Older Canadian prisoners don’t get no respect…
Via the Toronto Star:
Once respected as elders and called upon for advice, incarcerated baby boomers are now being bunked with violent youngsters and victimized. Walter Noonan recalls the days when older prisoners commanded respect. They were given the lower cell bunks and preferred seating in penitentiary television rooms. No one stole their food. People listened to them. Nowadays, they’re lucky if no one beats or slashes them, Noonan says.
“There’s no respect any more,” says Noonan, 55, a former Oshawa strip club manager who has served prison and jail time in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. “In the past 10 years, it has changed so drastically,” says Noonan, whose crimes include armed robbery, threatening death, driving while disqualified, passing a forged cheque, possession of break-in tools and possession of stolen property. His comments are supported by the annual report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, which was tabled in Parliament in November 2011. That report notes that the number of older offenders — those aged 50 or over — in Canada doubled in the decade after 2001 as the general population greys with the aging of the baby boom.