Trafford Publishing: From Prison to Parliament

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From Prison to Parliament

by Frank Howard

276 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0447; ISBN 1-55369-045-1; US$25.50, C$28.83, EUR21.00, £14.50

The no-punches pulled autobiography of former MP Frank Howard, who went from prison to federal politics in a career that saw him win ten elections over almost three decades.

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about the book      about the author      excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book

Frank Howard's mother was a prostitute; his father, purportedly her pimp. When he was six months old they placed him in the care of foster parents who never let him forget that he was the child of those "...no-good sons of bitches...".
At twelve he was committed by a judge to the care of the Childrens' Aid Society and taken to an orphanage in Vancouver. En route he was sexually molested by the policeman accompanying him. Dumped into the foster care circuit, he twice attempted suicide. He never finished grade ten. At eighteen he was sentenced to two years in the B.C. Penitentiary for armed robbery.
In From Prison to Parliament Howard describes those early years, his life in prison, and how, on finishing his sentence, he vowed never to return to crime. He never did.
He became a logger, then President of the Loggers' Local of the I.W.A. At twenty-eight he entered politics as a C.C.F. M.L.A. and went on to become the M.P. for the Northern B.C. riding of Skeena. He held that seat for seventeen years, longer than anyone else since its formation in 1914. During his twenty-seven years as a politician, he won ten elections.
Frank Howard was decidedly instrumental in getting Aboriginal people who lived on reserves the right to vote in federal elections. His three-year filibuster in the House of Commons produced reforms to Canada's divorce laws. His passion for prison reform led to the closure of Canada's barbaric Saint Vincent de Paul Penitentiary.
Blunt, tough, Frank Howard pulls no punches in describing some of his C.C.F./ N.D.P. fellow politicians. Reading From Prison to Parliament, it's easy to understand how his street smarts served his constituents, while at the same time infuriating other politicians.

About the Author

Born in Kimberley, B.C., but not sure of birth date, birth year, or family name. Raised by foster parents.
Erratic elementary schooling.
At the age of twelve a judge sentenced him to spend six years in the care of the Children's Aid Society. A Provincial Police Officer took him to Vancouver where he was deposited in the Alexander Children's Home.
Lived with two other foster parents in Vancouver. His formal education was not consistent. Ran away twice to return to Kimberley. Left school before completing grade ten.
At the age of eighteen was sentenced to two years in the B.C. Penitentiary for armed robbery.
While in the Penitentiary he determined that a life of crime was not for him. Promised himself never to steal again. He hasn't.
Following his release from prison (1945) he worked at various hourly-paid jobs such as iron-foundry moulding, underground mining, and logging. While logging he became a yarding engineer and was an active union member of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA).
In 1950 he was elected the President of the IWA's Loggers' Local (1-71), a position he held for seven years.
While President of the Loggers' Local he ran, unsuccessfully, as a CCF candidate in B.C.'s 1952 provincial election. In the follow-up 1953 election he was elected as the first CCF Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the provincial riding of Skeena. He was defeated in 1956.
Was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the federal riding of Skeena in 1957. He held that seat for seventeen years, longer than anyone else since the the riding was formed in 1914. He was defeated in 1974.
In 1967 a blackmailer threatened him and demanded money to keep silent. He met it head on, refused to succumb and revealed his background on a television station in his home town of Terrace.
In 1979 he returned to the provincial political scene and was elected once again as the MLA for Skeena. He was re-elected in 1983 and defeated in 1986.
His son Robert, born in 1950, died of AIDS in 1986.
He was divorced from his first wife. He remarried and his second wife died of cancer. He and his wife Joane Humphrey (writer/broadcaster J.J. McColl) live in Surrey, B.C. where he is writing a novel.

Excerpt
Chapter 17: A DISINFECTED FISH
The security of a prison requires routine, orderliness, and following the book. Everyone's movements must be accounted for. Mawhinney's and mine were pre-determined and clicked along like a well oiled military operation.
    When Mawhinney left the administration building with me in tow a guard phoned ahead to the main cell block to alert the guard there that we were on our way. The rifle-toting guards at the top of the stone wall had also received the message. We reached the building which housed the main cell block. Up a few steps to the entrance door. Mawhinney pushed a button alongside the door. A bell rang inside the building.
    When the inside guard peered through the peep hole in the door he expected to see two people, Mawhinney and a "fish." I was the fish--the newly-entered convict.
    Again the clank of key; the grate of metal; the toneless, orderissuing voice, punctuated by a sideways toss of the head, saying, "Inside."
    Then: "Over there, against the wall."
    Into the basement, to be processed somewhat like a fish in a cannery, except this was a different kind of can. Three convicts and four guards were in the basement. One guard was a porcine-jowled growler with a sour face, ball bearing eyes, and a medicine-ball gut. He was the Chief Keeper, Joe Goss, in charge of all guards. He instructed; others obeyed. Cons had nick-named him The Pig.
    "Off with your clothes. All of them," growled The Pig.
    "Everything?"
    He glowered at me, and growled some more, "When I say all of them it means all of them. Get 'em off."
    "Get in the chair," He said, pointing to a barber's chair.
    With a sheet around my neck and nakedness I was given a thirtysecond haircut. A little short on the sides, Sir? Trim your eyebrows a bit? Nothing like that. Just the simple use of clippers to reduce the head to baldness. Like shearing sheep. Next came a bath and a shower. Both a bath and a shower? "Over here and get into the tub."
    The liquid in the tub was a light amber colour as if a number of people had used it for other than bathing. It was pungent and caustic.
    I hesitated at the edge of the tub.
    "Get in."
    I got in and submerged myself to the neck as ordered.
    "Close your eyes. Hold your breath."
    A hand pushed my head downwards. That closed my eyes and stopped my breathing. It closed my mouth, too.
    When I came up spluttering Goss spit out: "We sterilize all vermin in here. Get out and take a shower."
    I was then ordered to bend over the back of a chair and place my hands on the seat.
    "Spread your legs apart. Come on, wider than that."
    One of the convicts spread the cheeks of my ass apart and one of the guards made a visual examination.
    "Looks O.K. Chief," he said, speaking to Goss.
    Then Goss placed one hand across the top of my hip bones and made a painful jab at my anus with a finger. That brought me straightening up and turning in anger.
    Two of the guards grabbed me and I was held motionless.
    Goss, wearing a rubber glove on his right hand, sneeringly said, "Don't like that, eh? We can do it the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is this way. Now, bend over."
    This rectal search was for smuggled items such as drugs.
    I was given a lump of ill-fitting and temporary prison garb. No belt, one button on the pants, no buttons on the coat, no shoelaces, no shoes. I slippered and slithered along the stone landings and up the steel stairs, holding my pants up with one hand and my coat around me with the other. A scarecrow with only the centre pole, a clump of shapeless blue unable to drive off sick crows, let alone vultures.
    The fish tier was a group of ten cells, those at the top tier of the prison's east wing. I was segregated there for about a week while the prison administration decided where it was going to put me.
    Meals were delivered to the fish tier by a guard and a fellow convict. The guard stood at the end of the tier and manipulated a device which allowed all cells to be opened or just selected ones. This allowed my fellow convict to open my cell door and, while standing about two feet away from the cell so as to be in full view of the guard, give me an aluminum tray of food. At the first such delivery he asked, in a very low voice, if I smoked. I gave him a "yes" nod.
    Along the front of the cells was a walkway about four feet wide. A metal-tubing framework about three feet high ran along the outer edge of this walkway, a sort of safety-fence. The whole side of the east wing tier was also encased with wire-mesh something like chicken wire, but much thicker and stronger. The purpose was to keep those fish who might be suicidal from leaping over the metal-tubing framework to crash onto the cement floor some fifty feet below.
    Directly in front of each cell this wire-mesh had a circular opening about a foot in diameter. Its purpose was to allow sheets and other bedding to be pushed through and dropped onto the main floor.
    The faint hum of voices and the clatter of institutional equipment drifted up to the fish tier; background noise to a sort of peaceful privacy. The wire-mesh started to shake. Suddenly a convict's head and shoulders appeared above the floor of the tier. He pulled a lit cigarette from his mouth and tossed it through the circular opening towards me in the cell. His aim was perfect for it skipped through the bars and he was gone as quickly as he had appeared. He clambered up the wiremesh two or three times. This was Doug R. and I was able to repay him with tobacco later on. Doug's eyes were always about half covered by his lower eyelids; a distinctive feature so unusual to me that I always remembered it.
    The B.C. Pen was a massive composition of stone, brick, cement, and steel; an impersonal, heartless place. The only sanctuary was within oneself. It was not populated by realities, but by caricatured cardboard cut-outs, all dressed in the same type of clothes. Each cut-out was a number. Mine was Y5565 and it was stamped onto all my clothes. The "Y" indicated I was under the age of 21.
    Convicts were counted many times during a day. 491 convicts locked in cells at night must result in 491 being let out the following morning. If the numbers don't add up to 491 everything stopped until the 491 were accounted for.
    Some of these cut-outs lethargically shuffled about with pieces of emery paper to polish the steel bars; use moistened rags to remove the dust; pails and mops to swab the floors and wash the walls; brushes and brooms to sweep the debris. This cleansing, polishing, and shining is part of a hard-labour sentence. It keeps convicts busy.

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