‘Too little, too late’ to stop virus in jails: inmate
An inmate serving time at a federal penitentiary for women where the coronavirus spread to more than half the offenders and dozens of guards has filed an application for a class-action lawsuit against Canada’s attorney general.
Joëlle Beaulieu believes she was the first inmate to contract the coronavirus at the Joliette Institution, 70 kilometres north of Montreal, and alleges Correctional Service Canada did “too little, too late” to prevent the spread of the virus “and exposed the incarcerated population of Quebec to this disease.”
Over the weekend, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies decried the situation at the Joliette Institution and said 50 out of the 80 inmates have been diagnosed with COVID-19. The Union of Canadian Correctional Officers reported that as of Tuesday, 34 guards at the penitentiary tested positive and 22 have since recovered.
The class-action application makes the argument that federal authorities in charge of penitentiaries in Quebec did a poor job of taking measures to prevent the spread of the virus in those institutions.
Correctional Service Canada’s statistics support Beaulieu’s argument.
As of Monday, 114 inmates at three federal penitentiaries in
Quebec had tested positive for COVID-19. That includes 51 at Joliette and 49 at the Federal Training Centre, a minimum-security institution in Laval. The second-highest numbers are in British Columbia, where 64 inmates have tested positive in one penitentiary.
According to the application, Beaulieu has been incarcerated at Joliette for the past year.
She works as a cleaner at the penitentiary, and cleaned the administrative offices near the entrance. The application says that at the start of the crisis she asked for gloves and masks to wear while she did her work, but was supplied with only gloves.
Three weeks into March, Beaulieu experienced symptoms including fever and muscle pain. She decided to stop her work and told her supervisor she would stay inside her unit. Days later, on March 26, she visited Joliette’s infirmary; according to Beaulieu, someone checked her vital signs but did not do a full exam. She was told that because she had not travelled recently, she likely only had the flu. She was advised to take Tylenol and water and was placed in a unit where two other women experienced the same symptoms.
The following day, authorities agreed to test her for the virus after other inmates complained about being in the same unit as the three who had symptoms.
“To her knowledge, (Beaulieu) was the first (person) to test positive for COVID-19 at the Joliette Institution. Several other women tested positive afterward, including some in different units than those where Beaulieu stayed,” her lawyer Philippe Larochelle wrote in his application for the class-action suit.
“(Beaulieu) has profoundly suffered because of the actions of the defendant. She felt helpless, frustrated and depressed. While she was sick, she felt like a dangerous parasite.
“Above all, after seeing at what point the defendant reacted inadequately to the pandemic, she no longer feels safe under their responsibility.”
If the class-action suit is authorized, Larochelle is asking that each inmate who joins be paid $100 a day — beginning from March 13 and ending at “the return of normality” — for punitive and compensatory damages. It also seeks $500 for each inmate who tests positive.