Minister says jails due for overhaul
Ontario’s jails are getting overhauls that could include a major renovation or reconstruction for the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, Correctional Services Minister Marie-France Lalonde said Friday.
“We know we have an aging infrastructure. I’ve visited several jails and I hear from the correctional officers, I see sometimes areas where we need to improve on safety,” Lalonde said in an interview in her Ottawa-Orléans riding after touting the Liberal government’s new budget at an Innes Road Shoppers Drug Mart.
The provincial budget includes money for jail renovations, some of which are already underway.
Building new ones is a three- to five-year project, Lalonde said, beginning with fundamental questions.
“You have to go through what kind of 21st-century jail or environment we want to create for our inmates and our correctional officers,” she said. “It really depends on how big. How big of an environment would we need? Don’t forget that part of our correctional system reform is that we’re trying to have less individuals coming to jail. We’re also working very closely with our attorney general. He’s also working very strongly on remand and bail and having choices to present to the judge where we may not have to send someone to do their sentence inside the jail.”
The Innes Road jail has 560 official beds, but it’s often over capacity. It also has very poor facilities for inmates with mental-health problems and nearly four in 10 inmates across the province have mental-health “flags” on their files, according to provincial numbers.
“We have a very vulnerable centre of mentally ill individuals in our jail. Is a traditional jail the best environment for them?” Lalonde asked. “What do we need? What can we build that will be something new in Ontario that will set the stage for a new investment in Ontario?”
It’s not at all obvious that we know the answer to that.
The last new jail to open in Ontario was the Toronto South Detention Centre, which took six years from announcement to opening in 2014. It’s also Ontario’s biggest with 1,650 beds and was supposed to incorporate all the latest thinking on how to design and run a humane jail. Instead it’s been plagued by lockdowns, fights among inmates and complaints from its outside advisory board that it doesn’t have enough guards or medical staff. In February, Toronto Life magazine published a feature investigation on “The $1-billion hellhole.”
After the government decides what it wants to build, it’ll need to conduct public consultations and seek co-operation from city authorities, none of which is simple. It’ll also have to decide where the need is most urgent. Ottawa’s jail has problems, but it’s not the only one.
“There’s also Thunder Bay, there’s Sudbury, there’s North Bay. There is that component we have to take into account. But there is money, definitely, for new investment,” Lalonde said.
The government has had multiple damning reports on the Ottawa jail’s conditions and on the state of jails more generally.
In Ottawa in particular, Lalonde’s predecessor Yasir Naqvi appointed a task force after finding out inmates were being stashed in mouldy shower cells because correctional officers had nowhere else to put them. It made 42 recommendations, including two about making the detention centre less of a dump.
“(The government) should undertake a full facility physical inspection to improve health and safety conditions and create a more hygienic environment for inmates and staff,” the task force said. “This inspection would determine and recommend immediate maintenance and renovations, including, but not limited to, security, painting and cleaning of air ducts. It would also establish a long-term, lifecycle approach for the physical infrastructure.”
In other words, the Ottawa jail is dirty and some of it is falling apart. Inmates get little rehabilitation, have been stuffed into overcrowded cells, fed disgusting food and denied proper access to their families and even lawyers. Nobody expects a provincial jail to be a vacation spot, but inhumane conditions don’t help inmates, especially ones with mental-health problems, get better adjusted before they leave.
They also contribute to bad morale among staff, who’ve staged sick-outs. Some have been accused by former Ontario ombudsman André Marin of having beaten inmates and lied about it, though criminal charges against one fell apart after a botched investigation.
Lalonde is expecting a new report on jails in early May from Howard Sapers, the former federal corrections investigator the province hired last year to study the use of segregation on provincial inmates.
Then in the fall, Lalonde said, Sapers is to deliver a report on the broader state of corrections in Ontario. That’s when to expect firmer decisions on what will be built where, she said.
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