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“I was told that anger internally will turn to cancer, will turn to heart disease, if we don’t deal with it in a healthy way,” he said.

Rather than look for rehabilitation in the Canadian prison system, which he says is more focused on budgets than supporting people experiencing trauma, he looked for healing in nature. There, he found ideas on how to shed anger and teach himself to live more positively.

“The way the tree sometimes has to go to sleep and has to wake up, or when a bee at wintertime it freezes but in the spring it comes back to life,” he said. “So create a moment in our life when you were absolutely nothing so that you can begin to rebuild on that. I tell people it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.”

The college program, which has been running since the new remand centre opened in 2013, attempts to do that with each of the 150 prisoners it sees a week.

Photo by Ed Kaiser / Postmedia, file

Educational programs run a month while life-skills programs are held weekly. In many cases, the goal is to connect incarcerated students with college courses upon release, and resources to help them pay for it.

McBride calls the program a huge success, but can be different for each student who participates.

“We can all kind of draw from our own personal different experiences, nothing comes close to what you actually encounter, good and bad, and the dynamics of that when you actually see what you’ve read about and how it plays out,” she said. “It’s a very profound, powerful experience.”