Optimism in transferring Paul Bernardo is galling

Which daydreaming officials in the federal prison service decided that serial killer, rapist and torturer Paul Bernardo deserved a gentler medium-security prison life?

Who are these anonymous bureaucrats now being told to reconsider after the PM and the public safety minister and everyone else expressed shock? Perhaps federal staff think Bernardo is redeemable. Since he didn’t commit a rape or sex killing during almost three decades in maximum security, maybe he has kicked the habit.

The plan was/is to move him to “open-campus” La Macaza Institution northwest of Montreal, where he could learn from teachers and its many other sex offenders.

What’s on offer? Anger management, stress management, social skills and workshops that “reduce the interest for [sic] rape or sadistic behaviour,” as one sweet-natured local professor described it.

Then officials will be able to decide on “the possibility of a conditional release.” The optimism galls, it cloys. Perhaps they also think the stars in the sky are heaven’s daisy chain. Every time a child dies, an angel gets her wings.

Even in a previous journalistic world crowded with beat reporters, Canada’s correctional service mostly had its own way, as did the federal parole board. We might never have known about this horrifying decision if Bernardo’s surname hadn’t rung a bell with Canadians.

We are aging out of the horror of the years he hunted young girls. Fit at 58, he hasn’t aged out; that’s largely the myth of bodily aging, not urge. The crime industry — courts, academics, criminals, journalists — spends time and money studying motives but must sometimes consider that sheer enjoyment is the main one.

It puzzles me that intelligent, heartfelt left-wing people often fail to understand evil. They don’t concede it exists. They are wrong.

A designated dangerous offender, Bernardo had been in maximum-security Millhaven near Kingston, Ont., with little time outside his cell and barracked with the kind of killers no one can stand. We keep them clumped to keep the peace.

The Correctional Service of Canada, headed by commissioner Anne Kelly, wouldn’t provide any information, citing Bernardo’s privacy rights. Kristen French, 15, and Leslie Mahaffy,14, lost their privacy rights as they took their last breath. Decades later, the killer keeps his.

It is right that the courts always operate independently of government although other countries face Bernardo-type scandals too. But the prison system cannot seem to regulate itself well. Even with oversight, it fails badly, and the Bernardo debacle is proof of that. Some prisoners are lifetime finalists, rightly so.

And yet the Mahaffy and French families must keep showing up at Bernardo’s parole hearings. Thanks to a truly ill-considered decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, serial killers can no longer be sentenced to serial spans of parole ineligibility. They get their chance at 25 years, even retroactively.

This means that killing one victim can get you 25 years without parole. Killing 20 more doesn’t change that. It’s a Get Out of Jail card.

We don’t want the judicial and penal systems to become objects of cynicism, like some police forces. Bernardo doesn’t have problems with anger, he has problems with lining a room with plastic so that dismemberment doesn’t leave splashback. He has problems with mixing concrete. He has problems with mercy for a weeping child who knows she’s about to die.

The thing is, Bernardo’s not smart enough to be repaired. His brain cannot contain the necessary concepts.

A few years ago, he self-published some kind of dog’s mess of a space hero thriller online. I read most of it. Bernardo is stupid. He is thick. He is illiterate. He is childish. He couldn’t manage a plot because he was incapable of joining up bits of things, the rockets and stuff. His dialogue reeked.

If the prison service is allowed to stage its intervention and send Bernardo for atrocity rehab, it won’t work. He doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. He’s not bright but he’s still a psychopath.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick