Corrections operations need serious correction
The provincial Liberal government is a lousy jailer.
Nova Scotia’s Auditor General Michael Pickup has uncovered some shoddy practices in the government over the past few years, but said he was “shocked” to find so much so very wrong in the operation of the four provincial corrections centres.
He left no doubt that the government is worse at running jails than everything else it is bad at, and he set a new personal high by proposing a dozen recommendations to correct corrections.
Guards aren’t getting the proper training and the holes in the jail’s hiring practices are big enough to drive a getaway car – or squeeze an otherwise unemployable Liberal – through.
One person was hired without any reference checks, no criminal record check, no check with the child abuse registry, and he or she didn’t even complete the required pre-employment questionnaire. “Come on in and grab a truncheon.”
The province’s director of corrections was unable to provide assurances that there aren’t people with criminal records working on the inside of one or more Nova Scotian jails right now.
Pickup wouldn’t offer an opinion on why hiring and other practices are so lax, but said he hopes the legislature’s public accounts committee will call senior justice departmental officials to get to the bottom of that.
The committee will almost certainly take his advice, but past is prologue so don’t expect any light to be shed on how or why the government let the jails go to pot, quite literally given the slack search procedures the audit uncovered. Senior civil servants have become well practiced at dodging the committee’s questions.
But back to the jails where a course for corrections officers on understanding and responding to mental illness was discontinued in 2014 and not replaced until February 2017.
The department had set a 2020 deadline to get all corrections officers that training but the auditor’s report lite a fire under someone, and that’s been pushed ahead to March 2019.
Given the prevalence of mental health issues among offenders, allowing that gap in vital training to persist seems like an abject failure in responsible corrections. The department maintains that other mental health-related programs have been available to guards in the interim.
The auditor found steps missing in the hiring process for guards in 75 per cent of the cases examined. By “steps missed” the auditor wasn’t talking about a missing high school transcript. In some cases, guards were hired without writing the required test and missing background checks are a common occurrence.
Once hired, guards seem to go to work without completing the necessary training.
The auditor said only four of the 20 guards examined had completed all necessary training. Examples of missing courses included the mental illness training, recognition of emotionally disturbed persons, and suicide interventional skills.
Among the non-guard staff, almost 80 per cent had not received the required training to de-escalate a conflict.
Guards aren’t getting their refresher courses, either. Sixteen of 20 officers examined had not requalified in such areas as use of force, emergency first aid, and fire and evacuation procedures.
The auditor also cited cases of inmates confined in solitary longer than permitted by departmental policy, and force used on inmates when guards were unaware of any medical conditions they might have, including one case in which a Taser was issued although not used.
Records of guards completing the required rounds of cells were missing and prisoner search procedures were breached.
“Correctional facilities are not adequately searched. Department policy requires staff to regularly conduct searches to find contraband such as drugs and weapons. We reviewed a sample of search records from each correctional facility and identified several instances of searches not completed as required,” the report states.
Justice Minister Mark Furey says the department is already working on implementing the auditor general’s recommendations, and the department claims some of the problems are poor documentation rather than bad practice.
That could be, but you’d expect jails to be one workplace where documenting everything that goes down is important. Removing a person’s freedom is the most severe sanction available in Canada, so when it is done it better be done right, and with proof it is done right.
Maybe no one cares much about the inmates, but offenders in provincial corrections facilities are there on remind, intermittent sentences or for less than two years. Seems like we ought to take a shot at making them better when they leave than they are when they arrive.