‘It’s going to take a very broad approach’
The Citizen revealed last week that the badly overcrowded Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre has used shower cells that measure eight by 10 feet to lock up two inmates at the same time or, as the jail calls it, “double-bunking.”
There are, however, no bunks. Inmates said they slept on mattresses on the floor, trying to avoid having bedding getting wet from the water in the shower room, which has a barred door.
The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services confirmed there were two “shower cells” in the jail’s segregation wing but would not say how many times the practice had been used.
Naqvi called overcrowding at the OCDC a serious problem and has asked his deputy minister to strike a task force, made up of managers, the union, a community advisory board and anyone else he chooses, to develop an action plan in the short term and seek long-term solutions.
“We’ve been calling for him to create a task force for awhile — we’re the ones who raised the alarm bells about putting people in shower stalls,” said Ontario Public Service Employees Union president Warren (Smokey) Thomas.
“All of a sudden, they admit they’re doing it. He’s ordered that doesn’t happen anymore, but the jails are still overcrowded. That’s just one little thing fixed. He has a lot more work to do.”
Thomas, who applauded Naqvi for previously committing to hire more correctional officers, said the task force should include frontline staff from the ministries of corrections, health and community services.
“It’s going to take a very broad approach,” Thomas said. “They can give your front-line experience of what happens to people with mental illness, what happens to people with development disabilities. You need to have them not be in a jail.”
Lawyer Paolo Giancaterino, who called housing one of his clients in a shower “nothing short of disgusting,” was startled by Naqvi’s admission.
“It’s surprising because before he said it wasn’t happening — now he’s saying it won’t happen again,” Giancaterino said. “It’s a start, but it shouldn’t have been happening in the first place.”
Giancaterino said that the task force has to include all the players in the justice system, including defence lawyers, prosecutors and judges, along with the federal government, which is responsible for criminal law.
“The bail system is totally broken,” Giancaterino said.
Six in 10 inmates at the OCDC — double the rate of a decade ago — aren’t being punished for a crime but are instead on remand, awaiting trial. Yet Giancaterino has had clients sentenced to serve jail time on weekends were sent home because there isn’t room.
“Yasir Naqvi can only do so much,” Giancaterino said. “The federal government has to get involved. We have to reform the way bail works in Canada because it’s not working.
“It’s about time that the situation is being put under a microscope and for the public to see what’s going on at the detention centre, how inhumane treatment of inmates is.”
Naqvi said that he has raised the issue repeatedly and is encouraged that the question is addressed in the mandates handed to the new federal ministers of justice and public safety.
“How do we reduce the number of people who come into our care and custody?” he said. “That is multi-faceted work that has to be done in terms of looking at bail and remand reform, looking at diversion. That work has to be done both at the federal and the provincial level.”
Aaron Doyle, a sociology and criminology professor at Carleton University who spearheaded a project drawing attention to conditions at the jail, said the Ontario government launched a project eight years ago to reduce court delays and the remand population. “We’re not seeing it,” he said. Nor is overcrowding a new problem, Doyle said, pointing to a 10-year-old media report in which the superintendent of the OCDC admitted inmates had, on occasion, been put in showers due to overcrowding.
Doyle wants members of his Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, advocates the John Howard and Elizabeth Fry societies, and a group of mothers of prisoners to be on the task force called in response to the shower revelation.
Crowding has to be addressed, but so does the lack of programs, support for the one-quarter of prisoners with mental illness, inedible food and lack of daily yard time.
“It’s shocking, but it’s like one piece of a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle of all the things that need to be dealt with there,” Doyle said.