Canada: camping holidays near the prison

Our son Émile has always been an anxious child. He started using drugs when he was 13. He dropped out before finishing secondary school. Over the years, his mental health worsened, and he took increasingly more drugs. We have always been there for him, we have paid off his debts and tried to support him, but in vain. His partner also struggled with drug addiction. They had twin girls together. We knew it would not go well, and eventually, they split up. We took the girls on full-time when they were a year old. Today, they are almost 13 years old and are still with us. They have been entrusted to us until they turn 18. Initially, their mother had visitation rights, but after two and a half years, she stopped coming to see them.

Émile was sent to prison in 2016. First, he spent nearly a year in a provincial prison, awaiting trial. At that point, he had not actually stopped taking drugs. Speaking to him on the phone was not very nice, so we stopped interacting with him. We cut all ties for three months. When we got back in touch, he was doing better, even though he was still taking drugs.

At first, we didn’t want the girls to visit because the only way to see their father was separated by glass. Émile was transferred to several different prisons. It was a challenging time for us. Each transfer meant extra costs. When he called us, it was always at our expense; it was extremely expensive.

Finally, following his trial, he was sent to a medium-security prison about two hours from where we live. Being sent to that prison cost us nearly three thousand dollars. We were the ones who paid for a whole list of things on his arrival. A radio, a fan; the costs soon added up. Our son was lucky because people without the means cannot afford to spend so much.

Almost a year after Émile’s incarceration, the Director of Youth Protection (Direction de la protection de la jeunesse, DPJ) authorised us to take the girls to the prison for a visit. When the time came, they had not seen one another for almost two years. It was very emotional. As we were leaving, one of the girls began to cry. A guard approached her and said, “It’s OK to cry; it’s hard, but you know, your dad will get through this.” She was comforted by what he said to her. That is when we realised that there are good and not-so-good guards. It is a shame that the not-so-good ones have such an impact, because we feel targeted. As relatives, we are treated like social pariahs, as if we were responsible for what our loved one in prison did.

Émile was transferred away from this prison. He continued taking drugs while inside and got caught dealing drugs. He was automatically placed in a maximum-security prison. It did not go well. So, he asked to be transferred, and ended up in a facility more than ten hours away from our house. We did not go often, only in the summer. For example, we were able to enjoy a private family visit with him. That was really good. Meeting up with him for three days was great: a father, his daughters and their grandparents.

Then Covid-19 hit in March 2020. Access to private family visit was suspended, but we decided to make the trip during the summer anyway. We were at a campsite not far from the prison. We could visit but could not touch, and we had to wear masks. The girls and their father cried a lot. He would have liked to hug them, but he could not. Contact was really minimal. We stayed eight days and could only see him twice for about two hours at most. The journey home was difficult because we knew we would have to wait a year before seeing each other again. We went back the following summer, in 2021. Restrictive measures were still in place, but we could see him every day and had more time with him. However, there was no room at the campsites near the prison, so we had to drive for over an hour every morning and afternoon. It was very tiring. The holiday was exhausting on every level. We did not go in 2022 because we knew he was being released that autumn. And we wanted to see other things with the girls.

We have always prioritised the girls’ well-being. Our son has made mistakes, and it is expected that he pays for them. But we never stopped him from seeing his daughters, quite the contrary. He always did right by them, even before he went to prison. When he was arguing with his new partner and the girls were there, he called us so we could pick them up so they would not have to witness it. He always protected them. He always maintained positive contact with the girls. As well as the prison visits, they saw him via video calls once or twice a month, and he phoned them at least three or four times a week.

When he was in prison, we sent him photocopies of games. He and the girls played together over the phone. He would move his counter or put down tokens, and we would do the same. Sometimes we played Battleship, too.

He regularly did schoolwork with the girls. He would test them on the vocabulary or spellings they had to learn, which we had given to him. The girls maintained a great bond with their father.

He is currently in a halfway house on parole, about a two-hour drive from us. Everything is going well; he is behaving as he should. We got the necessary clearances to visit him with the girls, and he can come and spend the weekend with us. We agreed on once a month: any more than that and it upsets the family balance. He must also realise that they have grown up and have their own lives. For example, we explained to him that they do not want their father to hold their hand when they walk in the street. They are pre-teens now! Our priority is protecting the girls, and naturally, we want our son to get through this. And this is all down to his daughters; they are his reason for living.