The plan to transform jail system

Too many people in jail, they say

Protesters who don’t want Ontario to build a bigger jail in place of the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre demonstrated Friday to call for better community support for people charged with crimes.

A year ago, Ontario announced that Ottawa and Thunder Bay would get bigger jails after years of overcrowding in the current jails.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services arranged to meet some community groups in Ottawa Friday, but postponed that meeting a few days ago.

Instead, several dozen protesters stood near the downtown Marriott Hotel at Kent and Sparks streets, where the meeting was scheduled to take place, to voice opposition to a bigger jail. They say the problem lies in putting too many people in jail in the first place. Most of the prisoners at OCDC are awaiting trial, not serving sentences.

“Building community requires doing more to address inequalities contributing to social harm,” said Justin Piché, a criminology professor from the University of Ottawa. “Jail expansion takes resources away from this work.”

The money should be spent on treating drug addiction and giving support to people who have none in this city, he said.

In her early 20s Charlotte Smith was in and out of OCDC. She was homeless and was taking drugs.

Now 29, she is finishing a degree at Carleton University and says that help through Rideauwood Addiction and Family Services did what the jail could never do for her.

“I didn’t see bad, evil people (in jail),” she said. “I saw wives, mothers, daughters, people with families waiting for them on the outside, and some people who had not a single soul waiting for them or who cared about them.”

The jail did nothing to help her overcome her life of living from crisis to crisis, she said.

“Help is not what you get in OCDC. We couldn’t access mental health supports, housing supports, (or) supports for addiction.

“I didn’t meet a single person there who didn’t have a strong desire to change their life but there was simply no help … And you can’t solve it in jail. When you’re

I didn’t meet a single person there who didn’t have a strong desire to change their life but there was simply no help.

released, you are worse than when you went in.”

Smith said she began to feel that there was a steel wall separating her from “decent society,” a feeling she overcame only when Rideauwood counsellors spent a year helping her fight addiction, find stable housing and eventually get back into school.

“We’ve organized this event today so that different community groups can come forward and talk about different alternatives to incarceration,” said Lydia Dobson from the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project.

“There are going to be a lot more beds in the new jail, and what we would like them to focus on is instead of putting more people in jail, looking at different ways to prevent people from ending up in jail.”