My Son Is Serving A Life Sentence. Now I’m An Advocate For Other Moms Like Me

Before you visit a loved one in prison, don’t stop at a gas station. You might touch something that will set off the ion scanner. 

The ion scanner—officially, an Ion Mobility Spectrometry device—is used at prison entrances to detect drugs. It’s highly sensitive and unpredictable. Traces of drugs can be found almost anywhere: on door handles, shopping carts, money. Especially money.

I know all this because my son is serving a life sentence in a Canadian prison.

Before I would visit him, I’d scrub my hands, my clothes, even the coins I needed for the vending machine in the visiting room. If the scanner tested positive and the guards were feeling generous, I’d be allowed a “closed visit,” separated from my son by a pane of glass and speaking through a phone. When they weren’t so generous, I’d be turned away altogether. It wouldn’t matter how far I’d travelled; I’d have to go home without seeing him.

False positives are common and can be humiliating and deeply upsetting, especially for children. Years ago, Mothers Offering Mutual Support—a group I helped create for families of incarcerated people—petitioned the federal government to review the scanners after members were repeatedly flagged without cause. Nothing changed.

The scanner is just one part of the prison visitor’s experience. Seeing your incarcerated loved one also means pat-down searches and metal detectors, long walks through gated corridors that clang shut behind you, waiting rooms with bolted-down furniture, surveillance cameras and the occasional sniffer dog. Sometimes, a guard treats you kindly, like you’re an ordinary person. 

You might think this is an experience reserved for other families, troubled families, not a family like yours. But you’d be wrong. It could happen to anyone.

Let me tell you how it happened to me.

*

I was born in 1948 and raised in Kashmir. In 1969, when I was 20 years old, I emigrated to Canada. If you asked me then why I moved, I would have said it was to be a bride in an arranged marriage. But really, I was emigrating to study. I was ambitious, studying political science at Hamilton, Ont.’s McMaster University. But those plans were put on hold when I became pregnant and had to withdraw from my classes. My first daughter was born, followed 14 months later by my son, Ahmed, in 1971. (Ahmed is a pseudonym.) My third child, a daughter, would be born a decade later.

In 1975, I was hired by Canada Post to work the night shift as a mail sorter. The work was hard, but I was happy. It was the first time I truly met and spoke with other Canadians. Before that, my world had been mostly family. Thanks to my education at a private convent school in Kashmir, I spoke English well, and I thrived. I was soon earning as much as my husband, who had been in the country far longer than I had. 

Over the years, my work life became more culturally and socially enriching than my home life, which remained ideologically narrow. Eventually, my marriage broke down. In 1988, I packed everything into a U-Haul and drove to Ottawa with my mother and youngest daughter beside me. (My eldest daughter was in her first year at Queen’s University.) Ahmed was old enough to drive, so he followed in our small, secondhand Chevy with our white, red-eyed rabbit, Buttons, in its cage in the seat next to him. 

We moved to Ottawa because Ahmed was fascinated by languages and, after hours of research, had learned that the city had exceptional schools. By then, I would do anything to facilitate his education, to keep him in school, to hold him together. 

Ahmed had always been a serious, motivated student. Once, dissatisfied with a 75-percent final grade, he enrolled himself in summer school and raised it by 10 points. But in his mid-teens, the school called to say he wasn’t attending class. I was confused. Every morning, I watched him leave the house. When his father and I met with his teacher, he told us he often found Ahmed alone in the library—just sitting there, or praying. 

At home, Ahmed began washing obsessively, spending long stretches in the shower. One morning, after he left for school, I went into his room and was shocked by what I saw. It was immaculate. Everything aligned, ordered, controlled. This wasn’t just a change from the usual teenage messiness; it was something else entirely. 

*

Ahmed was often late for school because he was washing or showering too long, and his tardiness would result in suspensions. Around the same time, the Gulf War dominated the news, and he began experiencing racism more directly. At school, while playing basketball, another boy called him a slur. Ahmed pushed him. The boy wasn’t reprimanded, but Ahmed was suspended. Eventually, he stopped attending school altogether.

One night at work, during a break at the post office, I was flipping through a discarded magazine when I saw an advertisement about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I had never heard the term before, but as I read, I recognized my son. I practically ran to tell his doctor the next day. At my insistence, Ahmed was diagnosed with and treated for OCD.

I didn’t know then that it was only the beginning.

Over the years, Ahmed experienced deep depressive episodes, sometimes remaining in bed for weeks. I enrolled him in a program at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, but after a year we saw no results. After that, I took him to multiple doctors, with no success. It was the 1990s, and there was little understanding of mental health disorders at the time—at least, it seemed that way to me. 

Ahmed also experienced periods of clarity. He’d look for work, take correspondence courses, even going on to earn his high school diploma after several years. During one such period, he enrolled in a computer technician program with the help of his friend who taught at the school. This friend, Adil (also a pseudonym), became a mentor. Under his influence, Ahmed grew more religious. The structure and certainty of religious orthodoxy seemed to calm him, to soothe his compulsions. 

Still, Ahmed was repeatedly hospitalized at the Royal—even though he didn’t have great experiences there, it was one, if not the only, place where mental health services were available to him in Ottawa. While Adil was kind and supportive, he didn’t grasp the seriousness of Ahmed’s mental illness. Once, he and a religious leader from the Lebanese Muslim community visited Ahmed in the hospital. They told him he needn’t be hospitalized; he was suffering from waswasa, which is an Arabic term for unwanted thoughts or “whispering.” They said prayer would cure him. This might seem naïve or careless, but at the time mental illness wasn’t well understood, particularly among some immigrant communities who had their own traditional beliefs. 

When he was in his late 20s, Ahmed confided in Adil that he wished to marry. Although Ahmed was quite mentally ill, Adil arranged for him to travel to Lebanon to marry his sister. I initially worried that Adil and his family were taking advantage of my son, perhaps using him to facilitate Adil’s sister’s immigration to Canada. But I also knew Ahmed was lonely—he was living by himself at that point—and I thought having a partner might help him.

The marriage went ahead, but Ahmed returned from Lebanon early—alone, terribly anxious about meeting the financial requirements for his wedding and for his new wife’s immigration. In Islamic marriages, the groom must pay a mahr, a financial gift, to the bride. Ahmed had agreed to pay a sum of money he was unable to afford. And the kind of income and stable housing needed to sponsor his new wife was virtually impossible given his illness. We all tried to reassure him, but we didn’t yet understand the severity of his condition and his paranoia. 

*

One morning in February 2001, I received a call from an unfamiliar number.

“Do you know where your son is?” a voice asked.

I was in bed, wearing a cast. The day before, I’d slipped and broken my ankle, and I’d tried to reach Ahmed without success, which was unusual. The caller identified himself as a reporter. He said Adil had been stabbed and killed, and Ahmed was allegedly responsible. 

I dropped the phone and screamed.

Soon it was everywhere: the news, the papers. My son was in police custody.

An officer came to my home and patiently, seemingly compassionately, sat with me for hours as I explained Ahmed’s history—his hospitalizations, his depression, his mental illness. I wanted them to understand that this act was not who he was, that it had come from a place of severe psychosis. 

Later, when I read the officer’s report, I was horrified. My words had been reshaped into evidence against my son. That was when I learned what many families learn too late: the police aren’t there to understand you. They’re there to build a case. What I’d said in that meeting continues to impact Ahmed today. Whenever he has a parole hearing, the report—what I’d said about my son—is used as evidence of his unfitness for release.

Friends and family rallied around us. Still, there was a stigma attached to being the mother of a killer. I was responsible for raising someone who’d committed such an awful act. 

As a result of this horrible incident, my life and the lives of my family have been indelibly affected. But the young man who died was, at the time, newly married and the father of a young child. Adil was a provider for his family in Lebanon. People loved him, needed him. This tragedy changed all of us, but that young family most of all. Theirs was a staggering loss. 

*

Ahmed was held at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (OCDC), where psychiatrists diagnosed him with multiple, serious mental illnesses, including OCD, depression and schizoaffective disorder. (Later, he would also be diagnosed as suffering from a severe form of schizophrenia.) It seemed to make little difference to how he was treated. 

Guards taunted him. “There goes the cousin of Osama bin Laden,” they’d say, since the September 11 attacks happened only a few months after his arrest. They once draped his prayer rug over the toilet in his cell, which you could imagine was devastating for a devout Muslim with a pathological anxiety about cleanliness. One guard menacingly remarked that Ahmed looked just like another prisoner who had recently committed suicide. 

If guards bully a prisoner, they give permission for others to do the same. Ahmed was threatened and beaten by other inmates. One fixated on him, telling him he would come after our family after he was released. Ahmed would call me, terrified, and beg me to change the locks or consider moving away.

The abuse he suffered at OCDC worsened his mental health. He was deemed unfit to stand trial. He’d cycle between jail and hospital—mental health crisis, stabilization, return. Whatever therapeutic support he’d receive in a hospital would be interrupted once he was back in a prison, and his psychological deterioration would start again. This cycle largely continues today. Punitive conditions in prison have done nothing to rehabilitate Ahmed. But much has happened under those conditions to traumatize and institutionalize him. 

In 2005, Ahmed was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, with parole eligibility after 15 years. It was difficult to visit him since he was sent to the Regional Treatment Centre in Kingston Penitentiary, but I would make the two-and-a-half-hour journey, sign in at the reception desk, smile at the sullen and unfriendly guards, and wait for hours to sit in the cramped visiting area for a chance to see my son.

I’ve tried to support Ahmed throughout his incarceration. For instance, he’ll often be suddenly, unexpectedly and involuntarily transferred from a medium to a maximum-security prison, and his personal effects won’t arrive with him. Days, even weeks pass where he must live without his necessities. Once, Ahmed called to tell me he hadn’t brushed his teeth in five days. I had to contact the correctional officer in charge for my son to receive his toothbrush.

I help in other ways, too. I’m his “substitute decision maker,” so the CSC is required to contact me for approval before changing his medication. I also try to help with his release plans by contacting halfway houses where he could stay should he be granted parole (which he’s been repeatedly denied). Many prisoners, especially those with serious mental health needs, depend on the care and support of outsiders—a dynamic that’s often overlooked in debates about the criminal justice system.

Ahmed relies on me, but the prison system makes it hard to support him. If I don’t hear from him in a while, I suspect he’s having a depressive episode, but it’s hard to learn how he’s really doing. I have to call or write to the prison’s Muslim chaplain to check on him. There have been numerous times when my son has been in a health crisis, and I’ve had to write to the Correctional Investigator, who acts as an independent ombudsman for the prison system, and ask him to intervene on my son’s behalf. I’ve even written to government officials, including numerous public safety ministers. Ralph Goodale, the minister of public safety under Justin Trudeau, once wrote a personal letter back to me, and his staff was very empathetic, although little changed for my son.

Sometimes, prison officials’ indifference is shocking. In 2017, Ahmed was discovered unresponsive on the bathroom floor at Ontario’s Bath Institution. Prison officials rushed him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome (NMS), a rare, life-threatening reaction to his antipsychotic medication. He was in a coma, intubated and on life support, but it took four days for them to contact me—and it was an intern at the ICU who finally phoned me, not prison officials. He was looking for Ahmed’s next of kin.

Although it took a full day to receive the warden’s approval, my daughter and I were eventually allowed to visit my son at the hospital. We stayed with a friend in a nearby town so we could be close to him and see him as often as possible. Then, just over a week later, we arrived at the hospital, but he was gone. He was barely out of a coma, had contracted pneumonia, could hardly walk, had a grotesquely swollen arm where an IV was improperly inserted—but they’d summarily returned him to prison.

*

Over time, I began advocating for other prisoners with mental illnesses and their families, connecting with organizations doing amazing work and with other mothers like me. In 2011, we founded Mothers Offering Mutual Support, or MOMS. Since then, our organization has grown considerably. We even have a podcast. Advocacy, especially with other moms, gave me renewed energy, a sense of purpose and a community. Finally, I wasn’t carrying this burden alone.  

Thanks to my advocacy work with MOMS, I was appointed to a federal advisory panel monitoring the use of isolation in Canadian prisons. Ahmed had been sent to isolation many, many times, and it had had a deleterious effect on his mental health. My lived experience supporting him informed my contributions to the panel. Sometimes, along with my fellow panel members, I visited prisons to conduct assessments. On those visits, I was a panel member and not just the mother of a convicted prisoner, so I was treated differently.

It shouldn’t be that way. 

Families who visit loved ones in prison are watched, searched and shamed even though they’ve done nothing wrong, and studies have shown that maintaining family contact reduces reoffending. Correctional Service Canada, who manages the prison system, is supposed to prioritize rehabilitation and public safety. If that’s the case, they should acknowledge the therapeutic benefits of family visits and facilitate them—not make them more difficult. 

Over the years, Ahmed has worked to improve himself with the very limited and restricted means at his disposal. He’s learned many languages, for example, like Spanish and Russian, and when he’s well and capable he teaches language classes to other imprisoned men. The guards would even call him to another part of the prison so he could interpret for an elderly Afghan man who only spoke Urdu. That happened many times. I’m proud of my son’s resilience. 

The last time I saw him in person was in 2018, at Millhaven Institution in Bath. I hugged him goodbye at the end of the visit. Later that day, he called to tell me guards had publicly strip-searched him after we met. He was humiliated. I had never heard him so distressed. Although I wrote to the warden and pleaded with him to forgo the strip search because Ahmed had a clean history, the warden denied my request. I decided not to visit in person and put my son through that trauma again. 

After that, we started relying on video visits. But, sadly, Ahmed has recently stopped those too. I haven’t spoken to him since March 2025. I learned from a health care team member that he’s asked them not to talk with me about him, or about me to him. From what I can glean, I suspect he’s started to think I’m not his real mother.

So, I wait.

I long for a phone call, for a voice on the line that I’ll recognize as the familiar one I miss. I imagine him sounding calm, grounded, like himself again.

How are you, mom? I’m feeling better now, so I thought I would call.