Witnessing rehabilitation and recovery
Talking Reform: Making and Unmaking a Life in Canada’s Prisons
by Dany Lacombe with Mac McKinney
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025
$29.95 / 9780228026365
Reviewed by Richard Fyfe
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Some time ago I stayed up all night binge-watching the British Series “7-up.” That series follows the lives of a group of schoolboys, checking in every seven years throughout their lives. It was absorbing to see a lifetime compressed into a few hours and to watch the changes that occurred as the schoolboys grew and dealt with the many challenges that life has to offer.
Sociologist Dany Lacombe, in collaboration with Mac McKinney, has achieved, for me, a similarly fascinating “compression of a lifetime.” Together, they tell the story of McKinney’s life, beginning with his adoption as a baby, through to his eventual death at age 69.
In 1972, MacKinney, referred to throughout as “Mac,” was convicted of murder and given a life sentence.
After many years in and out of prison Mac meets and ultimately engages in a six-year collaboration project with Lacombe. They met at a Simon Fraser University Humanities 101 class at which Lacombe was giving a lecture on punishment.
After Lacombe obtained the necessary ethical clearances to take on Mac’s life story as an academic project, she worked with Mac through bi-weekly interviews to assist him in telling his life story.
The story follows Mac from childhood, experiencing physical and sexual abuse from his adoptive father, through his youth, when he worked in logging camps, becoming a physically powerful young man, and moving down a path of alcohol addiction and petty crime.
Mac’s first serious arrest comes for arson when he burns a Jehovah’s Witness Hall in the late 1960s and serves a sentence of 2 years less a day at Oakalla prison in British Columbia. Although he had experienced overnight stays in smaller jails for petty offences, Mac found at Oakalla that “… everything was unfamiliar. The talk, the attitudes, the people – everything was unfamiliar.”
While in Oakalla, Mac succeeded at two things: he learned the prison culture, and he trained as a welder – two skills that served him in quite different ways. Part way through his sentence Mac was transferred to Haney prison, where, using what he had learned about prison culture, he found that exaggerating his story to suggest that he had blown the church up with dynamite gained him popularity and gave him access to drugs and future criminal connections on the outside.
During his imprisonment Mac was visited by his girlfriend Eva, whom he married shortly after his release. Marriage did not result in a settled life for Mac, however. During the day he operated a forklift and at night he dealt drugs at a seedy hotel in Whalley. Mac’s life became a blur of drugs, crime, and alcohol, leading ultimately to the violent physical assault and death of a friend of his wife’s grandmother. Although Mac, in his freely given confession, claimed that Brenda, the victim, was alive and talking when he threw her out of his car and left her, he was convicted of murder, and received a life sentence.
The book then chronicles Mac’s prison experience, as he served “life 10,” meaning a minimum of 10 years before he was eligible to apply for parole. Much of Mac’s story in prison involves the measures he took to develop a “tough guy” image, and to manage the story of the murder to avoid letting on that the murder victim was a woman (a risky fact which would have lowered him in the eyes of the other convicts).
Describing the many events during his imprisonment, Mac provides a prisoner’s view of the contrast between the rehabilitation efforts of “the man” and the hierarchical, hypermasculine prison culture, suggesting that following the “code” – a bunch of rules, “some spoken and some unspoken, that shape what guys in the pen can and can’t do” – was “the best way to gain respect and, more importantly, to survive.”
Among the many anecdotes and incidents during his time in prison Mac shares a story about the strategy he adopted to incarceration: “Early on old-timers told me that I had to be a fuck-up with the guards for the first four or five years. The idea was to cool it off after a few years. Then the guards would notice and tell the higher-ups that I was improving – a miracle of the science of rehabilitation.“ The approach was successful, and Mac’s story continues with his first release on parole in 1980, aged 32. In Mac’s words, describing his parole hearing: “As I stood before their glum faces and told them about my changed ways, I felt like a fraud, but, to my surprise, my performance worked. They granted my request for a program of Unescorted Temporary Absences in the community.”
While Mac’s story, on its own, is a worthwhile read, Lacombe’s skilful hand is visible, both throughout the narrative and in the concluding chapters, when she dons her sociologist cap to make sense of Mac’s life story.
Throughout Mac’s narrative, Lacombe intervenes, using a sans serif font to distinguish her interventions from Mac’s narrative. Lacombe’s interventions provide clarifying dialogue and highlight or question certain points in Mac’s story. In doing so Lacombe introduces and references facts drawn from his prison record files, which Mac and Lacombe had obtained under an Access to Information request. It is this dual aspect of the book – Mac’s (sometimes exaggerated or colourful) version and Lacombe’s (more clinical) perspective drawn from the official records – that provides the reader with insights into both the mind of Mac the convicted criminal and into the functioning of the Canadian prison system.
Mac describes a major change for him beginning in 1993, when he was at Bath Institution, when the shame of the abuse that he had suffered as a child overwhelmed him and he began to work with a psychologist named Dr. Lena. As Mac describes his gradual stabilization and shift towards rehabilitation, Lacombe intervenes to note that rather than confirming this change, the prison records show “the shock and dismay of the community of correctional officers and mental health professionals regarding your inability to remain sober outside prison.”
Lacombe does however go on to discuss the shift in correctional efforts as they became oriented towards substance abuse programs, both inside and outside the prison to “prevent further tumbles off the wagon.” Lacombe provides an overview of the many psychological profiling and “risk of reoffending” assessments during this time, but it appears that one significant and helpful change was a transfer back to British Columbia at Mac’s request.
In December 2000 he was moved to Ferndale, a low-security institution in Mission, British Columbia. As Mac describes: “During that time in Mission I was clean. I felt better about myself, had my hopes up, and thought that I had changed.” Although he was on a better path, Mac acknowledges that he “continued using for years,” occasionally overdosing and being revived with Naloxone, “a drug that kick starts the heart.”
Moving ahead to 2011, Mac describes “living in recovery,” which involves his lecturing to Lacombe’s students at Simon Fraser University and writing his autobiography. The book provides the full text of the emails between Mac and Lacombe that led to their collaboration, as well as numerous diary-type entries from and after 2010 that chronicle Mac’s life on the “Outs” (outside of prison). Through these entries, and an ongoing dialogue with Lacombe, Mac comes to a point where he is comfortable being honest about himself and his shortcomings. He even begins to accept that he can be honest with his parole officer, who is genuinely supportive and trying to assist him to stay out of prison.
Despite a parole revocation and later release in 2013, the collaboration, teaching and dialogue continue until Mac’s death at age 69 in 2016. From that point on, Lacombe assumes the book’s narrative, sympathetically encapsulating Mac’s life, but including a chapter discussing the impact on the family of Brenda, Mac’s murder victim.
In the final chapter, “The Management of a Spoiled Identity” Lacombe suggests that “… Mac was a compelling research subject, one who allowed me to explore the relationship between “identity and prison discourses about crime control and rehabilitation.”
In summarizing the research component of the project Lacombe comments: “The complex performance of Mac’s different and at times paradoxical personae is not as unusual as it might initially seem, since all of us adopt very distinct social roles or subject positions depending on the interactions we have with others and the contexts we find ourselves in. The contexts in which Mac operated, however, were far more constraining than for most of us.”
Lacombe then closes with a glimpse of hope from Mac’s classroom participation for her students: “…the students let the ‘grey-haired old man’ know how much they had learned from him and his attempts to reform himself, and how much they cared.” And for Mac himself, “… I witnessed first-hand how his performance of a rehabilitating self instilled in him the confidence to succeed at integrating into society and engaging more broadly with people.”
In the end, Lacombe writes: “Whether we believe Mac or find his account of his private troubles tragic or shameful (for having brought them onto himself) does not matter that much. What matters most is how Mac’s private troubles can shed light on larger social processes at work in an institution like the prison. For example, Mac’s journey, … speaks not just to his own struggles, but to those of countless incarcerated individuals whom we will never hear about.”
By the end of this book one is left with no doubt that Lacombe has successfully exceeded even her own sociological objectives in undertaking this collaboration project, almost as if the reader had been one of the fortunate students to attend Mac’s lectures and undertake Lacombe’s sociology classroom assignment.
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Richard Fyfe is a semi-retired lawyer and former Deputy Attorney General for British Columbia. As a retirement project, he is currently in the process of completing a Master of Laws (LLM) degree at the University of Victoria, with a focus on prison law. This is his first review for The British Columbia Review.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster