July 30, 2003
Small Town News

This is from page B1 of today's issue of The Record, which serves Kitchener, Cambridge, and Waterloo, Ontario and surrounding areas, including Stratford, where I saw it. I haven't looked to see whether it's on the web:

               Man Prefers Jail To Living With Mom

Michael McAllister would rather be in a jail cell than living with his mother or sister.

The 21-year-old Kitchener man turned himself in to police yesterday because he refuses to live with either his mother or his sister, as required by the terms of his bail.

He's been on bail since being arrested for methadone trafficking in July 2001. His lawyer, John Lang, said McAllister just couldn't take the "house rules".

There's more, including the fact that if McAllister hadn't turned himself in, he would have left his relatives holding the bag for $10,000 (Canadian), but we never do get any details of the house rules. Was he tired of being nagged about leaving the toilet seat up, or was it much worse than that? And how could he possibly think the local jail's rules would be less onerous? There seem to be only three possibilities:

  1. McAllister's mother and sister (both of them!) exhibit near-Nazi levels of merciless authoritarianism and obsessive rule-making.
  2. Ontario jails (shouldn't they be gaols?) are permissive beyond the dreams of the wooliest leftist.
  3. McAllister is really really dumb.

The three possibilities are not mutually exclusive, so there may be a bit of each.

Posted by Dr. Weevil at July 30, 2003 11:42 PM