Advocates, Legal Aid union call for targeted jail releases

Advocates are calling on the Saskatchewan government to release inmates with pre-existing health conditions and those who pose no risk to public safety in an effort to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading within provincial jails.

The Saskatoon jail is the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in the provincial corrections system. As of Monday, 116 inmates and 26 staff had tested positive, according to numbers provided by the Saskatchewan Government and General Employees Union, which represents corrections workers.

On Tuesday, Corrections, Policing and Public Safety Minister Christine Tell said “many” precautions have been taken since the start of the pandemic.

“Why it came into the facility with all the precautions, I can't answer that,” she said. “There's no possible way for us to find out.”

Opposition NDP justice critic Nicole Sarauer said she wasn't surprised by Tell's statement.

“If she's not worried about figuring out where this started, it makes me wonder if she worries about the safety of the inmates and the staff in our correctional centres,” Sarauer said, adding that Tell is “a minister who shouldn't be a minister anymore.”

Sarauer said inmate populations have risen since the summer to near pre-pandemic levels, despite ministry efforts in the spring.

Between mid-march and midMay, the number of inmates in provincial custody fell by nearly 30 per cent. By mid-august, the trend had started to reverse.

During the first wave of the pandemic, the province did a “good job” of reducing the number of inmates in custody in jails, said Julia Quigley, president of CUPE Local 1949, which represents about 130 Legal Aid staff in the province.

Quigley said there's no reason a similar reduction isn't happening now.

“The government's been caught flat-footed on that,” she said.

There's also a lack of supports for people who are being released that ensure they have a safe place to go, she added. Quigley said there's a risk of returning vulnerable people, many of whom have health issues, into precarious housing situations or having them return to their communities.

Consistently, over the last five years, about three-quarters of inmates in Saskatchewan's jails are Indigenous.

Tell has previously said prosecutions staff took the pandemic into account when assessing bail matters in the spring, and it's the ministry's understanding that will continue now.

Quigley doesn't thinks this goes far enough.

Earlier in the pandemic, advocates called on the province to release non-violent inmates to reduce numbers at jails and prevent the spread of COVID-19; they have now renewed that call in an open letter co-signed by the John Howard Society of Saskatchewan (JHSS), Community Legal Assistance Services for Saskatoon Inner City (CLASSIC), the Elizabeth Fry Society and Pro Bono Law Saskatchewan. The letter argues for the release of all inmates, whether sentenced or remanded, who are older, immunocompromised, non-violent, at low risk to reoffend or likely to “disproportionately suffer from complications of COVID-19.” They also want hotel accommodations for anyone who is released and has to self-isolate.

Pierre Hawkins, public legal counsel for the JHSS, said addressing the overuse of remand is a good first step, but the government must also address sentencing issues.

“We're not calling for a get outof-jail free card, we're calling for sentences to be transferred into the community so that that risk falls for the individual inmates released, but also for the wider prison population.”