Guard breaks $25,000 silence

Fired after Ashley Smith’s death, then given bonus

When it appeared that Blaine Phibbs and three of his fellow correctional officers were going to carry the can for Ashley Smith’s death — they had been charged criminally after she died on Oct. 19, 2007 — their employer, the Correctional Service of Canada, was only too happy to fire their arses.

First, the four were almost immediately suspended without pay; by January of 2008, they were done.

Magically, documents that proved the guards had been acting on orders from their bosses in the CSC weren’t disclosed to the Crown by the time their preliminary hearing began that fall.

As a result, at the end of the hearing, the prosecutor told the judge, he had to reconsider things.

As a result, a week or so later, on Dec. 8, 2008, he told the court there was no longer a reasonable prospect of conviction, and asked the judge to discharge all four guards.

But, as Howard Rubel, who represented the guards at that criminal proceeding and does so now at the coroner’s inquest probing Ashley’s death, asked Mr. Phibbs Monday, “You were still fired?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Phibbs.

Yet just a few months later, the CSC reversed his firing, offered to allow him to resign and to pay him for the hours he would have worked — at time and a half and double pay.

They even threw in free career counselling and a bonus of $25,000 to allow Mr. Phibbs to “go back to school.”

All the dear correctional service asked in return, Mr. Rubel pointed out, was Mr. Phibbs’ silence.

Until he took the witness stand last week, where he remains, Mr. Phibbs had kept his end of the bargain — which, understandably given that his reputation and employment prospects were rather dimmed, he accepted.

The mendacious and mindless nature of the vast CSC bureaucracy by no means began or ended with its treatment of Mr. Phibbs and his colleagues.

As coroner Dr. John Carlisle and the five-member jury have already learned, blaming the guards for Ashley’s death was but the easy and superficial solution to the complicated, duplicitous and sometimes sinister manner in which the 19-year-old was treated during nearly a year in the federal prison system.

Using one of the homemade ligatures she regularly fashioned and used to “tie up,” Ashley asphyxiated in her segregation cell at Grand Valley Institution for Women, a federal prison in Kitchener, Ont. The guards had stayed outside Ashley’s cell the morning she died, trying to assess her condition through the ridiculous means at their disposal — a complete inability to search her for either the broken glass everyone at the prison knew she had hidden in her body, and which a middle manager had allowed her to obtain, or the cloth nooses she cut with the glass; a camera in the control room that couldn’t be turned on if a male guard was on duty (because of the “crossgender protocol”), and which was replaced by “direct observation” by a guard stationed outside her cell, except that the observation took place through a four-inch wide meal slot in the cell door.

And while the guards dithered, their confidence undermined and their humanity dampened by the people for whom they worked, Ashley died.

In fact, Monday, the jurors learned that even that day, the day Ashley died, two guards were under active investigation by CSC, one for having once entered Ashley’s cell too soon, the other for having searched her.

Mr. Phibbs himself had been “counselled” — it’s a form of discipline — for having rushed in to cut off a ligature from Ashley’s neck on Sept. 22, not a month earlier.

The jury has seen the video of that incident, one of several times that day Ashley had tied up. (She sometimes tied ligatures seven or eight times a day.) Her face had turned purple; she audibly gasped for air when the ligature was cut off.

Yet on Oct. 9, 2007, there was deputy warden Joanna Pauline writing Eric Broadbent, the “correctional manager,” ordering him to counsel Mr. Phibbs for having gone into the cell too soon.

Ashley was at Grand Valley twice, once in May-June of 2007, the second time from September until she died.

At first, the guards would go into her cell any time she had a ligature; until that June, this never got any of them in trouble, and earned some of them, like Mr. Phibbs, praise for having acted correctly.

But in June, the orders changed, and the guards were told not to go into her cell unless Ashley appeared to be in distress, whatever that was to mean.

And then, sometime later, certainly by September, the orders changed again: Now, guards were told, they shouldn’t go into Ashley’s cell — even if she had a ligature — unless she had stopped actually breathing. If they thought her life was in danger, they should let a manager know and until the manager arrived on the segregation unit, they should “time her breaths.”

Thus it was that on Oct. 19, as Ashley, ligature round her neck, was face down on the floor of her cell, wedged between the wall and her metal cot, outside it, her guards were counting her breaths, peering in through that infernal meal slot and trying to walk the impossible line between acting in time and saving her and not acting so soon they would be hauled on the carpet.

There is much reference at this inquest to Ashley Smith as a mentally disturbed young woman, though it isn’t clear yet if she was ever diagnosed, only that she was never treated.

There was insanity in this mix, but it didn’t belong to Ashley or her guards, rather to the still mostly anonymous middle managers and senior bureaucrats who so cheerfully set the standards of absurdity and inhumanity.