Recommend this book:

Deprived of a Fighting Chance

An Inside Look at Rehabilitation in a Canadian Detention Centre
Ghi Dean

2015 Silver Medal
438 Pages
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Non-Fiction - Occupational

2015 Silver Medal
Ghi Dean reveals the truth about working rehabilitation in a maximum security detention centre in the early nineties. With a broom closet for an office, she puts up with harassment from correctional officers and jumbles of red tape from a constantly changing set of managers while trying to deliver correspondence courses and tutoring support to adult inmates, and learning the special modus operandi of working in a maximum security facility as she goes along. Read about the ups and downs as she develops the education program with the help of volunteers, how rehab programs affect the life in the jail and how some corrections staff learned the value of rehab programs.

Although one would think that DFC might be a depressing book, it is not.  Many good things happened as Ghi carried on her program, and in fact she describes it as the best job she ever had.
She never felt so useful as when she was able to help inmates endure confinement and change their lives.  

'Deprived of a Fighting Chance' has many inmate stories from the notes Dean made as she answered requests froom her students and encouraged them to pick up textbook learning again.
In 2017 "Deprived of a Fighting Chance" was read by high level government officials dealing with Corrections.  They informed Dean that although the book is 20 years old, everything described in the book is still going on in 2018 - except the outstanding education program Dean initiated.