Mentally ill prisoners still go straight to ‘hole’

Four years of ‘decisive action’ later, solitary confinement remains default

Ontario’s corrections ministry has reneged on a deal to stop stuffing mentally ill jail inmates in solitary confinement because it doesn’t know what else to do with them, the province’s chief human-rights commissioner says.

This is perhaps the worst of the scandals in our provincial jails and it’s still going on four years after a landmark agreement to stop it. So Renu Mandhane is launching a complaint aimed at ordering the government to do what it said it would do back in 2013.

“When the government signs on the dotted line, it should be held accountable for its promises,” she said Tuesday. The Ontario Human Rights Commission (which advocates and advises) has filed papers with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (which can give instructions to the government), saying the government has breached its word.

The commission’s application asks for a rush hearing, citing the injustices being carried out in our jails right now.

There have been two major investigations of the system since the 2013 agreement, including one that’s still going on. Ontario’s ombudsman did one; the other is a special inquiry by Howard Sapers, the former federal investigator of abuses in prisons. Both the ombudsman and Sapers (in a first partial report) have said that segregation is still rampant in our jails.

Sick inmates have killed themselves. Many of those cases have been in Ottawa’s detention centre.

In the past year, two Ottawa inmates believed to have had schizophrenia, Justin St-Amour and Cleve Geddes, died by suicide while in custody, both having been kept in segregation cells.

The agreement Mandhane says the province has breached had its roots in the same OttawaCarleton Detention Centre on Innes Road with inmate Christina Jahn.

She was in jail for shoplifting, causing a disturbance and resisting arrest. For being a serious nuisance in public, pretty much. And then they put her in the hole for being a nuisance in jail, too.

Addicted, bipolar and severely ill with cancer, Jahn spent 210 days in solitary during two stints in the lockup — 23 hours a day in a windowless cell. She missed surgery and chemotherapy and went unmedicated. Sometimes the water didn’t work.

In 2012, Jahn filed a humanrights complaint about how she was treated, saying she was kept in solitary because she was mentally ill and also because she was a woman — Ontario’s jail system has a mental-health facility, but only for men.

In 2013, on the eve of the hearing, the Corrections Ministry all but agreed that she was right. It agreed to pay her $90,000 in compensation. More importantly, it promised to fix its mess, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

Under the deal, jails would screen new inmates for mentalhealth problems, train corrections workers better in dealing with mental illness and study the need for a secure treatment centre for women. Above all, the ministry promised to use solitary confinement only as an absolute last resort for sick inmates.

That hasn’t happened. Not even close.

“In a significant number of segregation cases involving individuals with mental illness, alternatives to segregation are not being considered at all,” the new complaint says, citing one of Sapers’ findings. It’s the default: Someone’s mentally ill, they go in solitary, same as before. Sometimes the consideration is done as a formality, with administrators “considering” putting inmates in special treatment units they don’t even have.

Geddes was waiting for the mental-health assessment the system promised. It takes an average of two weeks to get that done, a ridiculously long time for a sick person. Sometimes over a month. It should take 72 hours at the most, the rights commission says.

We haven’t broken our word, said Correctional Services Minister Marie-France Lalonde. We’re just really slow.

“My ministry has already moved forward on many remedies, including an inmate handout, screening tool and working with mental-health experts on a report that provides advice on improving access to mentalhealth services for female inmates. However, we know that we have a lot more work to do,” the Ottawa-Orléans Liberal MPP said in a written statement. “We continue to take immediate and decisive action to ensure that we are both safeguarding human rights and ensuring the safety of those placed in our custody.”

Four years of immediate and decisive action later, there still isn’t even a system-wide definition of “segregation.”

It varies from jail to jail. It’s whatever the segregation cells look like, governed by whatever policies and practices the institution has. How long you spend in there, how much exercise you can get, whether you can read, whether you get any natural light — there’s no standard.

Segregation is meant for people who are too disruptive or vulnerable to be in regular cells, but if their underlying problem is that they’re out of touch with reality, locking them away alone for weeks at a time is no way to make them better.

Even if jails do use segregation as a last resort for mental illness, they’re still doing it because it’s the only resort they have. Nearly 40 per cent of Ontario’s inmates have mental-health flags on their files; that’s not the same as a formal diagnosis, just a warning to corrections officers, but it indicates how big a problem this is.

It also speaks to what’s really going on here, which is that vast numbers of people with mental illnesses are going untreated until they act out enough to be jailed and then they’re being sent to jails that don’t know what to do with them.

The province is getting around to opening a mental-health facility for 24 female inmates in Brampton next year — nearly five years after the Jahn deal, in which the province promised to get it done in no more than three.

Jahn’s lawyer Paul Champ is involved in the new complaint, too. She’s still alive, he says, though she’s now very ill.

The Corrections Ministry is on its fourth minister since 2013, which can’t help, but that’s not sick inmates’ problem. When we arrest people and keep them in custody, we take on responsibility for everything. For sheltering them, feeding them, keeping them safe and treating their illnesses.

Doing this properly costs some money, yes, but not doing it isn’t an option for civilized people.