Top-to-bottom disaster laid bare by jail report
Ontario has hundreds of legally innocent jail inmates in solitary confinement without clear rules for how they get put there, what their conditions should be like, how they should be checked on, or when they should get out, the provincial government’s special adviser on the problem reported last week.
“We tend to assume that people are in custody because they have committed serious crimes and present a risk to society, and that segregation is reserved for ‘the worst of the worst,’ ” Howard Sapers said.
“These presumptions do not reflect the reality in Ontario. Last year, seven out of 10 inmates in Ontario’s segregation cells were legally innocent — on remand, waiting for their trial or a bail decision.”
That statistic includes Adam Capay, who spent four years in solitary confinement in Thunder Bay awaiting trial on a murder charge. Capay’s not a great poster boy for anything, but there’s every indication the system simply forgot he was there.
Civilized societies do not throw people into dungeons.
Sapers was the federal corrections ombudsman for a decade so he knows the business. He resigned near the end of a second term to do this job for Ontario.
“What I found,” Sapers reports, “was a thinned-out and overstretched workforce, the work of corrections being carried out in the shadow of strained labour relations and the legacy of ideological, not evidencebased, decisions about infrastructure, program design and service delivery.”
Front-line staff do pretty well with the terrible resources and conditions they’re given, he said.
Sapers’ work produced an immediate promise from Correctional Services Minister Marie-France Lalonde that she’ll totally overhaul the law on provincial jails by this fall.
Our reliance on segregation is a sign of how badly we’ve screwed this up.
Jailing people is supposed to be a last resort. By the time someone is behind bars, all the things we’ve tried in education, social services, previous court appearances and maybe health care have failed.
“Corrections is at the bottom of the social service and criminal justice funnel,” Sapers’s report says. And segregation is the bottom of the funnel in corrections.
Some inmates go there because they’re disruptive and dangerous to others, as we’d imagine. But a full 40 per cent of the people in solitary confinement are there for their own protection or because they have medical problems their jail doesn’t know how to handle any other way. That can mean 23-plus hours a day in isolation, locked in a room without human contact.
Corrections officials know this is a problem: Sapers dug up a memo from a regional overseer telling staff that when they’re filling out paperwork explaining why an inmate is in solitary for a long time, please stop mentioning their wheelchairs. Just say it’s “based on the needs and safety of the inmate.”
This is a top-to-bottom disaster. Sapers has 63 recommendations on what to do, most of which it’s hard to argue with at all. Some of the key ideas:
We need to start with a law that lays out what segregation in jails is, what it’s for, and when it can and can’t be used.
We can’t put inmates in solitary just because they’re sick; if we don’t have proper infirmaries or secure hospitals, we must build them, and staff should work for the Ministry of Health, not the jail system.
We need to take mental-health treatment in jails seriously, and not let guards ignore doctors’ orders because they’re inconvenient.
“I have the luxury of not costing my recommendations,” Sapers admitted. But he wasn’t asked to. He was asked to tell the government what it’s doing wrong.