Jail lockdowns up to start year
With 29 in 2 months, pace represents 20-per-cent increase over last year
The number of lockdowns due to staff shortages at Ottawa’s jail is on pace to be even higher this year than last, when the jail was fully or partially locked down a recordsetting 147 times.
There were 29 full and partial lockdowns at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre in January and February — the equivalent of one every second day.
Lockdown totals for March, April or May aren’t yet available, according to the provincial ministry that oversees the jail.
The total over the first two months of the year puts the jail on pace for a total of 174 lockdowns this year if the current rate remains steady, or a nearly 20-per-cent increase over the previous year.
The new lockdown numbers were released a day before a provincially-appointed task force is set to make recommendations to Yasir Naqvi, Ontario’s minister of community safety and correctional services, about how to ease overcrowding and other problems at the jail on Innes Road. The task force was appointed after the Citizen reported on inmates’ being forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor of damp and mouldy shower cells.
The 15 full and partial lockdowns in January could be partially explained by a labour dispute that nearly resulted in a strike. The jail was locked down for several days as managers from other ministries arrived to run the jail in the event there was a strike. The jail was also locked down for several days after the strike was averted, as correctional officers needed to search the jail for contraband.
But the totals in February remained almost as high, with 14 full and partial lockdowns, even though it was a shorter month and the jail had by then resumed regular operations. However, the number of full lockdowns fell to three in February from 10 in January.
Clare Graham, a spokeswoman for Naqvi, said January was a “difficult month” because the jail was still operating with reduced staffing levels.
“Once the COs (correctional officers) were back in the institution and new staff began to transition in, we began to see a shift from full to partial lockdowns,” she said.
A full lockdown is when the entire jail is locked down and inmates must remain in their cells. A partial lockdown occurs when just specific units are locked down.
The total number of lockdowns in January and February had decreased about 20 per cent over the totals of the last two months in 2015, Graham said.
Graham added it would be “premature” to forecast the year based on only two months of statistics.
Graham said the ministry has committed to hiring 81 more correctional officers at the detention centre, in addition to 43 hired since 2013. Many of those new hires have just started working at the jail in the past few months.
“With the (labour) agreement in place and our continued hiring of more staff, we’re hopeful that we will see fewer lockdowns as we move forward,” Graham wrote.
But lawyer Paul Champ, who is representing current and former inmates of the jail in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the province that was launched last week, called the situation a “crisis.”
“With full and partial lockdowns almost every other day, that interferes with family visits. It interferes with lawyer visits. It interferes with yard time, it increases tensions throughout the entire facility, and when you think about people being triple bunked, it’s frankly cruel and inhumane,” Champ said.
He estimates that up to 50 current or former inmates have signed on to the proposed class action lawsuit launched by a pair of former inmates.
Denis Collin, president of the OPSEU local representing Ottawa correctional officers, said he found the numbers from the first two months of the year surprising. Collin said new staff have been posted at the jail, and it feels like lockdowns are becoming less routine.
“I would be predicting by September those numbers will change,” Collin said, himself a correctional officer at the jail.
“I could see those numbers going down dramatically.”