Google up your local office, phone the Executive Director and ask about volunteering opportunities. If you have special skills, you might be an excellent candidate for a board member position. We’re always looking to carry our message to more people because we don’t think we have to choose between our values and the evidence of what works: our values accord with the evidence of what works.
John Howard, born to a deeply religious Englishman, spent his early years on a family property in Cardington, near Bedford. His keen observation skills in natural history earned him recognition from the Royal Society, despite his frail health. Howard’s compassion extended to his tenants, for whom he provided better housing and funded children’s education. His life took a pivotal turn during a trip to Portugal when the British merchant ship he was on was captured by a French privateer. The subhuman conditions he endured below deck and later in a French dungeon profoundly impacted him. This harrowing experience ignited his lifelong mission to reform prison conditions.
In 1773, Howard was appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, where he was appalled by the squalid conditions of the jails. Determined to abolish the inhumane treatment of prisoners, he traveled extensively across England, Wales, and Scotland, covering over 7,000 miles in 1779 alone. His observations culminated in the publication of “The State of the Prisons” in 1777, which laid the groundwork for the Penitentiary Act of 1779. Howard’s relentless advocacy for prison reform continued until his death from the plague in 1790, while investigating prison conditions in Russia. His legacy endures, epitomized by the John Howard Society of Canada, which upholds his belief in citizens’ responsibility for their criminal justice system.
Just that, the fear of crime — anxiety about being the victim of crime or target of a criminal act — is often different from the reality of crime. The two are often not connected: fear of crime may be going up while actual incidents of crime are declining.
Most people don’t realize, for example, that THE MOST DANGEROUS thing any person does in a given day is get into or out of the shower/bathtub or that it’s more dangerous to drive to the next town than to fly around the planet in an Airbus. Did you know that, on a balance of probabilities, you are in more danger from someone you know (wife, husband, sibling, cousin, priest) than from someone you don’t know? That most crimes of violence are committed between people who know each other? – and that most crimes of violence between people who know each other are never reported?
So this too is complex. We know that people who watch a lot of local or dinnertime television news tend to think the world is a more dangerous place than people who read national newspapers (like the Globe and Mail or National Post).
This figure changes every year, but not by a lot. Furthermore, there may be many people in provincial detention centres on remand (awaiting trial) on any given day. The rate of incarceration per 100,000 people has not changed significantly for many years. Canada incarcerates more people than most European countries (approx. 107 per 100,000) and far fewer than the United States (approx. 738 per 100,000) which is a huge change in the past 30 years.
The Society is a network of 65 offices across Canada whose mission is to provide various kinds of rehabilitative and reintegrative services to released prisoners; everything from basic job search skills to anger management to life skills to finding affordable housing. If you Google up “John Howard Society” + “your city,” you’ll find the website of the Society office closest to you and a list of programs the office provides.
Various offices across the country provide transitional housing and programs to young persons who are at risk of coming into conflict with the law.
We are a non-profit charity governed by a volunteer board of directors to whom the Executive Director is accountable. Our money flows from various government departments both federally and provincially and we fund raise to finance special projects and programs. You can find two of our recent special projects on our website. The non-profit voluntary sector, also known as the Third Sector, provides a wide range of services on a non-profit basis and employs thousands of people in every aspect of life in Canada, from emergency housing for street children to the management of cultural festivals to the protection of agricultural land.
They’re still human beings, of course, and that’s one reason to care. But the better reason is that, with few exceptions, almost all get out. And if we know one thing about incarceration it’s this: few people are improved by the experience. On the contrary, some are made worse by their time in prison. At bottom, however, one should care out of simple self-interest: if public safety is important, then we all share a responsibility to humanely and effectively re-integrate former prisoners. We cannot lock up forever everyone who has done something terrible – except for a small minority – so the fact that the majority of prisoners eventually gets out requires us to ask “How might we, as a community, make their return to our community as safe and humane as possible?” – because that’s in our shared interest.
We do. We lock them away and deprive them of the most basic right: to live in society. Punishment would be a lot more satisfying if it worked; if it actually made people better, or improved them in some way. Too often, however, it just hardens their anti-social attitudes. Besides, the threat of being locked away does not seem to deter some people. They don’t calculate the risks of being incarcerated – or the odds of getting caught – the way we might expect them to.
We punish by incarcerating them so that, for a limited period of time, they cannot hurt other people. We try to train them out of the behaviour that brought them to prison in the first place. But that’s not a sure thing because, by the time they get to prison, many of these people are already damaged by;
– this list is quite long.