The Corrections Officer
Meet Matt
Matthew Lerpiniere has been with the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) for 17 years, both as a Correctional Officer and a Parole Officer. He currently works at Joyceville Institution. He began his career with CSC in 2003, starting at Kingston Penitentiary, where he worked for nearly a decade until its permanent closure in 2013. Prior to joining CSC, Matthew worked in corporate security in Toronto.
What was a typical day pre-COVID?
"You know, a normal day is -we have a routine within the jail that both the inmates and the staff follow. Um, because I'm in a minimum, it's a little more um, open in that the inmates have more freedom to do what they want when they want, to go see their parol officers. Mostly our job is interacting with inmates. We do do a regimented you know patrol every few hours to ensure the health and safety of all inmates if they're still within their rooms. Um, but a lot of what we do is like a dynamic security in a minimum. So it's our interactions, talking to inmates, being aware of what's going on.
So, for you know, on a daily basis that's really all that's taking place. It's, it's, you can almost equate it to like on a, say a campus, you know, a university campus and you have security you know it's just kind of being around, being aware of what's going on, interacting."
What changed after COVID began?
"“—there was no sudden change for that. Things still kinda carried on, those routines were still there, although there then were some policy changes and the amount of work that was happening did change. But it affected more the…the, like, what I’ll say the support staff, so parole officers, teachers, those staff that come into the jail to do stuff. Security often doesn’t get affected too too heavily by these things initially because it’s a 24 hour operation, we’re there through everything and we have to keep these processes going through everything, our, our walks, our patrols, and all these, you know, health and safety checks are mandated, uh, within, um, our legislation that governs us, so it, regardless of the situation, it keeps going.
So, outside of Covid, you know, colds and flus and things like that travel around pretty significantly anyways.
Um, as well as within the inmate population you do have, you know, serious things, you have HIV and Hepatitis quite common in, um, in offender populations as well.
What they are at our jail, I-I, what the levels, I have no idea no idea. But, again those things are out there so we always, like when I got trained you get trained on protocols, I’m always carrying medical gloves, we do have to interact with, you know, there are times where you do deal with, you know, bodily fluid, um, blood, things like this, so, yeah those practices are still there just from a standard of our own health and safety, and health and safety of the offenders."
How did you adapt to COVID in the workplace?
Technologies that will last
"I think the video, I, I think the video is definitely going to stick around ‘cause they were bringing it in, trying to introduce it prior to Covid. Covid I think has amped it up, we had 1 video machine that they could do video visits with, and like, as soon as Covid hit it was like boom, here’s another one that they rolled in right?
Um, so I think, I think you’re gonna see more of that. You know, I can envision that we get to a point where, you know, we have visiting rooms that are full of these visiting, you know, uh, videos. And that becomes a technology that is widely used. Um, the other thing is everything in the line of like, parole board hearings has all gone to video conference now right?
So we don’t even have, uh, parole board coming in anymore, whereas normally we’d have the parole board come in, in a conference Zoom and they’d hold a parole board there. It’s all being done through video conferencing now. A lot of the court-related stuff has been done through video conferencing now as well.
I think that’s something that if it’s been successful especially on certain areas—things like, in court, that go quickly anyways, like when they just go in for remand hearings which take like 5 minutes, that we’re seeing more and more of, uh, video being used.
As well as, and I think that’ll continue and be, um, a resource that you’ll see used more.
M: And the same with, with like distance court where if you’re, you’re in an institution in Kingston, but your crime is up in Barrie, you’ve technically got to go to court in Barrie, within the jurisdiction. We see sometimes, even prior to Covid, they’ll do again video court rather than the process of having to transport someone and hold someone in like Barrie say, as a, as a hypothetical. That we can just do a video, especially for things as I say remand. Trial’ll be a different thing, I think, you know, the reality is trials will still need to be in-person and with a full court system but, um…
Some of the smaller things, absolutely they could be done. And I think that would help, you know you can see that actually we don’t always talk about a backlog in our justice system, to reducing and getting rid of a lot of these little, uh, you know speeding tickets, stuff like that that we’re taking up court time and court officers, and court resources, to go to court to fight your speeding ticket that we’ll see more and more, even for us in the public. Um, use of that technology. And it, to me it makes a lot of sense."
How did you adapt to COVID in the workplace?
Tools and downtime
"So I think that was the big, I think really the big thing ‘cause as I say not a ton changed in the sense of our tools, like, it became more, the—we have like these officer safety kits, and again these officer safety kits we have on our posts that have, like, you know a Tyvek suit and masks, we always have those anyways, because we could potentially be going and dealing with, you know, a person who is, um, you know, bleeding or has, you know, something. And we know, we may know they can’t divulge medical information, we may realize they’ve got hepatitis, they’ve got AIDS, or there is that risk ‘cause of what we deal with. So we always have that available to us anyways on our post, that wasn’t new.
M:. You know, how to properly put, don and off medical gloves, surgical plastic gloves kind of thing. Um, you know, we always are carrying, you know, CPR masks and all that stuff. We always have access to N95s and all that. Um, so there was a lot of refreshing going on, we had like some online training we had to complete just to show we’d done a refresher on how to do it.
The big thing was, the less staff, um, and the more distancing amongst us, where quite often people—we have an area that, the quote un-quote “main control”, you know, kind of, everybody would gather in there, and, and staff, guards, officers would come up and you know hang out and people would do a coffee run and you know especially on a weekend we all would sit around and have coffee together. That kind of ended, you couldn’t obviously go to get coffee anymore.
That was the, talk about the little things that was my thing, when you’re getting up at 4:30 in the morning, like I couldn’t initially go through the drive-thru and get my coffee, so I’m like—it sounds so silly but it’s like I’ve got to have preparation to be able to have coffee at work now.
I was like well should I be doing that?
And a guy I know whose partner’s a nurse, she actually got kind of chirped about going, ‘cause I’m like for going for coffee and whatever. And I agreed what he said, his response online was, to someone who chirped him on Facebook that, that’s like for me when I’m going to work a 16 hour shift, leaving the jail for 10 minutes and going and grabbing a coffee or tea at Tim Hortons or Starbucks like, that’s my little bit of sanctity.
In a 16 hour shift.
And that’s what he said about, you know, nurses that are dealing with all this in the hospitals. And a 12 hour shift, to be able to go away, to go through a drive-thru, get a coffee, and kind of have that little sanctity where you can maybe put your radio on in your car and listen to a little bit of music or you know check your text. It really became important and that was actually quite key.
. The big thing is though is we wouldn’t intermingle, people would kind of get their post assignments.
M: And it was like all of a sudden we just, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t see people. The person that mained control would keep the door closed and like sanitize, like everything in their office, and then wouldn’t let anybody into that control post and…
it was a little—for me it was a little more like, that kind of sense like people didn’t want you around now, like you weren’t welcome at someone else’s post right? Um, but you kind of understood it and, you know, in that environment again in the minimum it’s definitely a thing anyways that you would go and kind of be on your post, there’s not a lot of staff in a minimum on a daily basis. Like you take away everybody else and just have the security staff, there’s not a lot of us. It’s not like in the, when I was at the Kingston Penn, and you’d have 50 or 60 officers on a shift. We can only have 5, and we can run with 5…"
Matt reflects on pandemic work
"So I think it’s, you know, someone put it, calling, you know, a frontline staff heroic and courageous and brave, it makes us feel good about it.
It doesn’t actually help them sometimes, it’s great and it’s nice, and the appreciation, but if it’s not followed through with, giving them the resources they need, giving them the PPE they need, giving them the, you know, the contracts to have mental health leave and all these things they need to work in that environment, then it’s just, you know, someone really crassly put, you’re calling them heroes so that if someone dies because they don’t have the proper resources you can feel good about saying “Well they were a hero.”
But to me there is that aspect. If you’re calling someone, you know, so heroic or brave but not actually giving them the resources they need to do the job, then you’re just kind of placating, you know, you’re placating a bit. You’re making yourself feel good about it, without actually doing what needs to be done in that aspect. And that’s how I feel like some of us feel at work, right, like “Oh it’s great, we’re getting all these nice things from the commissioner corrections, right, you people working frontline.” Great, but we’re short-staffed, we’re under-staffed, we don’t have resources, PPE is questionable, like that’s what we really need."
Pandemic workplace: Object for museum collection
"I mean probably lots of people say PPE right, ‘cause that’s like the most common, the different masks. Honestly for, for me, what I came up with to add to that question is, myself and pretty much every officer, we have these little like calendars we carry around in our pocket, and that’s where we like, we highlight our days off, when we’ve worked over-time, all this stuff. And I think to me that would be it, right, to see, ‘cause that’s the big effect that people are up to working 400 hours of over-time since this started. You know, I’ve worked almost 200 hours of over-time since this started.
Like, the thousands and thousands of hours that are being worked in over-time, to keep shifts filled, people being ordered to stay at work. You know, not knowing if, you know, when you go in on a shift basically, you know, the feeling is if I go on an evening shift, which is from basically 1:30 in the afternoon to 10:30 at night, chances are they’re going to tell me I have to stay overnight.
So that I think, where people have that little book where they track everything and they highlight or whatever their system is for marking down what shifts they worked, the over-time they’ve worked, you know what days they’ve taken off…that’s kind of a reflection in a shift-working environment…"