In September, a razor-wire topped gate at Bath Institution will slide open and inmate Bill MacNeill will walk out, a free man. Not willingly. MacNeill is scheduled for automatic, early release after serving two thirds of his prison sentence. He doesn’t want it. “I was sentenced to two years and I want to do the two years,” the 45-year-old life-long criminal told me in an interview at the medium-security prison just west of Kingston. (MacNeill explains his strange request, in a video after the jump).
MacNeill has begged officials to keep him locked up until his sentence expires next June. Some Corrections authorities “think I’m crazy,” he confesses.
He doesn’t seem crazy.
Dressed in blue jeans and a T shirt that hangs over a bony frame and a small belly, MacNeill is calm and forthright.
Tattoos of skulls and bug-eyed beasts decorate slender arms.
He has a ruddy complexion and long greying red hair is tucked beneath a ball cap.
“I’m a thief but I’m honest,” he says with a grin that becomes a half laugh. “It’s contradictory; I got no reason to lie.”
“When I’m guilty of something, I admit to it.”
His record bears out his claim.
When he’s been caught – and there have been lots of occasions in 19 years – MacNeill has usually pleaded guilty.
Most of his 60 convictions are for property crimes, primarily break ins.
In Toronto last year he was sentenced to two years in prison for a break-in, theft under $5,000, possession of break-in instruments for coin-operated machines and assault with threats of violence.
He pushed a person out of the way as he was fleeing, he says.
A prison report notes that his latest crimes, including the assault, “were not assessed as severe.” There were no weapons and the victim did not suffer serious harm.
MacNeill’s non-violent past is part of his problem.
He doesn’t qualify for detention until the end of his sentence. It’s a tough measure reserved for sex offenders and other violent criminals who are considered likely to cause “serious harm” in future.
A prison warden can grant temporary accommodation to a freed inmate, but it’s rarely used and only in exceptional cases. Corrections grants an average of six requests annually.
MacNeill wrote to the politician in charge of Canada’s prisons, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews. An aide to the minister replied, writing that it was “inappropriate” to comment because MacNeill had pursued the inmate grievance process (read letter).
The response chafed.
MacNeill notes that the Conservative government has boasted of plans to abolish statutory release as part of its law-and-order agenda.
“Why aren’t they backing me up on that?” he wonders. “They want to make themselves look good to the public and that’s about it.”
MacNeill has a plan.
“If I am released [early] … I’ll commit a crime just to get into court and give my side of the story,” he says, without bluster or bravado.
This is simply what he has to do, he figures.
“Doing time don’t matter to me but when you’ve got more conditions to be out on the street than you do being in maximum-security, then why bother trying,” he says.
MacNeill maintains that early release, under strict conditions that have been proposed, doom him to failure.
“The conditions they’re givin’ me right now are conditions nobody can live by,” he says. “They’re setting me up for a fall.”
MacNeill says he’ll have to wear an ankle bracelet with satellite tracking. He’ll be subject to intense team supervision from a group of parole officers and he’ll have to live in a prescribed area with a curfew.
Corrections Canada won’t talk about his case, citing privacy law.
MacNeill has no savings in his prison bank account and no job prospects or community connections in the cities where he’s likely to be sent.
He’ll end up jobless, collecting meagre welfare payments, and perhaps homeless, he believes.
“I always get screwed around by welfare, so I just say the hell with it,” he says. “It’s quicker and easier to just go out and make a few bucks [stealing] and I spend most of my time in jail anyways.”
If he’s held until his sentence expires, MacNeill would be released without any conditions. He’d be free to live wherever he chooses, without requirements to check in with a parole officer.
“I can re-locate on my own and get a fresh start without having the cops up my ass when I get there,” he says.
He claims he’ll be able to save some money, enough to bankroll a start at straight life.
“If they let me [stay] until my expiry date, I’d have enough to pay for the bus ticket to go where I want to go, pay for a month’s rent and support myself for at least two weeks and by that time, I would be working no problem because I know a lot of people there,” he says.
MacNeill hopes to get to the East coast, where he says he knows he can get honest work doing renovations.
His plan seems optimistic, given his past.
He started stealing at a young age.
“I grew up on the street so you gotta make money however you can and that was the easiest way,” he says.
His biological parents are dead.
“Nothing to say,” MacNeill says curtly. “There was never anything there.
“They never did nothing for me and I didn’t care about them.”
Someone cared for him.
“There’s a lady that took me in off the street when I was a kid that I’ve called mom ever since,” he says. “It’s a place I used to go whenever I’d get out of jail but for the past 10 years or so, maybe more, she’s been with somebody that I don’t get along with so I just stay away from there.”
While MacNeill was behind bars in 1997, his wife was murdered in Toronto. He was released about a year after the killing, full of anger.
“I was just screwed, didn’t give a shit about nothing,” he says.
He quickly began committing crimes, hoping to get caught.
“Figured I was better off in jail before I ended up hurting somebody,” he says.
In prison, MacNeill refuses counselling programs, dismissing them as a waste of time. He says he isn’t addicted to drugs.
He insists that he doesn’t want release without conditions so that he can more easily return to stealing.
“I can do that on parole with the bracelet,” he says. “It’s not going to stop you; if you want to do it, you’re going to do it, no matter what.”
Practical, convict wisdom predicts what will prevent a criminal from committing crimes.
“You,” MacNeill says. “It’s the only way.
“Nobody’s going to stop you unless you want to do it.”
MacNeill will be released Sept. 30.
(This story also appears in The Kingston Whig-Standard)
Here’s the letter sent to MacNeill, on behalf of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, after MacNeill wrote to the minister, asking to be kept in prison until the end of his sentence:
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