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She spent 25 years inside Her Majesty’s Pen. This is why she had to leave
Former corrections officer Lisa Snook describes a toxic culture of harassment, particularly against female staff, inside the prison in a new documentary.A documentary on corrections officer Lisa Snook’s last day at work details the struggles of female guards inside Her Majesty’s Penitentiary. (Submitted by Brenda Grzetic)Every weekday for 25 years, Lisa Snook would rattle through…
Former corrections officer Lisa Snook describes a toxic culture of harassment, particularly against female staff, inside the prison in a new documentary.
Every weekday for 25 years, Lisa Snook would rattle through her routine. Inmate counts, paperwork, evening lockdown — all like clockwork.
Amid the order, though, thrived chaos.
Turmoil inside Her Majesty's Penitentiary often came not from the cells as one would expect, Snook said, but from management.
The corrections officer's fight against what she describes as an ongoing culture of harassment took the form of more than a dozen grievances over the way employees were treated inside the prison's walls. She says many of those formal complaints were never addressed.
Snook describes the struggles — and victories — of her career in a documentary, One More Day, screening across Canada this fall. The film follows Snook over the course of her last shift, while Snook tells the camera crew about the inner workings of the jail.
“The day she walked out of that prison was the day that they lost the contribution she made to that institution,” said director Brenda Grzetic, a women's policy worker with the St. John's Status of Women Council.
Grzetic points to Snook's discussion-based approach with inmates as an example of the changes she fostered. “She would oftentimes ask the inmate a few questions to try and understand better why he was so upset,” she said.
“That wasn't common with the male correctional officers.”
When Snook retired from HMP in 2016, she left behind a maternity leave policy, something she says she fought to put in place for over a decade.
The prison's director at the time, she says, called her pregnancies “a fiscal burden and a drain on the system” — the subject of her first complaint.
Chronic, ongoing harassment, against female officers in particular, plagued Snook's tenure there. She fought back with a binder, which Snook affectionately recalls as a Bible of sorts, in which she'd record each interaction with management.
Snook waged one such battle over a shower curtain to partition the intake office, where she worked, from the prisoners' bathroom, Snook recalled. It was one of the ways she says she tried to treat inmates with a bit of dignity.
“Walking in blatant and just laying down the law doesn't work all the time,” she said.
Snook says female officers would approach her, afraid to speak up when they were harassed or tell their bosses they were having a baby. She was told by management to mind her own business, and suspended twice, she says, for refusing to stop raising issues she believed in.
“I was uncovering some ugly stuff,” she said. While she's since tried to forget the darker moments, the film, she said, might lend support to her former colleagues still in uniform.
“Most of the challenges that she encountered were really around her being a woman in a very male-dominated, militaristic environment,” Grzetic said, suggesting improvements to the justice system could come in the form of addressing what she calls the marginalization of female guards.
“I think they do have a different contribution to make,” she said, “and that contribution does need to be respected and validated.”
Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
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