KENNEL PENS INHUMANE
It was Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky who said: “The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”
By that measure, Canada’s standing improved a week ago in Alberta with the overdue dismantling of a set of outdoor exercise cells so cramped and humiliating that inmates at the Edmonton Institution called them dog kennels.
Echoing Dostoyevsky’s adage, it took a visit by an outsider to the segregation unit at the prison to bring the treatment of some of its incarcerated individuals to light.
The cells were disassembled coincidentally after that visitor — Ivan Zinger, Canada’s correctional investigator — provided photos of the units to the media in hopes of putting pressure on Correctional Service Canada. That it took this long to scrap the pens after seven years in operation reflects poorly on the agency and Canada’s reputation as a human-rights champion.
The outdoor cells were constructed in 2009-10 to meet the requirement of giving each segregated inmate with a daily hour of fresh-air time. The institution at times may have had 40 or more prisoners in its segregation unit. It was too many to safely accommodate in the available yard space so the enclosures were built to keep inmates apart.
Unfortunately, a makeshift solution evolved into standard practice at the institution. Zinger notes prisoners already enduring the psychological and physical strain of segregation, or solitary confinement, were forced to exercise in cages smaller than their cells. Some inmates found the pens too humiliating to use.
These cages come to light during a time when Canada’s use of prison isolation is under increasing scrutiny for its toll on health and its role in the suicides of some behind bars. Even the UN says more than 15 consecutive days of solitary confinement amounts to a form of torture.
Policy changes are also taking effect this month to reduce the use of segregation in federal prisons such as banning its use on those with serious mental illness, the physically disabled, terminally ill and others.
Some may find it difficult to feel much sympathy for convicted criminals, especially those whom authorities feel must be isolated from the general prison population, but inmates can be placed in solitary for a variety of reasons and there have been allegations of inmates being segregated unfairly.
If the long-term goal is to forestall criminal behaviour in those who will one day return to the streets, confining already-segregated prisoners to exercise pens which enrage or humiliate them is hardly conducive to rehabilitation.