Mistreatment of young offenders

                                                      

In 1980, I received an invitation from the United Nations to give a series of speeches at a UN crime conference being held in Caracas, Venezuela.  I could choose any subject I wished to speak on.

Prior to going the conference, I came across a large report about the abuses committed against young offenders being held in US federal young offender facilities. I was shocked at what I had read. I decided that one of my speeches would be on the treatment of young offenders as to how they were being abused in the American federal young offender facilities. I planned to say that what was needed was a bill of rights for young offenders.

When I gave that speech, the American delegation was so embarrassed; they did something right after my speech by asking the chairman of the session to permit them to answer my allegations. Normally, the Rules of the UN prohibit responses right after the experts (that is what we are called by the UN) have given their speeches. Nevertheless, permission was given. They were told that they could have five minutes to respond to my allegations and after they spoke, I would also be given five minutes to respond to their response. Unfortunately, I had left the conference hall so I didn’t hear what the chairman had said.

The spokesman for the American delegation told the other delegates that my allegations were true and that their delegation was going to bring in a resolution instructing the United Nations to conduct a series of meetings around the world for the purpose of creating a bill of rights for young offenders.

Whenever a delegation brings in a resolution, they need seven seconders from the other delegations. They got their seconders.

That night, I was invited to meet several members of the American delegation  in the home of the Canadian Ambassador to Canada. Much to my surprise, one of the American delegates was the man who wrote that damning report I had referred to in my speech. They asked me to help them draft up their resolution.

The next morning, they brought their resolution to all the delegates attending the conference and they all voted in favour of the American resolution.

For five years the proposed Bill was studied around the world and when it reached Beijing, China, it was almost finished.  In 1985, while I attended the Seventh United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the treatment of offenders which was held in Milan, Italy,  the issue of my initial proposal came up for debate. With some minor changes, the America resolution was voted on and all the delegations voted in favor of the resolution. 

Five months later, the UN General assembly gave their approval. Originally it was called the United Nations Bill of Rights for Young Offenders. In 1985,  its title was then changed to The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Administration of juvenile Justice.

Later I learned that in the UN archives, I am known as the precursor of those Rules  for young offenders.

I figured that from then on, young offenders would be treated properly. That presumption on my part was in error.  Abuses in American federal young offender facilities cane to an end but unfortunately, the American delegation attending the UN General Assembly couldn’t vote for those rules as they applied in each of the 50 states in the US. Hence, abuses in some of the state-controlled young offenders’ facilities were abusing their young prisoners.   Some of the abuses were outright horrific.

I decided to give a series of speeches at the UN Eleventh Congress being held in Bangkok in 2005. One of my speeches was; The Bill of Rights for Young Offenders—Why do we as a society, still abuse young offenders? I was later invited to give the same speech in Lima Peru that same year. And the following year, I gave the same speech at a conference being held on juvenile offenders in Brussels, Belgium. 

In 201o, I attended the Twelfth UN Congress being held in Salvador, Brazil. This time my speech on the abuses of young offenders was solely about a young offender’s facility in Toronto, Ontario that was so horrible in its treatment of young offenders—it was finally closed down.

Has anything changed? At the time of the publishing of this article (December 2017) not a great deal has changed. However, the American states did finally shut down their privately-operated young offenders facilities as I suggested in my speech in Brazil but not much else had changed.

Now I will tell you about the abuses that young offenders suffered from in young offender facilities that were taking place in the Province of Ontario beginning in the 1960s. I got much of this information from an article published in the Toronto Star that was written by Kenyon Wallace.

The Province 0f Ontario secretly settled 220 lawsuits where the young offender victims suffered from sexual, physical and emotional abuse by teachers and staff at its training schools for troubled youth between 1960 and 1984 when the young offender training schools were shut down.

Investigations had uncovered information that the financial settlements ranged from several thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a condition of the settlements, the victims had to sign confidentiality agreements, what some former residents, now in their late 50s, referred to as “gag orders.” Of course this is a common practice when financial settlements are reached.

Staff and teachers were accused of sodomizing students, forcing them to perform oral sex, and pushing them to engage in “scrambles,” a sort of fight club where students were encouraged to beat one another.

Each of these young boys and girls had been sent by Ontario court judges and provincial government officials to training schools  which were also called residential institutions in communities such as Simcoe, Bowmanville and Cobourg just t name a few. 

These young people—many from broken families, struggling with poverty, or addicted to drugs and even just for being a truant and for these reasons, they had been deemed “unmanageable” or “incorrigible.”

Today, most of the training schools have been abandoned, torn down or converted to housing, while a few have been retrofitted as youth correctional facilities.

Former student, Greenwood, now age 56 said, “There were a lot of warped minds in these schools.” He was speaking about the staff. While many cases have been settled, a the time of the writing of this article, Greenwood’ case is still before the courts. He is suing the province for physical, sexual and emotional abuse he alleges he suffered from at both the Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville and the Sprucedale Training School in Hagersville in the late 1970s.

The Training Schools Act was repealed in 1984 and though the Province of Ontario cannot change the past, according to Mr. Naqvi, (Minister of the Department of Corrections) “We will continue to do everything we can to ensure that all Ontarians are treated with the compassion, dignity and respect they deserve. Our primary objective with the settlements for abuse victims from training schools is to address the harm suffered while respecting the privacy of these individuals and not re-traumatizing them by publicly revealing their identities.” That makes a great deal of sense. However some of the victims had no problems about giving their names to the Star.

In a statement of claim filed in court, Stephen Burley described one of many attacks he says occurred at the Brookside Training School, where he was sent to at age 13.

Burley alleges that a male staffer beat him with a broken wooden broom handle on a number of occasions, and then used that same wooden handle to sodomize him as two other staffers held him down. Sodomy of anyone who is forced to submit to that act is a crime in Canada. Burley also alleges he was also forced to perform oral sex on the man. He also says he spent a month in Brookside’s concrete-lined solitary confinement cell, known by staff and students alike as “the hole.” It was four feet wide and eight feet in length. When I was in the Toronto jail forty-one years ago, my cell was the same size. My toilet was also a bucket. 

Burley, now 59, who has suffered years of depression, sleepless nights and alcoholism said, “It was cruel and sadistic. I was a child. They broke you apart and you had no chance of putting yourself back together. You can’t get away from it.” Health issues have forced him to go on long-term disability from the Toronto Transit Commission  where he drove buses for 24 years.                                                   

Burley sued the province in 2010 and settled three years later. He was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement that prevents him, on paper, from discussing “the fact and terms” of the settlement.

He is speaking out now because he wants the government to publicly acknowledge its responsibility for what happened to him and others. But in doing so, Burley and others speaking publicly about their settlements are taking a huge risk. As to the province demanding its money back; I will be surprised if the province really wants to add insult to injury.

Shelly Richardson says she was a rebellious child who had a hard time coping with her parents’ separation when she was ten. She stopped listening to her mom, Rita, and started doing “stupid” things like skipping school and stealing.

It soon became evident that Rita couldn’t provide the kind of structure her daughter needed, so Shelly was placed in the care of the local children’s aid society and bounced between foster and group homes.

When she was 13, Shelly and a few friends stole a couple of cars to go joyriding. When she was caught, a judge sent her to Brookside Training School.

Students sent to residential training schools took courses that followed the regular Ontario curriculum, such as English, math, science and shop class. In some cases, classrooms and bedrooms were in one building.

In an interview with the Star, Richardson said the abuse at the hands of three male staff members started almost immediately after she walked through the doors of Johnson House, a locked-down facility for girls, in 1979. Her allegations mirror those in a statement of claim filed against the province in 2004. She has since settled her court case.

Her problems began with one of the senior male staff members, who asked her to help him in the basement laundry room as a ruse. Alone with her, she says this staffer would reach under her shirt and fondle her breasts, rub his groin against her body and force her to touch his penis.

“He just said nobody would believe me if I said anything, so it was better not to say nothing. He said we’re known to be liars and we were in there for that reason,” Richardson said in an interview

On another occasion, Richardson says she was caught smoking in her room by a different male staffer. She says he threatened to report her unless she submitted to sexual acts with him. Richardson’s court claim alleges he kissed her against her will, fondled her genitals, inserted his fingers into her vagina, and forced her to “fondle his penis until he ejaculated.”

Richardson complied, fearing she would be “sent back” to “Day 1, Stage 1” which is a designation that essentially wiped out any progress residents made and reset their time in the institution. “She said, “I just wanted to do my time and get home to my mom,”

There was a superintendent at the former Guelph Reformatory for first offenders who also took away all the good time due  to the prisoners  (a seventh of their time served) even for the most minor of offences committed by the inmates. He was Charlie Sanderson and the inmates referred to him as “Good Time Charlie.” He was finally fired. from his post as a superintendent of prisons in Ontario.

Richardson said, “One night, I snuck into a fellow resident’s room to smoke a cigarette only to discover that my friend was being kissed by yet another male staff member.”  Realizing he’d been caught in the act, the staffer started sexually abusing me  telling me that I would not be believed if I told anyone because I was a “bad kid.”

The abuse took other forms. Richardson said that both male and female staff would also stand and watch the girls shower. “There was no privacy at all. You couldn’t feel comfortable.”

I can’t fault the female staff keeping an eye on the girls when they were showering. They had to make sure that that all the girls were doing was showering themselves. But the men had no right to be in the shower room whatsoever. They were pedophiles, of that there can be no doubt.

Richardson says she remembers one male staffer would often sit in the lounge where the girls gathered to watch TV and start massaging her shoulders and back in plain view of the others. Nobody said a word. Obviously if they did, they would be punished.

By the time Richardson got out of that training school at age 15, She was a different person. She was no longer a rebellious, carefree teenager but instead, she was a damaged, angry young adult.

She said, “If anything, training school made me worse. It made me more defensive. I didn’t trust anybody after that experience.”  

Now 51, Richardson says, “What happened in the school made it difficult for me to be in a trusting relationship. I just couldn’t get the bond with somebody. I had a hard time when I had kids because I was so protective. To this day, they say I’m too protective.” Perhaps it is because she doesn’t want her kids to be sent to a correctional facility for young offenders.

As recently as 1984, training schools were still  in use in Ontario and former residents say they were the scenes of horrible acts by teachers and staff members.

 The  statements of claim list the province as a defendant, and often name individual teachers, though typically, only the last names of teachers or staff are listed since the students never knew their full names, or can’t remember them. In all the court files, the Toronto Star examined, none of the files contained a statement of defence from the province. That doesn’t mean that the province may not file a defence. I believe the province (at the time of this writing) are attempting to find a way of settling the claims in favour of the plaintiffs. The province has to be satisfied that the claims are valid.

Richardson said, “They were wrong for what they did. Did they not do a background check on these people whenever they got hired? Nowadays, you can’t even go on a school trip unless you have a clean background. These people were working with kids.”

Her mother died in 2009 but Richardson never told her about the sexual abuse she suffered in Brookside. “It would have devastated her.” said Richardson.

That I can understand. When I was eleven years of age, my mother visited her sister thousands of miles away from our home. My father anal raped me twice while she was away and then he moved away. I never told my mother what my father had done to me because even as an eleven-year-old, I knew that my mother would be devastated and feel guilty the rest of her life for having left me with my father when she was away with her sister. She died when she was 91 and my secret was kept from her to her dying day.

The allegations contained in the statements of claim viewed by the Star are disturbing and graphic.

One described a ritual known as the “scramble,” which former training school students told the Star entailed staff throwing a sheet over one student and encouraging the others to kick and punch the sheet until it was bloody. Those who didn’t participate would be the next to go under the sheet.

Another punishment would require students to hold a stack of books with their outstretched arms. If the student’s arms fell, they would get beaten.

One former student said he was forced to eat an entire package of cigarettes as punishment for collecting used butts to trade with other boys. He also said he was forced into an empty forty-gallon metal drum, while other residents banged the top and sides of the drum with sticks.

Another alleges that a member of the kitchen staff at Brookside Training School would take students to his home, where he gave the boys marijuana, showed them pornographic films and fondled their genitals.

In one case, a former student said he was ordered to stand with a cigarette in his mouth while a staff member used a bullwhip to snap the cigarette out of his mouth.

Another staff member at Brookside would sneak up on boys while they were watching TV, jump on them, sit on their heads and fart, one claim alleges.

The first provincially operated training school opened in 1925 in Bowmanville with the enrolment of 16 boys. More than a dozen would be established across the province in the ensuing five decades to eventually provide thousands of children, some as young as 8, with “moral, physical, academic and vocational education” training, according to the 1965 Training School Act.

Section 8 of the Act gave family court judges the power to commit children under the age of 16 to training schools even when no crime had been committed. These children were often deemed “unmanageable” or “incorrigible.” The province repealed this section in 1977.

The courts made little distinction when it came to transgressions. Children sent to training school for truancy or running away from home could find themselves in the company of drug dealers and gang members.

“These were not treatment centres, these were basically jails for kids,” said Simona Jellinek, a Toronto lawyer who practises in the area of sexual assault law and who has represented dozens of former training school students.

“The emotional abuse alleged was just as harmful. This included staff members telling children they were no good, no one wanted them, that if they didn’t do what the staff wanted, they would never see their families again,” said Toronto lawyer Loretta Merritt, who has represented dozens of former training school residents, mostly men. “All these kinds of comments, statements and treatment were designed to really break the kids down.”

The shame that can come from suffering abuse, particularly sexual, and the fear of not being believed are what make many victims of training school abuse reluctant to come forward, she said.

“Generally, the perpetrators were expert at getting the children to think the abuse was their fault,” said Merritt. “Maybe they didn’t fight back, maybe they accepted cigarettes or other bribes, maybe they were just afraid and said nothing. But somehow, they formed the belief that it was their fault or that there was something wrong with them.”

There is an added level of complexity, she says, when there was alleged sexual abuse of a boy by a man.

“There’s this whole element of ‘what does that mean with regard to my sexuality?’ ” she said. “Being a victim doesn’t really fit in with the male myth of our society. Men are not supposed to be victims.”

Lawyers who have handled such cases say when former training school students alleging sexual abuse come forward, they often don’t make “good” witnesses in the eyes of the law. Many have criminal records. Many have tried not to remember abuse they suffered.

When former students sue, it’s not usually just about the money, Merritt says, although that financial compensation can be helpful in funding treatment and therapy.

“It’s about being heard, getting acknowledgement, standing up for themselves, seeking some form of justice, healing, and closure,” Merritt said. “The sad thing is, many people have never come forward and they take this to their grave.”

The statements of claim filed in court allege criminal acts by training school staff, yet they are being dealt with in civil court. Lawyers say former students chose the civil route because criminal convictions for sexual abuse are rare. As well, given the time periods covered by the claims—some go back 50 years—many of the alleged perpetrators are now dead.

There have been some criminal investigations into sexual abuse allegations at non-religious training schools, but with little result.

An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police in the mid-1990s surrounding allegations of abuse at White Oaks Training School in Hagersville, Ontario saw more than 300 former students interviewed. The probe resulted in charges against two men who used to work at the school, which closed in 1982.

One of the men, Dwight Wadel, a former housemaster, was acquitted of 15 counts of sex-related charges in relation to five boys who attended the school between 1966 and 1975. In his 2001 ruling, Superior Court Justice Walter Stayshyn characterized the five complainants as “unsavoury” and noted that they all had “significant criminal records and dysfunctional lifestyles.” Wadel died in 2009. The judge should have been fired. Even if the complainants had all those characteristics;  that doesn’t mean that they weren’t abused by Wadel.

The Star found only one instance in which a former staff member at a non-religious training school was convicted on abuse charges. He was Raymond Arthur Elder, a former house manager at White Oaks, was convicted in 2000 of gross indecency and breach of trust after admitting he had a 14-year-old boy perform oral sex on him in the late 1960s. He was acquitted on nine other sex-related charges in relation to four other students due to a lack of evidence.

During his trial, it was revealed that in 1969, Elder went to the  Les Horne, as an assistant superintendent at the school  and confided about some of his behaviour to Horne. But Horne didn’t report Elder to the province or police.

“The real tragedy of this case is that nothing was done for the boy. It was obvious he was a victim and society’s answer was to ship Elder off somewhere else,” said Superior Court Justice Nick Borkovich during his ruling, according to a report in the Hamilton Spectator. The Catholic Church did the same thing with priests who sexually abused small children in their parishes. They were sent to other parishes and sexually abused children in those parishes. 

Lawyers who have handled such cases say when former training school students alleging sexual abuse come forward, they often don’t make “good” witnesses in the eyes of the law. Many have criminal records. Many have tried not to remember abuse they suffered.

When former students sue, it’s not usually just about the money, Merritt says, although that financial compensation can be helpful in funding treatment and therapy.

“It’s about being heard, getting acknowledgement, standing up for themselves, seeking some form of justice, healing, and closure,” Merritt said. “The sad thing is, many people have never come forward and they take this to their grave.”

The statements of claim filed in court allege criminal acts by training school staff, yet they are being dealt with in civil court. Lawyers say former students chose the civil route because criminal convictions for sexual abuse are rare. As well, given the time periods covered by the claims where some of the abuses go back 50 years.  Also many of the alleged perpetrators are now dead.

There have been some criminal investigations into sexual abuse allegations at non-religious training schools, but with little result.

An investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police in the mid-1990s told of allegations of abuse at White Oaks Training School in Hagersville. More than 300 former students were interviewed. The probe resulted in charges against two men who used to work at the school, which closed in 1982.

Today, the former site of Pine Ridge, which opened in 1925 as the Bowmanville Boys’ Training School is closed permanently.

As an aside, I was offered a job at that particular young offenders facility by the Superintendent back in the early 1960s.  He was interested in a disciplinary system I had designed earlier. I turned down his offer.

I had previously been the senior supervisor of an Indian Residential school in Kenora, Ontario where I had devised a disciplinary system that was used to deal with the many unruly boys in the school. It worked and it was later used successfully in a training school that was north of Toronto. No physical punishment was included in the system of discipline I designed. It was based on the withdrawal and regaining of privileges.

Buildings that housed hundreds of children for half a century are now boarded up, overgrown with weeds and covered in graffiti. No trespassing signs and security cameras warn passersby to keep away.

Despite the current dilapidated condition of the Bowmansville site, the solitary confinement cell, in which former resident Steven Greenwood spent many tortured hours when he was 15, remains. Standing outside the four-by-eight-foot concrete room, Greenwood recounted a time when he was thrown into “the hole” for 14 days while suffering from poison ivy he contracted after escaping from the school.

He said, “I had blisters on my fingers, my face, everything. They let me have one Epsom salt bath in two weeks. I was in here in the middle of summer. Can you imagine the heat in these places?” said Greenwood, who was sent to Pine Ridge in 1976 after he became a Crown ward.

A self-described drug dealer at 12 who was putting needles in his arms by 13, Greenwood came from an abusive home and resorted to stealing to support himself and his sister, he says.

After just three months at Pine Ridge, Greenwood was sent to another training school, Sprucedale, in Hagersville. His transfer was prompted, he said, after he and a group of other residents, sick of hearing about a female staff member abusing students in their beds at night, decided to put a stop to it. They confronted the female staffer, who radioed for help.

“The next thing we know a bunch of guys with baseball bats showed up. We fought back. A couple of guys pulled knives. They beat the shit out of us,” Greenwood recalled. He said he spent 11 straight days in the “hole” after that.

Greenwood’s statement of claim alleges that while at the two schools he was subjected to a range of abuse, including being sodomized by two male staffers, being forced to perform oral sex on two male staffers, and having a sexual relationship with a female staff member. He alleges staff used to tell him that he “had no future” and that he was “destined to spend many years in jail.”

“There was no self-worth taught here. If you wanted to survive in here, you better learn to fight,” said Greenwood, now 56. “Every day you looked forward to bed. Once you got your eyes closed, you prayed they stayed closed all night, that nobody bugged you. That was our way of life.”

During another escape, Greenwood says he overdosed on PCP, an anesthetic known on the street as “horse tranquilizer” or “angel dust,” and ended up at Toronto East General Hospital

Greenwood says two male staffers from Sprucedale came to get him at the hospital in a pickup truck. On the way back to the school, he believes he was raped, but can’t remember details or the identities of the men because he was still recovering from his overdose. When his drug-induced haze cleared four days later, he said, “certain parts of my body were hurt and bleeding that shouldn’t have.”

Greenwood said he wonders what qualifications these men, and other staff, had to deal with kids like him.

In February. 1973, the Globe and Mail reported that 86 per cent of the 62 supervisors at Pine Ridge had no professional training, nor were they enrolled in any upgrading courses. At Sprucedale, where Greenwood was sent later, only 30 per cent of supervisors had degrees or certificates. The numbers for the remaining four training schools profiled by the Globe weren’t much better.

“I’m speaking up now because I never had a voice when I was a kid, and nobody wanted to listen,” said Greenwood, a retired electrician, who has suffered years of tortured memories, depression and battles with addictions to hard drugs and alcohol. In 2014, he found Christianity and now wears a silver cross around his neck. Last month, he completed a three-month rehab program.

The idea was that young people went into these schools in order to learn better behaviour and improve themselves was a fallacy.  Instead, the adults in these schools broke the trust of these kids by abusing them. As a result, many of these former young offenders went straight from training school and right into adult jail and the penitentiaries in Ontario.

Following the closure of the last training school in 1984, remaining students transitioned into alternative forms of community care, such as group homes or foster homes. Some former students stayed in touch while some others drifted apart. A lot had run-ins with the law. Many are dead. Most suffered in silence.

Of the eleven former training school students who spoke to the Star, only four agreed to their name being used; recounting their experiences publicly was simply too painful, they said.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that a large number of former students began to come forward with allegations of abuse. This was prompted, in part, by media reports surrounding settlements and benefits paid out to other victims of abuse at two Ontario training schools operated by a Roman Catholic lay order. Students of other training schools began to wonder if they, too, had cases and started reaching out to lawyers.

They lived in a moral cesspool for so many years, their minds and bodies couldn’t take it anymore. They needed somebody else to know and to understand what they went through. Stephen Burley, told his wife after 23 years of marriage about what happened to him. With her support, he reached out to a lawyer.

Hopefully, my UN Bill of Rights for young offenders will put an end to the abuses brought down on these kids who are sent to young offender facilities.  Well, we all have a right to hope.