Ontario jails can’t go on this way

Ontario is astonishingly out of step with modern standards — and common decency — when it comes to running jails. It’s past time this changed. A report this week from Howard Sapers, the former federal corrections investigator who was appointed to do an independent review of our provincial jails, painstakingly details the ways in which Ontario’s penal policy falls flat, dehumanizing prisoners and their families and failing to adopt consistent, provincial regulations. He even points out that Ontario isn’t properly counting or investigating the deaths of incarcerated people.

Around 66 per cent of those in Ontario’s jails are legally innocent — they’re awaiting trial on a range of offences. Those who have been convicted are serving less than two years (anything longer and they go to a federal prison). In short, inmates in Ontario’s jails are generally those we expect will return to society in the not-too-distant future.

Yet many Ontario jails continue dehumanizing practices.

Strip search policies illustrate the point. “The majority of jurisdictions in Canada have put in place laws that explicitly prohibit the suspicionless strip searches that regularly occur in Ontario,” the report says. It’s a regulatory wild west in our provincial jails.

Or, this: “Ontario does not have any parentchild or mother-baby programs.” Quebec and British Columbia, in contrast, do. Here, the corrections ministry doesn’t even keep records of the number of pregnant women in custody. As well, “an incarcerated mother who wishes to bond with her baby will not be given that opportunity while in custody in Ontario,” the report says. Unless there is an “approved kinship agreement,” which places the child with relatives, it’ll be given to a Children’s Aid Society, and the woman returned to her cell.

When a system is unable to let mother and child bond, something is seriously wrong.

It’s hard to say what comes next — but maybe improving the lives of infants and pregnant women is a decent place to start. As of Thursday, there were 587 women in Ontario’s jails, of the total 7,438 people held.

Beyond administration problems, from record-keeping to transparency, there’s the challenge of those held in jail before trial, and the fact that 25 of 26 provincial institutions are maximum-security. People being held there don’t have many opportunities, such as work programming or other activities, so they just languish. Most institutions don’t have risk-assessment procedures, and inmates and those on remand are in maximum-security by default. (The ministry doesn’t even know how many medium or minimum-security units there are in the province.) This is, to put it mildly, a mess. Corrections Minister Marie-France Lalonde, who’s also the MPP for Ottawa-Orléans, says legislation is coming soon to overhaul the jails. Next June, though, is the provincial election, and the Liberals are on a bill-introducing spree, so it’s not clear how much can get done before election day, or whether another party that might conceivably take power would follow up.

This isn’t just about isolated cases of awful food or mouldy shower cells — as we’ve seen at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. It’s about wholesale change at Ontario’s jails.

What’s needed is clear legislation, transparency and reporting mechanisms that do not vary between institutions.

Other jurisdictions, such as Alberta, which tracks fatality inquiry recommendations and government responses on a website, provide a template.

It’s a matter not just of political will, but of public safety and rehabilitation. No government can ignore this.