Grieving city urged to show compassion

Pastor's plea comes after a paroled ex-con is charged with murder

Frank Stirk
BC Correspondent
bc@christianweek.org

VERNON, BC-For some of the 36,000 residents of this North Okanagan city, pastor Dave Bootsma's plea for compassion was the last thing they wanted to hear.

Bootsma had been invited by local MP Darrel Stinson to close in prayer during a rally outside Howard House, a halfway facility for paroled offenders run by the John Howard Society. For the third time in eight years, one of its residents had been charged with murder.

Eric Fish is accused of beating to death a 75-year-old Vernon man during a home invasion on August 4. Fish had gone missing from the facility two weeks earlier.

But while residents vented their outrage and fear and demanded that Howard House be shut down, Bootsma, who pastors New Beginnings Community Church, urged them not to paint its other residents with the same brush.

"Howard House is about people. It's not simply an institution," he says. "There are people who live there who are also concerned-‘Why do we have to suffer because of this?'"

Stinson promised the rally he will push for better protection for communities from ex-convicts, beginning with an independent inquiry into the entire parole system.

"Government's first and foremost responsibility is to its law-abiding citizens, not to the criminal elements of this country," he says. "I'm one that does not believe that parole is mandatory. I believe that parole has to be earned."

A petition was also circulated calling on Parliament to make it harder for violent offenders to be paroled.

And while he supports such measures, Bootsma says he tried to remind the crowd of 300 that changing the system alone is never enough.

"I said, ‘Here's an example of where the wisdom of men has failed. All of our laws and everything else cannot protect society ultimately… It's only going to come when we're safe in God.'"

Corrections Canada quickly responded by agreeing to tear down Howard House and replace it with a new facility, but on a much smaller scale, hopefully by 2006. In the interim, no new residents would be accepted.

That outcome, says Bootsma, is an answer to prayer. "We need to shut down Howard House and start it up again-new but different."

But Stinson doubts that Vernon's RCMP detachment is equipped to police a halfway house, no matter what its size.

"We're understaffed by six or eight now as it is," he says. "And when you bring the violent offenders into a small community that's 50 per cent retirement age, you've got a serious problem."

Yet Linda Deutschmann, a regional director of the John Howard Society and a criminologist at the University College of the Cariboo in nearby Kamloops, says halfway houses-while not perfect-actually foster safer communities.

"I would prefer to have people released into 24-hour supervision than to have them released and renting a place next door," she told Kamloops This Week.

"That is the choice…The more we close these places, the more danger there is."

But part of the solution also has to be encouraging those who end up in prison to follow Christ, says Skip Lynn, a prison ministry volunteer at St. Matthew's Anglican Church in Abbotsford.

For 10 years, Lynn has been escorting inmates out of the Ferndale Institution. More recently, he has helped them take part in his church's Alpha program.

Lynn says out of the 22 inmates he has mentored, all but one or two have now been released, and only three are back behind bars.

"The three inmates that have gone back in for various reasons are ones that walked away-walked away from the [church] support they had," he says.

"I've got an individual who will never go back. I just know that. He was in for quite a while, but he's doing very well on the outside. He's very strong in his Christian belief. Just a remarkable individual. We've become very close friends."