nowhere in their system. I went and interviewed Eddie's employer, and he liked the order because Eddie showed up for work every day. And he knew how hard it was for Eddie. He knew that Eddie was in a relationship with a young woman in her 20s, and Eddie was, in his early 50s. And the young, partner of his still liked to party. And they knew that Eddie's father was having heart problems, and Eddie was scared his dad was going to die all while this order was in place. And I talked to Eddie and asked, him what he thought of the order. And he said, well, sometimes the police were assholes. I'd show up and they'd make me wait. Even though they weren't doing anything. They were just gossiping. And, yeah, it's true. Sometimes police officers can be assholes. I said, would you rate that order for me between 0 and 10? 0 being the worst, 10 being the best. Eddie gave it a 7. I went and talked to his probation officer. I know this guy. He's one of those probation officers that gives a shit. And I talked to him, and Stan said, you know what Eddie told me? Eddie said he didn't want to breach that order because he didn't want to disappoint Harold Johnson. That's the difference. Show people you give a shit, and they'll respond. That probation officer was part of a study done several years ago looking at. They took two groups of probation officers. one group got no training at all. The second group was trained in empathy. Then two years later, they looked at the results. And of those probation officers who were trained in empathy, they found that their clients recidivism rates were down by 15%. And if the probation officer actually worked the program a little bit, the recidivism rates were down by 19%. Just give a shit. Show them you care. Just listen, and you can make a difference. So thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention, all my relationships.
>> Benjamin Perrin: Thank you for listening today. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes as they go live. And remember to rate and review us. To find out more, get a copy of my latest book, Indictment the Criminal Justice System on Trial by Benjamin Perrin, published by the University of Toronto Press. All author royalties are directly donated to nonprofit organizations that support people who've been incarcerated and survivors of violent crime. Indictment was recorded on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam People. To protect their privacy, the names of people with lived experience have been changed. This podcast is obviously not intended to provide legal, medical or therapeutic advice. If you're in need of help with any of these things, please consult a professional for assistance. The topics we cover can be upsetting and triggering. If you need support, please check out the show Notes for Resources Funding and support for Indictment was provided by the Law foundation of British Columbia and the University of British Columbia. Indictment is produced by me, Benjamin Perrin, and Dora Duber. Keep listening and stay safe. See you next time.