Means of Escape

A former Catholic priest teaches Matsqui inmates a way out of the lives that led them to prison

By Todd Parker

OVERHEAD, HARSH FLORESCENT lights shine down on a horseshoe of standard-issue, collapsible tables. High, thin windows show slices of sky, though nothing that might distract a student’s attention for long. The cement-block walls are painted a bland beige. There’s a big flip chart at the front of the room. This might be a suburban high school, except for the guards outside the door.

At the tables sit a dozen fidgety men in green parkas, faded jeans, once-white T-shirts discoloured and stretched from use. They nurse black coffee and finger cigarettes rolled from loose tobacco. They range in age from early twenties to mid-fifties; some are long-haired, unshaven and tattooed, others as clean-cut and rosy-cheeked as high-school gym teachers. There are drug abusers here, dealers, at least one killer. They’re inmates at Matsqui medium-security prison, here for their weekly creative writing class.

Ed Griffin teaches the class every Friday morning. Almost 71 years old, white in the little close-cropped hair that remains on his head, a bit shaky in the neck and fingers, he looks like the grandfather you wish you saw more of. He’s driven here from his modest home in Surrey. When he arrives at the facility, he’s greeted by guards with shotguns. He passes chain-link fences topped with razor wire and is scanned for metal objects and drugs. At security checkpoints he waits for heavily reinforced doors to be opened. The class is held in an activities center at the heart of the compound; beyond is the yard and then the prison proper—a four-storey concrete bunker with cells for more than 300 inmates. The place induces suppressed panic and claustrophobia in many people, but Griffin looks forward to his Fridays here.

He opens by calling for a volunteer to read something written since last week’s class. Chris, who celebrated his thirtieth birthday after arriving at Matsqui in 2005, has been a regular in the class for more than a year. His short black hair is spiked with gel. Before his incarceration he was a business manager, a husband, and a father. Thanks to methamphetamine, he became an addict, a dealer, and a thief. In prison he’s become a high-school graduate, an avid reader, a passionate writer. He reads from the first chapter of his manuscript, “Broken Fences”, a fictionalized rendition of his battle with crystal meth. He’s not worried that he’ll be ridiculed here—mutual respect is rule one.

In the opening scene of the story, the protagonist is outside his own home, which has been left a smoldering ruin: “A cat, owl-eyed and slightly singed, comes wandering out from the safety of a juniper. That’s my cat, Nash recalls, and feels a sliver of gratitude. But he is unable to remember the cat’s name.” Later, asked why he attends the class, Chris replies, “Writing takes me out of here. It’s something other than drugs that I can imagine waiting for me on the outside.”This is the effect Griffin hopes to have on his students, though it’s not why, in 1985, already in his late forties, he first taught in a prison.

His goal then was simply to spread the joy of writing, which he himself had recently discovered, and his hope was that he might provide tonic for a few worried souls. At Waupun, a pre-Civil War maximum security prison in Wisconsin, the dull lighting, high-ceilinged halls with yellowing paint, and foul odours made him question his decision. Witnessing the brusque cavity search of an inmate made the idea seem insane. In the first chapter of his own book-in-progress, “Dystopia,” Griffin expresses the doubts he felt: “Maybe I just wanted to feel good, to tell people, ‘Hey, aren’t I macho?’” But something an inmate said that first day gave him the idea that he could perhaps accomplish something of real significance. When Griffin asked the inmates why writing was important to them, a young man named Brian replied, “It’s something they can’t take away from us.”

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