CHILDREN IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. IN CANADA? YES. TODAY? YES.

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

This past summer I caught a performance of Modern Times Stage Company’s presentation of The Caged Bird Sings. A re-imagining and radical adaptation of Rumi’s Masnavi, it revealed a cage within a cage as the surreal piece unfolded for audiences in the courtyard at the Aga Khan Museum.

The press release explained that it was about two prisoners who, as they navigate their new-found reality and reconcile their past lives, are haunted by ghosts and demons of their own making. The piece explores Sufi mysticism, ideas of Fanafillah, the prisons – literal and metaphorical – that we are put in, that we put ourselves in, and that we create ourselves, and how and whether it’s possible to escape such prisons.

I never imagined that it would find an echo in the life of a man in Canada in the here and now.

In 1973, at the age of 13, Jack Whalen was sent to the Whitbourne training School for Boys in Newfoundland.

Invisible Prisons is his story, a collaboration between award-winning writer Lisa Moore and the man who, as a child, suffered abuse, deprivation and months-long solitary confinement.

The preface encapsulates the story, and it is so brutal, that I think, enough, I know all there is to know. I can’t enter any further into the experience of this frightened child.

But Moore draws me in and will not let me look away, even as she describes her own struggles with the details as she and Jack become friends, become family, over the course of writing the book.

“I pretend no objectivity towards my part in this story,” she writes. “I knew, counter to what Jack wanted and expected of me, that I was guilty of trying to write a happy ending. I was leaning heavily into the bravado and humour of Jack’s stories. But he called me on it. He said I was ignoring the horror.”

During the four years Jack was incarcerated there were more than 100 instances of attempted escapes. Twenty-four of those involved Jack. Each time he was caught and hauled back. Each time, thrown into a tiny cell in solitary confinement, the period of confinement growing with each attempt.

Jack sawed at his wrist with a plastic spoon that came with his breakfast bowl of cornflakes after being caught yet again. He wasn’t trying to kill himself as an escape, he was just so full of despair.

And this is the secret. A secret that nobody on the outside seemed to know. There’s prison, and inside that prison there’s another, invisible prison. Solitary confinement. That other prison is the breaking of the child. The suspension of growth, the atrophy of the brain and heart because the child has no experience to think about.

The biggest victims were the kids with nobody coming to visit them, Whalen tells Moore so many years later. They were the kids who learnt how to survive like an animal does in the wild, always alert to danger, always watching for signs of the next assault. And the reward for good behaviour was five cigarettes a day.

He remembers, in heartbreaking detail, how his mother Alice looked at the end of the call that set the next four years in motion.

Here her eyes flicked towards Jack, looking at him not with anger but as if she could see through him straight into the future. As if he wasn’t there, as if he had already grown up and the consequences of this call had already registered, and he was already the man he would be, for better or worse, and she perhaps was long gone. She was emptied out by this phone call.

Then, as now, there were kids who should never have been taken from their homes. “Youngsters causing rackets, full of backtalk, lifting a chocolate bar” – kids whose parents were never told that a free lawyer was available.

As there were kids who were in danger in their homes, but no one checked in on them, no one kept them safe.

The courts who sent the kids to such places, RCMP officers who rounded up the kids, put a gun to Jack’s head, handcuffed him and marched him back, the guards who abused the kids, did no one care?

Moore’s sister Lynn, a lawyer, tells her that there are people who work in child protection who do care. But there is no oversight, the system is chronically underfunded.

And that’s when it hits home. Lynn is not talking about a time long past. She is talking about now.

Teenagers are still being put in solitary confinement.

“There was also so much I didn’t know about the repercussions of childhood trauma,” Moore writes. “How a stolen childhood can creep into adulthood and irrevocably stain it, destroy it, if not for the presence of love.”

Though Jack Whalen never really left that prison, though he still wakes up at night, arms flailing, fighting those demons, and though Moore steers firmly away from a happy-happy ending at Whalen’s insistence, I take hope from the love that envelops him. His wife Glennis, son Nicholas and daughter Brittany, a lawyer, who continues the fight for her father and all those other children whose childhoods were snatched from them.