The Saint-Léonard halfway house, located in the Montreal district of Saint-Henri, welcomes a very specific clientele: the establishment being equipped to receive people with mobility problems, many of the residents who pass through it are elderly people who have been sentenced to life imprisonment.
The first thing you notice upon setting foot in the gray stone building are the walls covered in advertisements from an array of community resources. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, laminated, occupies a prominent space in the middle of these announcements.
Among them, we notice a pamphlet from the YMCA, which proposes to help people with a criminal record to find a job. Another organization, Toit d’abord, does the same for apartment finding, and a document created by the Office of the Correctional Investigator explains how to file a complaint about the treatment received behind bars.
It is a community organization, the Maison Cross Roads Corporation, which, thanks to agreements with the federal government, manages the living environment of the Saint-Léonard halfway house.
The typical day for the residents of the house is not easy: they must all be busy looking for a job, working, volunteering or consulting community resources. All of their movements are monitored to the minute, and all must notify staff of any schedule changes.
Each former inmate is also supervised by his parole officer, employed by Correctional Service Canada. It is he who determines whether his client should return to the penitentiary for non-compliance with his conditions, who meets the offender, questions his relatives and even goes so far as to pay him surprise visits.
In the case of life-sentenced prisoners, “the world wrongly thinks that after 25 years, it’s over, but that’s not true, there is a person like me who will watch them until their last breath”, explains Andréanne Samson, regional vice-president of Quebec for the Union of Security and Justice Employees, which notably represents parole officers. Mme Samson herself exercised this profession.
In the evening, the resident returns to the halfway house, where he is served supper and attends workshops given in a common area equipped with sofas, a television and a large table. A small cupboard is full of board games, including key And Fates. The game of life.
The room visited by The duty lockable by the occupant, although the staff holds a duplicate. It is small without being cramped, and its white walls are undecorated. A single bed, which takes up most of the space, is accompanied by some furniture and an air conditioner. The adjacent bathroom — all residents have their own — has a shower and strategically placed metal bars to prevent falls.
Merris Centomo is the General Manager of Maison Cross Roads Corporation. Asked about the possible dangers of her job, she replies: “The rest of us feel very safe here. I don’t fear for my life every morning when I come to work. I have over 30 years of experience and have never been threatened by a client. “The majority of people we work with are not Mom Boucher,” she adds, referring to the former Hells Angels, an emblematic figure of organized crime in Quebec. In fact, many residents fill their days by volunteering with local organizations.
The vagaries of time
Coming out of the penitentiary after decades of incarceration is to be thrown into a world that has continued to turn without us.
“I remember, I had a gentleman, the ATM card, he had not really known that, says Mme Samson. Smartphones, when you did 25 years inside the walls, mobile payment, [tu ne connais pas ça]. »
The job of a parole officer is to supervise, but also sometimes to take by the hand: “I was going to do the grocery shopping with them,” she says, remembering that some could wonder where the cashier was when arriving in front of the self-service checkouts.
But it is not only the mastery of technology that may be lacking. “These people, often, they are mortgaged by their incarceration. […] They committed their crime 55 years ago; they have necessarily changed, for better or for worse, but they often have post-traumatic syndromes, ”says Ms.me Centomo.
“Sometimes, just a walkabout, it’s difficult for someone who has been incarcerated for so long,” she says. One of the first things you have to work on is interpersonal relations, because the contact they have had for twenty or thirty years is with fellow prisoners or personnel in positions of authority. »
Learning to manage all the responsibilities of adult life, when we are already in our golden years and our family members are distant or deceased, is another challenge in itself, explains Marc Fortin. It manages another service of the Maison Cross Roads Corporation: so-called “satellite” apartments located in Saint-Henri and Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. These homes, equipped with common areas, somewhat like student residences, are for those who have completed their stay in the Saint-Léonard halfway house, but who fear being left to their own devices.
It is also preparing the inauguration of a social housing program that will serve as the next step towards the autonomy of its clients.
But changing from one environment to another is not easy for those who are about to take the plunge. The mere fact that future social housing does not have a dresser provided is enough to trigger a spiral of stress, and “Marc is dealing with eight people’s dresser anxiety right now,” notes M.me Centomo.
Others will never leave the satellite apartments, adds Mr. Fortin, because living alone can be dangerous, for example, if you are at risk of falling. The words of one of its elderly residents remain etched in his memory: “Can I die here? […] I’m not moving from here, I want to die here, I don’t have the energy to move anymore. »