Project Turnaround Ontario's Homegrown Cardboard Jungle

By Alll

More than a few pieces about Project Turnaround made it to print while the place was turning out graduates (and getting broken out of). People couldn't agree about whether to call the place a strict discipline facility or boot camp. After Project Turnaround closed its doors for good back in '04 (soon after a change in provincial government) there wasn't much left for anyone to say.
This book won't change your opinion (if you have one) about correctional boot camps or Project Turnaround itself. What it will do is give you a look from an (as of yet) un-explored vantage point.
*This book was previously published under the title "Tales From The Cardboard Jungle" which is (a lot) less discoverable (than the current title) to someone looking up Project Turnaround itself using a search engine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alll
• Release date: Nov 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463357699

Alll

This is a pen name's biography, details will be lacking.ALLL stands for A Life Less Lived.I grew up in Toronto, Canada. I was a teenager through the mid and late 90s.These days I'm a fan of lesser-known things, places and events.I like writing non-fiction about my interests based on the lived experience of (at least) one participant.

Book preview

PROJECT TURNAROUND: ONTARIO'S HOMEGROWN CARDBOARD JUNGLE

By ALLL

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2019 ALLL

Cover Background (the jungle bits) by chuttersnap (@chuttersnap)

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forward/Intro/Prologue/All The Stuff We Need To Get Out Of The Way First

Part I Intro: Cardboard Jungle Blueprint

Chapter 1: He Said, She Said

Chapter 2: Papers Please

Chapter 3: The Cast

Chapter 4: Read This First

Chapter 5: Brass Tacks & FAQs

Part II Intro: Living In The Cardboard Jungle

Chapter 6: Camp Run Amok (Pecking Order, Customs and One Offs)

Chapter 7: A Personal Project Turnaround Experience (Rough Timeline, Weird Shit and More One Offs)

Chapter 8: Story-Time

All About ALLL

PROJECT TURNAROUND Ontario's Homegrown Cardboard Jungle

FORWARD/INTRO/PROLOGUE/ALL THE STUFF WE NEED TO GET OUT OF THE WAY FIRST:

WHY (like this):

Why wait all this time to grab the low hanging fruit? Why bother?

Project Turnaround is a part of Ontario’s history. All (most) people get to look at when they want to know more are reports full of charts and stats drawn up by consultants and academics, some television coverage, and tons of articles dripping with rhetoric.

Other people are way more qualified to write this book. They had their chance... my turn.

I'm someone telling parts of a place's story by using (mostly) my own experiences at that place. What I'm not is a grown man (staring down the big four 0) looking to celebrate/monetize/glorify past life choices. These pages aren't my life's memoirs or a retelling of old exploits (still too young to be writing either). This is why you won't find my name anywhere here. If it makes you uneasy that I'm not very forthcoming about myself, read the book then ask yourself if you'd want your name on it.

INTENT:

When I decided this book was going to happen for real, the plan was to make copies of (my copy of) the cadet handbook and add some of my own experiences at Project Turnaround to it. I wanted to leave these tourist pamphlets inside Project Turnaround’s (now) abandoned site for the urban explorers to find.

RESULT:

Thing is, I had a lot more to say than what'd fit inside a tourist pamphlet. This book adds material to the stats, charts and rhetoric from someone who slept in the dorms, ran around the track, got clunked with a parade boot and used steam from the showers to sneak a smoke in. None of the people who wrote about Project Turnaround ever woke up in one of the dorms wishing they were somewhere else.

WHAT'S ALL THIS TALK ABOUT OTHER PLACES?

Part of telling a story is to establish context. In this book I (sometimes) give context to whatever part of Project Turnaround I'm covering by talking about how it was handled at TYAC (Toronto Youth Assessment Center) and/or in Open Custody.

Keep in mind that everything I say (when I'm not quoting from somewhere) about Project Turnaround, TYAC and Open Custody is based on my experiences there. Thing is I spent just a little more than a month at TYAC, three and a half months at Project Turnaround, and five and one half months at Art Eggleton House (Open Custody). I've already said that there are people more qualified to write this book.

INMATE/CONVICT/YOUNG OFFENDER/WHATEVER

We got called inmates in the papers all the time. People go on about the differences between convicts and inmates when they talk about doing time. A bunch of young offenders don’t qualify for either label. The proper term for us was Young Offender. In this book I call us people when I don’t have to differentiate between us and staff or visitors. I use us or Young Offender when I have to make this distinction.

PRISON/JAIL/YOUTH CENTRE/ FACILITY/INSTITUTION/WHATEVER

The places where we spent any secure young offender time got called all of the above. None of them were jails or prisons, but we called anywhere we did secure time a jail. That's why I've thrown jail into the mix when I talk about Project Turnaround.

VIOLENCE (what to expect in this book, and how Project Turnaround compared to TYAC and Open Custody)

This is a book about a jail, not a book of war stories. There are a lot of stories in this book, and some of them involve (some) violence, after all the jail this book is about was full of phase II Young Offenders. Thing is, this jail had less (serious) violence than most open custody houses, and any of the ranges at TYAC. There were reasons for this.

Violence at an institution depends (at least) as much on the people doing time there as it does the conditions at the institution. Both matter.

A lot of people at Project Turnaround were already eighteen or would be by the time they got out. One person already had adult time to do, he was supposed to go and serve his sentence then come back to Project Turnaround for the rest of his phase II time. Everyone wanted to get out early, some really wanted to change. Whatever the case was for you, getting caught up in something wasn't your goal (there were exceptions).

The people doing time at Project Turnaround weren't Killers, Arsonists, Sex Offenders or diagnosed with a mental condition. A lot of the people with years to do (less to lose), and some of the automatic targets weren't at Project Turnaround. At the same time, we all had six+ month sentences, with at least four of those months being secure custody. This meant first timers (like yours truly) were rare.

Project Turnaround had more staff per Young Offender than anywhere else I went. There were more people at Project Turnaround that didn't think twice about talking with staff than anywhere else that I went. This meant that almost the only time anyone got away with doing anything (even a little serious) to someone was when the victim didn't talk about it afterward and no one (who wasn't involved) saw it. Landing a couple of shots then getting away quick was more than one persons go to at Project Turnaround, they knew that if their victim tried to follow them right away it came off like snitching. At the same time it was a bad look for their victim if they didn't do something about it soon.

When staff saw (or heard about) people fighting, or saw someone marked up, something was going to happen. Most of the time consequences weren't serious because the fighting wasn't serious. Having a real fight at Project Turnaround without the staff noticing was very rare, people got caught anytime something kicked off in the showers, one of the classrooms, behind the vocational building or in the alley behind A dorm. Getting caught at Project Turnaround meant anything from time in the quiet room to new charges (rare). A lot of the time not getting fresh charges came after a talk with Brad. Project Turnaround was no gladiator school.

Project Turnaround was very different than TYAC with its lack of weight classes and frequent handicap matches. We could get razors and spare toothbrushes (that got sharpened, these were the go to), even the small pencils from the canteen got used. I never saw anything like a proper knife there. Staff would (sometimes) ask what happened if they saw someone marked up, and when the person told them he fell (or whatever) it got left at that. If you were seen fighting at TYAC, you could get sent to the seg cells or back to the intake range (especially if you were on the dorms), or they'd just make you stay in your cell for at least a day. Everyone seen fighting was asked if they wanted to press charges, I never heard of or saw anyone saying they did. Sometimes if someone got hurt bad enough (or died) there'd be an investigation and somebody might catch some serious charges from that.

Since there were more than a couple organizations/non-profit groups running open custody houses in Ontario at the time, conditions at these places varied widely. Things like: were you allowed to smoke or not, what would they let you watch on TV or what and how many TR's were available.

If you didn't like how the house you were at handled the above (and were willing to accept some time at TYAC), getting 24.29'nd could be your ticket to a more suitable house. A lot of open custody sentences were on the shorter end of the spectrum, this plus how easy section 24.29 made sending someone doing open time to secure (always TYAC) meant an open custody house could have a consistently high turnover rate among its young offender population. Filled with fewer people doing mostly shorter sentences, each individual's coming and going had more of an impact on a house than they would have at Project Turnaround or TYAC.

It's impossible to make an overall statement about how violent open custody was. Anything about how one house is rougher than another would only be true for a short window of time. At Art Eggleton House we played violence like at TYAC, but it was (usually) less intense than at TYAC (in my experience). At Art Eggleton House the staff (mostly) didn't play violence like they were at TYAC. They even transferred someone (who didn't want to go anywhere) because they saw marks on him and made him lift up his shirt where they found more marks. I remember someone getting away with keeping the Nike hoodie we all got for Christmas pulled low over his face whenever he had to be around staff, he did this to hide swelling/bruising. I know the staff couldn't have missed this.

WHY I WAS THERE

I won't be saying much about my convictions since I'm pretty sure Ontario still has Son of Sam laws on the books. I'll repeat what I wrote elsewhere (in this book) about being convicted on three counts of the same charge, and getting four months secure custody, six months open custody and eighteen months probation for each charge, with all three dispositions to run concurrently (not consecutively).

WHY THIS SOUNDS A LOT LIKE TALES FROM THE CARDBOARD JUNGLE

Because this book is Tales From The Cardboard Jungle with a new title to make it more discoverable to people searching for information about it's topic (Project Turnaround).

Some of the content was altered to better explain my point of view or reasoning and to remove a lot of the ambiguity about some of the things I've said. In other words I took the opportunity to give this work another edit during its rebranding.

PART 1:Cardboard jungle blueprint

The first five chapters are me going on about a whole grab bag of things relevant to Project Turnaround and the people in it vs me telling stories about what happened at/to Project Turnaround and the people in it based on my own Project Turnaround Experience.

CHAPTER 1-He Said, She Said

Here we have material from more than a dozen writers covering everything from opening to closing and a celebrity visit somewhere in the middle. I've credited the writer when I could, the publication and date will have to do for when I couldn't. Commenting on everything (that I know about) that was ever written about Project Turnaround would fill a whole book.

This chapter could be a time line of Project Turnaround’s existence. This isn’t what I was trying for. I wanted to show that a lot of people were curious about Project Turnaround. Opinions about the place went from American style boot camp to more like a summer camp with a fence. When you got released/transferred from Project Turnaround, people asked you (ridiculous) questions like did they teach you guys how to use guns? and How much was Project Turnaround like full metal jacket?

I want to show you the most an average person knew about Project Turnaround back then. A lot of Project Turnaround's media coverage came from the local papers, if you didn’t live in the area around Project Turnaround, you didn’t get these papers.

A lot of things touched on in this chapter get covered later on. If something’s in this chapter, it’s because someone printed something about it somewhere. This chapter is about what got printed, the other chapters are more about what happened.

Next stop: a bunch of pages filled with things people wrote about Project Turnaround (and related topics). You should read this before the rest of the book, you could read it after the rest of the book; definitely read it. I promise the rest of the book is a lot less dry and full of the stuff you paid to read about... like the differences between your Initiation and Intake, and who Shelly was.

PRE-OPENING

The idea that Ontario’s young offenders needed to be sent to boot-camps was part of the 1995 Ontario Progressive Conservative election campaign. After Mike Harris won, the clock was ticking on a bunch of campaign promises. Having a private company set up a jail that could be called a strict discipline facility (or boot camp depending on who you were talking in front of) was like hitting three birds with one stone. It made you look tough on crime while getting businesses to set up shop in the province and saved taxpayer dollars.

The John Howard Society’s fact sheet #8, August 1996:

Had plenty to say about the Ontario provincial government’s plan to set up A highly structured atmosphere of rigorous physical discipline-(Nov. 20, 1995 press release) for young offenders. This fact sheet says that Project Turnaround would be modeled after the Sgt. H. Johnson youth leadership academy in New York State which had a five month aftercare program set up in New York City, where all of the Young Offenders lived. The author pointed out that In Ontario in 1994-95, 247 young persons were sentenced to custody for longer than six months. A lot of these wouldn’t be eligible for Project Turnaround. Ontario would’ve had to scrape together young offenders (this is what happened) from across a province more than twice the size of New York State to fill Project Turnaround. In the spring of '98 there weren't many young offenders from Toronto at Project Turnaround.

Packet & Times, 10/6/97-Colin McKim

When Encourage Youth had an open house for area residents at the Moonstone elementary school, they came off like the Swiss army knife of the correctional system. The locals got to hear about the aftercare program Inmates at the facility must take part in an aftercare program for up to one year, and this is what officials say makes all the difference in rehabilitating young offenders. and the boot camp The facility uses a military framework to instill respect and accountability, said Sally Walker of Encourage Youth corporation. If an inmate repeatedly defies an order he is given, his crew (a group of 8 inmates) will be forced to do the task. This type of group motivation or peer pressure quickly gets project participants obeying staff and respecting their peers..

This peer pressure was only used 100% of the time in drill class. Some staff did this outside of drill class, but only if you gave them a balls out fuck you I’m not doing that. If you quietly didn’t participate they mostly didn’t bother.

Sally Walker ran Cyprus Creek (a maximum security facility for teens near Tampa in Florida) before she ran Project Turnaround. Someone who’s run a jail for even a little while knows what they’re encouraging when they punish people as a group for an individual’s transgressions. It’s a wonderful way to keep staff use of force numbers down. Anyone at the open house listening to this was either a) not thinking too hard, b) knew what this meant and thought it was wonderfully efficient, or c) outnumbered by the people in groups a&b.

Packet & Times, 1/8/97

This go around it’s almost all talking up the tough parts of Project Turnaround. The MPP Al Mclean is the only one talking about things at Project Turnaround that don’t have anything to do with making life rough for the people doing time there He hopes the facility can be turned back into a working farm, as it was under the previous mandate, Hillsdale at one time supplied food to the Barrie jail. ‘It had the lowest operating cost in Ontario, it was a good operation and I hope young people here can do that same kind of work.’.

Brad puts emphasis on results and getting tough at the beginning. ‘They’ll develop respect for themselves, respect for other people’ said Lt. Col Brad Delong, the facility’s deputy director. By the time they leave, four to six months from now, they’ll learn to like discipline and structure, Delong predicted. Most of this article is telling people who want a boot-camp what they want to hear, even when it’s not an accurate representation of reality. A sergeant shouted, ‘move, move move!’ The nervous cadets hustled to a yellow line and stood at attention. ‘Chins up! Look proud!’ the sergeant shouted, who barked that their thumbs must be on their inseams and heels together when they stand at attention. ‘Do I make myself clear!’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Sir yes Sir!’ Strict discipline means that from the time they get up at 6am to lights out at 10pm, they can expect to hear staff barking orders at them. They can forget about building their bodies with fancy exercise equipment like at some youth facilities-only jogs under the prison fence, calisthenics in the spartan gym, and some outdoor sports..

It was like the movie Pumping Iron some days in the weight room (we had a lot of free weight plates and bars, a squat rack and at least a couple of benches) at the back of the gym less than a year after August 1st ‘97. There was a polaroid