What I have seen of Acoby’s accumulated criminal record follows a narrow, unwavering narrative line: difficult childhood, delinquency, incarceration, violence, recalcitrance, escalating punishments, a determination of incorrigibility, and finally, in the courtroom in Kitchener-Waterloo, the potential for the worst possible sentence. In the court transcripts that I have had access to — which in turn allude to social welfare reports, psychiatric evaluations, and csc files that I have not — it also seems to be a story larded with racist bias and incendiary psychiatric speculations.
A more humane version of Acoby’s story might begin with a bright, fierce child caught in the fan of adult actions and passions. It would allude to timeless, tragic motifs: a father who murders a mother, a grandfather who kills himself after the brutal murder of his daughter. An aunt who betrays the child unwittingly, with terrible consequences, but who is still loved. The child who lost her mother in turn becoming a mother who loses her child.
Acoby was six months old when her father murdered her mother. She and her siblings were brought up by a loving grandmother who struggled with diabetes, addiction, and heart problems. It was only when Acoby was nine that she learned, in the chance overhearing of a conversation, that her grandmother was not her mother. “So everyone has lied to you,” she told me one evening on the phone. “Your picture of your family falls apart.” Forgiveness came slowly, much later.
According to the official record, from the age of twelve Acoby was angry, defiant, and in serious trouble. She spent several periods in secure custody for such offences as theft under $1,000, theft under $5,000, setting off false fire alarms, public mischief, assault, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle. Four days after her twenty-first birthday, in 2000, she was sentenced to three and a half years and sent to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. She was pregnant at the time.
Approximately two months into her term, Acoby participated in a hostage taking, a strategy some women inmates use, often collectively, to make a point about prison conditions. The official record refers to the possibility that the incident was staged, but its aims were real enough. According to the prosecution’s statement, the women “demanded to see a mental health nurse; they wanted coffee and water; they wanted feminine supplies, sanitary napkins, that sort of thing.” Acoby’s role in the hostage taking is unclear from transcripts: in what became a pattern, she chose not to defend herself against the charges. “I’m taking responsibility for my actions,” she said. “I just want to plead guilty... I’d like to get sentenced today.” The plea added three years to her sentence.
That fall, Acoby gave birth to a daughter. csc changed her security designation from maximum to medium, allowing her to go to the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge for aboriginal inmates in Saskatchewan, where her baby could be with her at all times. She was even permitted to make one escorted journey away from the prison with the infant, to visit family. Parole began to seem like a possibility.
But when the baby was eleven months old, Acoby, then twenty-two, did drugs with other prisoners — a temptation she had previously resisted, despite ready access. Prison staff removed the baby that night, then sent her to a relative in another province the next day. Acoby (who was still breast-feeding) was permitted to see her daughter briefly that morning, a moment she wrote about a few years later: “I spent those five minutes memorizing every detail of her beautiful little face, holding her and telling her how much I loved her. It was the hardest thing I had to do in my life — to turn my baby over to the care of someone else. I spent hours crying and praying for [her] health and happiness, and I hoped that one day I would have her back with me.”
Almost immediately after she lost her child, she attempted to escape, taking a correctional officer hostage. Again, she refused legal aid and pleaded guilty. During sentencing, she had this exchange with the judge:
“Because they took her away from me, that’s why I did it.”
“Well, now she will probably be taken away from you permanently.”
“I know, and that’s probably the worst kind of sentence... So what you give me is not going to make a difference.”
Her sentence was extended to ten and a half years. She would not see her daughter again for seven.
In several prisons over the next three years, she committed still more offences: uttering threats, forcible confinement, assault causing bodily harm. Her sentence went from ten and a half, to fifteen and a half, to eighteen years. As one judge noted in sentencing her, “You’ve heard the expression ‘life on the instalment plan.’ I think I’m seeing it here.”
