Seven of 10 Ontario inmates in segregation ‘legally innocent’
Ontario has hundreds of legally innocent jail inmates in solitary confinement without clear rules for how they get put there, what their conditions should be like, how they should be checked on, or when they should get out, the provincial government’s special adviser on the problem reported Thursday.
“We tend to assume that people are in custody because they have committed serious crimes and present a risk to society, and that segregation is reserved for ‘the worst of the worst,’ ” Howard Sapers said. “These presumptions do not reflect the reality in Ontario. Last year, seven out of 10 inmates in Ontario’s segregation cells were legally innocent — on remand, waiting for their trial or a bail decision.”
That statistic includes Adam Capay, who spent four years in solitary confinement in Thunder Bay awaiting trial on a murder charge. Capay’s not a great poster boy for anything (the murder he’s accused of was itself inside a jail) but there’s every indication the system simply forgot he was there.
Sapers was the federal corrections ombudsman for a decade so he knows the business. He resigned near the end of a second term to do this job for Ontario.
“I expected to find a system that, while not problem free, was generally well-managed, adequately staffed and resourced and supported by modern information technology and management capacity and practice,” Sapers reports.
“What I found was a thinnedout and overstretched workforce, the work of corrections being carried out in the shadow of strained labour relations and the legacy of ideological, not evidence-based, decisions about infrastructure, program design and service delivery.”
Front-line staff do pretty well with the terrible resources and conditions they’re given, he said.
Sapers’ work produced an immediate promise from Correctional Services Minister Marie-France Lalonde, who’s also the MPP for Ottawa-Orléans, that she’ll totally overhaul the law on provincial jails by this fall.
His is the third thick account of the jail system’s failings to thump down on the desk of the third minister to hold the portfolio in the past year. Ontario’s human-rights commission and its provincial ombudsman have reported on how the government stuffs hundreds of inmates into solitary because it doesn’t know what else to do with them, too. It follows smaller reports on problems in individual jails, especially Ottawa’s, where inmates have slept on shower-cell floors, been ignored while they’ve been in labour, been kept for months in solitary without reviews.
Truly, our reliance on segregation is a sign of how badly we’ve screwed this up.
Jailing people is supposed to be a last resort. By the time someone is behind bars, all the things we’ve tried in education and social services and previous court appearances and maybe health care — they’ve all failed.
“Corrections is at the bottom of the social service and criminal justice funnel,” Sapers’s report says. And segregation is the bottom of the funnel in corrections.
Some inmates go there because they’re disruptive and dangerous to others, as we’d imagine. But a full 40 per cent of the people in solitary confinement are there for their own protection or because they have medical problems their jail doesn’t know how to handle any other way. That can mean 23-plus hours a day in isolation, locked in a room without human contact.
(Even being disruptive isn’t always the problem it appears: The report has a jail nurse telling Sapers’ investigators about inmates who, because of “operational issues,” didn’t get medication prescribed for pain or drug withdrawal. They’d get upset and act up and get thrown in solitary as a punishment.)
Clearly corrections officials know this is a problem: Sapers dug up a memo from a regional overseer telling staff that when they’re filling out paperwork explaining why an inmate is in solitary for a long time, please stop mentioning their wheelchairs. Just say it’s “based on the needs and safety of the inmate.”
Vulnerable people in jail need to be protected but solitary confinement can’t be the only way to do it, Sapers said. And if the data you’re collecting shows that what you’re doing is bad, the problem isn’t with the data.
“Medical segregation, protective custody and special needs units are all defined and governed exclusively by ministerial policy and institutional orders and practices. None of these more restrictive forms of custody are mentioned in legislation or regulations,” Sapers found.
That means the rules are the loosest and lightest possible. “Institutional practices” aren’t even rules. Policies are typically written down but they’re not readily available even to inmates or their lawyers, so who knows if they’re being followed.
The lack of standards leads to big differences from jail to jail. Our own Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre had the longest segregation stays of any institution in the province last year, with the average segregated inmate doing 26 days in solitary. The provincewide average was 12 days.
Bizarrely, even as the provincial government was realizing it had a problem with segregation, the use of it in Ottawa specifically more than doubled: we had an average of 31 inmates segregated in our 560-bed jail in 2015, but 65 of them on any given day in 2016.
This is a top-to-bottom disaster. Sapers has 63 recommendations on what to do, most of which it’s hard to argue with at all. Some of the key ideas:
We need to start with a law that lays out what segregation in jails is, what it’s for, and when it can and can’t be used.
We need proper reporting on how segregation is used and independent reviews of extended stints in solitary — not having the same guards who put an inmate in segregation deciding whether he or she should stay there.
We can’t put inmates in solitary just because they’re sick; if we don’t have proper infirmaries or secure hospitals, we need to build them, and their staff should work for the Ministry of Health, not the jail system.
We need to take mental-health treatment in jails seriously, and not let guards ignore doctors’ orders because they’re inconvenient.
When inmates are in segregation they should be able to read and have access to music or the radio, see natural light during the day and sleep at night.
“I have the luxury of not costing my recommendations,” Sapers admitted. But he wasn’t asked to. He was asked to tell the government what it’s doing wrong.
Transferring health care to the health ministry is already in the works, Lalonde said after Sapers presented his report Thursday morning. Ottawa and Thunder Bay will get new, larger jails, though designing and building them will take years. And that reform law is coming soon, she said.