A simple pat-down may have spared Ashley Smith’s life

TORONTO — The absurdity of it, the eye-rolling madness of it, never seemed to resonate with anyone at the Grand Valley Institution for Women.

There, the powers-that-be had two basic options: Search Ashley Smith until the cows came home and keep her safe from herself, or follow the doctrine of “least restrictive,” which, in the name of female bodily integrity, permeates the women’s side of Canadian federal corrections.

At its most simple, the choice was between a live teenager with injured pride or a dead one with intact dignity.

Consider what I think of as The Glass Conversation.

It took place on Sept. 22, 2007, less than a month before Ashley asphyxiated in her isolation cell at Grand Valley in Kitchener, Ont.

Now, at this time she had a big fat supply of broken glass and everyone knew it.

And everyone knew, too, that Ashley was a girl who liked to “tie up,” wrap homemade nooses around her neck and choke herself.

A week or so earlier, briefly moved to a regular range and given a cell with a TV set, Ashley had smashed it to bits.

That in turn had so enraged a middle manager that he frogmarched her back to segregation and put her back in her old cell without so much as a pat-down search — even though, as they walked the corridor, some of the glass Ashley had hidden all over her body tinkled noisily to the floor, like a trail of shiny bread crumbs.

This particular morning got off to a bang-up start when Ashley tied up—her face went purple, her neck was bloody — and the guards rushed in to cut off the ligature.

On the video, mandatory as a “use of force” incident and played Thursday for the coroner’s jury now examining Ashley’s death, she was gasping for breath.

Afterward, even she seemed shaken by how close a call it had been.

But before the hour was out, a female guard is heard on the video saying, “Ashley, why don’t you just leave that piece of glass” and then telling Blaine Phibbs, who appears to have been Ashley’s favourite guard, “She’s got a piece of glass in her hand.”

So Phibbs, talking to Ashley through the meal slot in her door, tried to learn about the shard he could not go in and retrieve.

“How long is it, compared to your finger?” Then he asked, “What colour is it?” And then he asked, “Is it straight on one side or jagged?” to which Ashley replied, “Jagged.”

Through the meal slot, the camera caught her face, and she smiled at Phibbs, a smile of indescribable sadness.

The video was paused then, and Jocelyn Speyer, coroner’s counsel, asked Phibbs some questions.

“Did you have any way to make her stop doing that?” she asked. “No,” said Phibbs. “There was no reason for us to enter the cell … the ‘least restrictive’ would be to have her do it (hand over the glass) herself.”

Prison management, he said, deemed the broken glass — even in the hands of this broken girl — to be merely “unauthorized” material, not “contraband.”

As he put it later, what guards understood was that “if she was hanging herself from the ceiling, we could have gone in. Because she was tying it around her neck, there was no imminent risk.” The lunacy continued. The nurse had been called to do a “health-care assessment” on Ashley, but it, the healthcare manager said on video, would be done through the meal slot “because it’s not safe to enter because the inmate is still in possession of a piece of glass she won’t turn over.”

Phibbs was later reprimanded for going into Ashley’s cell that day.

On Oct. 12, Ashley was assessed by a prison psychologist, who duly noted that she was “not willing to give up the piece of glass” — was there a single SOB in that prison who didn’t see the glass? — and put her on suicide watch.

Phibbs was working the Oct. 18-19 overnight shift.

About 11 p.m., he and Ashley had a long talk; she was upset by a nightmare that by the time she was released from prison her beloved mum would be dead. She had a ligature in her hand and Phibbs tried to persuade her to put it on the meal tray, so she could look at it and feel strong for not touching it, and he could see it and know she was safe.

She told him it was OK, “You guys are going to stop me, you’re going to come in in time” and “I won’t kill myself; I know what I’m doing.”

“You don’t know what we’re being told,” Phibbs said he thought to himself.

Early that morning, he learned “she had something around her neck and was lying on the floor.”

As they had so often done before, he and the other guards gathered outside Ashley’s cell, one man with the camera, the others trying to peer in through the cursed meal slot they used for everything.

For almost 10 minutes, they did this. Phibbs, for his part, thought Ashley was joking, was holding her breath, as she had done before. In fact, she was dying.

Probably no one in that prison was kinder to Ashley than Phibbs. He is still furious at how management handled her case, at the guards’ inability to be heard, at the restraints upon the tools they had.

All these things he mentioned when Speyer asked him what recommendations he would urge upon the jurors.

But even he didn’t mention searches.

For all the big questions at this inquest — the cruelty of keeping a teen in isolation for almost a year, the mendacity of the correctional bureaucracy, the stupidity of punishing the mentally ill — this little one, this matter of searches, might have kept her alive.