Nine inmates declared dangerous offenders by the courts are being held in B.C.‘s Ferndale minimum security institution – not including the one who is still at large after walking away last weekend.
“There were 10, including [Blane] Macdougal,” Correctional Services Canada spokesman Dave Lefebvre said Wednesday, referring to the escaped rapist and murderer who escaped from Ferndale Saturday.
Macdougal, who has escaped custody before, was kept in minimum security despite a parole report last October that described him as having an “uncanny ability” to hide his deviant desires.
Vancouver South MP Ujjal Dosanjh, the Liberal Public Safety critic, called the placement of dangerous offenders in Ferndale “absolutely unforgivable.
“How on Earth would anyone think [Macdougal] is a suitable candidate for minimum security? I think Stockwell Day [the Conservative Public Safety minister] and I will agree on one thing – serious and dangerous offenders should not be reclassified into minimum-security prisons.”
Although Corrections Canada acknowledged Tuesday that at one time the warden from a lower security prison could refuse to accept any prisoner they deemed a security risk, Mr. Lefebvre said Wednesday he could not locate records of when the policy was changed.
Randy Hawes, a provincial Liberal MLA said Corrections Canada assured him when he was mayor of Mission, B.C., near the jail, that the Ferndale warden would have the last say on transfers.
Mr. Hawes said Wednesday he found it odd that Corrections Canada could not find record of that policy.
“If they did not really change [the policy] and they were misrepresenting the policy to make us feel better, we never found out,” he said.
Mr. Hawes held a municipal inquiry into Ferndale’s impact on public safety in Mission after two prisoners walked away from Ferndale in 1994, then slipped across the border and murdered a Washington state man.
Meanwhile, both the federal Conservative and Liberal parties have questioned why an offender with a history of violent crimes such as Macdougal was placed in Ferndale.
Parole board documents revealed Macdougal, 60, had raped two women in August 1979, four months after being granted day parole.
Days after receiving full parole in 1989, Macdougal kidnapped and raped another young woman. Parole board documents said he purchased “a rape kit including handcuffs several days earlier.”
The parole board found Macdougal has an “uncanny ability to hide difficulties from intimate partners, parole officers, sex offender therapists, and clinicians who did prior assessments.”
The documents also revealed Macdougal became agitated after being interviewed by police in a missing person’s case last June. He was angry over being asked to take a lie-detector test.
RCMP are still searching for Macdougal who was serving a life sentence at Ferndale.
Vancouver Sun, With files from The National Post
They need to find this guy before he hurts someone else.
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