New Nova Scotia data raises concerns about use of solitary confinement

Close to a quarter of solitary confinements in Nova Scotia’s jails are due to medical issues or protection from other inmates, according to recent figures offering a glimpse of why offenders in the province spend weeks buried in virtual isolation.

Experts say the statistics are worrying, especially when isolation is used for non-disciplinary reasons.

“You’re denied access to human interaction, you have very limited access to the outside world. … It’s a very austere form of confinement,” says Howard Sapers, who recently prepared recommendations for reforms on the use of segregation in Ontario. “Segregation is not therapeutic,” said the former Correctional Investigator of Canada.

The list of “closed confinement” cases from February to June this year show about 80 confinements out of 600, or about 13 per cent, are for medical reasons. In addition, more than one in 10 cases of the solitary confinements were for “protection of the offender,” which often means an offender risks violent attacks by other prisoners.

The province defines closed confinement as “a restriction imposed on an offender to a cell or isolated area ... that limits interaction with other offenders,” with guards only required to give offenders 30 minutes of fresh air exercise daily. Medical confinement includes prisoners “recovering from a surgical procedure,” and “illness,” which officials say includes mental health diagnoses. Sean Heywood, 29, has frightening memories of being in closed confinement in the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility’s health unit.

He said 90 days in a windowless, segregated cell with a bed and toilet meant brief, bi-weekly interactions with a psychiatrist, deepening despair and a lack of preparation for a transfer to a federal jail’s general population.

“I was put in an isolation cell and there’s not access to anything. I think I got outside twice in the 90 days I was in there,” he said of his experience in 2013.

“I went from borderline personality disorder to ideas of suicide.”

Sean Kelly, director of corrections in the province, said in an interview efforts are being made to reduce solitary for non-disciplinary reasons, with prisoners permitted to continue in programs and more flexibility in the amount of time spent with other inmates.

Kelly said “the majority” of 43 medical confinements at the Halifax jail and 15 in Pictou County were in the prison’s health unit cells, rather than solitary confinement units used for punishment.

However, he said there aren’t health-unit cells available for the 18 cases in the provincial jail in Sydney and three in Yarmouth’s facility.

A committee is looking at alternatives, he said. “Rather than thinking of reasons why they (inmates in medical confinement) need to stay there, we need to think of reasons why they can move out into the general population,” said the administrator.