While other students in Lethbridge College’s Correctional Studies program saw the grim side of prisons in Ecuador, Jodi Archambeault returned from her tour of Australian facilities in 2008 with ideas for improvement here.
After a week in the Los Angeles area, including a tour of Alcatraz in San Francisco, Archambeault and her classmates set off for Sydney and Brisbane with instructor Earl Nilsson. While they found some similarities to correctional facilities in Alberta, in many respects they discovered Australia is more progressive.
“Rehabilitation is a huge factor there,” says Archambeault. “In the state of Queensland, inmates can take a nursing program and, once they’ve completed it, can tend to other prisoners. Others take trades training and might end up building public benches for state parks.
In women’s facilities, inmates can raise their children to age four, which they do as a group effort, along with cooking meals.
“It’s amazing how they work together to raise the children,” says Archambeault, originally from Pembroke, Ont., who graduated from the applied-degree program and is now an officer at the Lethbridge Correctional Centre.
And that was a maximum-security facility, where male officers wore shorts and women officers wore dresses, both commanding respect among the inmate population.
“I wish we could be more like them,” says Archambeault. “There are more opportunities for inmates to really learn there. In Alberta, they just want to interact with the rest of the inmates; in Australia, they’re learning how to paint, weld and run forklifts. The prison had a contract to sew sheets for a hotel chain, and the profits were used to augment the prison budget.
“They seem to be one step ahead of us all the time.”
