Ontario’s jails can’t even count their dead, review finds
‘The system has evolved to the point where it must be made over’
Ontario’s Corrections Minister Marie-France Lalonde will rewrite the law governing the province’s jails, she promises, after realizing there are few central rules for how we treat inmates who are at our mercy.
She’s driven by a final report from Howard Sapers, formerly the official in charge of handling inmate complaints in federal prisons. The province hired him to tell it what to do about a jail system so bad it let one particular inmate, Adam Capay, languish in solitary confinement in Thunder Bay for years, awaiting a trial, apparently forgotten.
Here’s how bad the situation is: We don’t even know how many people have died in our jails, Sapers discovered, and there are no definitive rules on what should happen when someone does.
“Ministry policy and memoranda provide conflicting directions regarding whether superintendents must contact the next of kin when an inmate dies,” says his report, released Tuesday. “There are no ministry directions, resources, or policies regarding a number of other relevant issues, including funeral, burial, or cremation costs.”
If we can’t be sure what to do with a dead body, imagine how we treat live inmates and all their complicated needs and problems.
Whom inmates can see and for how long. How much time they get outdoors. The conditions they sleep in. How often they get stripsearched. What rehabilitation programs they take. Whether they can write to elected officials without having their letters censored. These vary from jail to jail across Ontario. The jails were built in different eras, using different ideas for how inmates ought to be kept, and are staffed differently.
“All of that conspires against best and humane practice,” Sapers said as he released his report. “When you don’t have enough people on the job site, you can’t escort people, you can’t get people onto recreational yards. You can’t deliver programming.” You don’t get inmates rehabilitated, which is supposed to be the point.
Provincial jails hold people sentenced to less than two years — their inmates are supposed to be fixable.
“If the purpose of corrections is to contribute to a peaceful and just society by assisting those in conflict with the law to learn to live within it, then the work of corrections must be done in a way that models ethical, legal and fair behaviour,” Sapers says.
Ontario’s corrections work doesn’t. It models slop, neglect and randomness.
Take visitor policies. In some jails, inmates can have one visitor at a time; in others, it’s three.
In some jails, children can visit; in others, they can’t. In some places, visits are “open” and inmates and visitors can hug; in other jails, they see each other only through glass.
Or worse. We just built new jails in Toronto and Windsor with video equipment, which was not cheap. Screens and cameras in cellblocks, linked to visitor rooms.
“Although these video terminals were designed to allow families to remotely connect with their loved ones, alleviating the need to travel to the institution, this functionality has never been activated,” Sapers’ report says.
We make inmates’ relatives go to the jails to see inmates on screens.
Take strip searches, which the Supreme Court has found are inherently degrading and can only be done when there’s a good reason. In Ontario, they’re routine. Policy says we stripsearch inmates whenever they enter the jail (including after trips to court), any time they’re in a disturbance, any time they’re put in solitary, and both before and after open visits. Also, every time their cells are searched, which is supposed to happen at least every other week — or, for an inmate in solitary, every single day.
Keep in mind we use solitary confinement for everything, including inmates with mental illnesses the jails aren’t equipped to handle.
“The majority of jurisdictions in Canada have put in place laws that explicitly prohibit the suspicionless strip searches that regularly occur in Ontario,” Sapers’ report says.
Grinding a boot into a scumbag’s face doesn’t get you a reformed citizen after a year.
Teaching inmates how to be better people works. Helping them keep connections to supportive families works. Occasional passes work, for inmates who earn them. Parole and supervision works. We do almost none of these things. We have two modes: caged like an animal and free.
“The system has evolved to a point where it needs to be made over,” Sapers said.
Which brings us back to MarieFrance Lalonde, the minister in charge and a social worker by training.
Lalonde followed Sapers to the microphone at his Toronto news conference and agreed with pretty much everything.
She promised a new corrections law this fall — yet another major overhaul of a major provincial law to be squeezed into the next few months.
“Work is already well underway. This new legislation will redefine correctional services in Ontario.”
The ministry has hired 1,100 new corrections workers in the last couple of years, Lalonde said, a big step toward reducing the number of arbitrary lockdowns. And Sapers praised some changes to the way the OttawaCarleton Detention Centre, in particular, is run, especially a new process for taking and responding to inmate complaints.
Legislation can only be a start, said Irene Mathias, a spokeswoman for Ottawa MOMS, a mutual support group for mothers with incarcerated children.
Legislation has to be followed by rethinking everything about how Ontario’s jails work.
“There are a lot of big chunks of reform needed, some of which Mr. Sapers has ably defined,” she said. “Which chunk gets done first is not as important as having a plan that links all the parts together, and does not allow reform to deteriorate into fixing isolated parts of the system.”
Ontario’s jails need better food, she added, and renewed attention to spiritual and cultural support for prisoners from minority groups. The government has earned no benefit of the doubt here.
We can believe the government’s good intentions when we see the promises made real.
The majority of jurisdictions in Canada have put in place laws that explicitly prohibit the suspicionless strip searches that regularly occur in Ontario.