Province’s prison peer support program garnering national attention

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This article was published 16/10/2018 (2016 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A one-of-a-kind peer support program for federal prisoners in Manitoba is attracting attention as part of a national study on prison conditions.

The Peer Offender Prevention Service (POPS) has been running at Stony Mountain Institution since 2010, and currently involves seven inmates serving life sentences who are on call 24/7 to help other inmates in crisis. They’ve responded to 23,000 incidents within the prison over the past eight years, and they were recently spotlighted during a Senate visit to the penitentiary.

Sen. Wanda Thomas Bernard, chairwoman of the standing Senate committee on human rights, is studying prison conditions in Canada and expects to release the committee’s final report next year. She said the POPS program should be evaluated to see if it can be expanded to other prisons across Canada.

The committee noticed “structural issues” with the program that could be improved, she said, but visitors were impressed with the peer support program, which doesn’t exist elsewhere.

“I’d love to see a review of POPS about looking to, you know, how do you standardize something similar across the country, because there are some very serious mental health issues that people are experiencing while in prison. And we’ve heard from people across the country that there are not enough mental health supports, not enough mental health services available 24/7,” she said in an interview with the Free Press.

POPS was the brainchild of a correctional officer who formalized a peer support network within the institution, allowing trusted, long-term inmates to sign up as mentors and be paid a minimal wage as they would earn for any other job within the prison, said J.L. Meyer, assistant warden of management services at Stony Mountain.

“The way it works is if an inmate is having some difficulties, he can ask for a peer (from POPS) to come and see him, and that peer will go down and just talk to him. Anything from whether an inmate is feeling suicidal or they’re in some kind of crisis, some kind of an issue that they don’t want to talk to a staff member about, they can request to see a peer and we’ll facilitate that,” he said.

POPS runs in addition to mental health services offered inside the institution, but the inmates working in POPS can be called upon any time, including to talk to an inmate who is in segregation, and they can draw on their own life experiences.

“I can go and talk to an inmate and listen to them and try and understand what the situation is like, but I’ve never been there, so how do I really understand it, right? So I think the lifers that have actually lived it and been through those issues, they understand it more than anybody,” Meyer said.

Meyer said the institution doesn’t track whether POPS has led to a decrease in prison suicides or security incidents, but, “The inmates utilize the program, so it must be helpful to them.”

The Senate committee wrapped up its cross-country tour in Winnipeg earlier this month with the visit to Stony Mountain and a public hearing that delved into concerns about solitary confinement, “overwhelming” over-representation of Indigenous and other visible minority inmates, restorative justice and a lack of post-sentencing support for offenders who are being released back into the community.

POPS was one bright spot amid the prisoners’ concerns senators heard during their time in Manitoba, Bernard said.

“For all of those positives, we still saw and heard despair – a sense of hopelessness – from not having enough opportunities for education and for training in trades, just not enough opportunities for those,” she said.

 

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay