Guards all but barred from entering Smith’s cell
It was toward the end of a long day in the witness stand at the Ashley Smith inquest for Michelle Bridgen, a nowretired veteran employee of the Correctional Service of Canada.
Bridgen was drained and a little defeated. She seemed emotionally blunted.
But for a moment, for whatever reason, when lawyer Julian Roy suggested that an inmate’s safety surely trumped everything else — it was a beach ball of a question — Bridgen actually disagreed.
Roy was questioning her about the events of Oct. 8, 2007, when correctional officers were ordered by another manager not to go into the teenager’s cell for almost five minutes even though they could no longer see her, and in the last glimpse they had, her face was purple from the ligature around her neck.
And then, when that manager himself arrived on scene, he first took the time to set up a tripod for the video camera and the mandatory taping of the guards’ belated entry into Smith’s cell.
Bridgen wasn’t there, but she was at a meeting the next day where all this was discussed.
Roy asked his question, meant as a rhetorical one, then: But surely, he said, an inmate’s life supersedes all other concerns?
“We have an obligation to record,” Bridgen snipped back. Roy was staggered. “You’re not suggesting they’re (the two concerns) of the same import?” he asked.
“About the same importance,” Bridgen said.
Roy, who represents Smith’s family, asked, “Is that true?”
After a pause, her face reddened, Bridgen replied, “No.”
She hadn’t meant it. She was so beaten she was prepared to agree with whatever proposition was put to her or she was tired past sense or she had been being flippant.
But her answer raises a question about how much truth any of us — but particularly those who were responsible for Smith at the Grand Valley Institution for Women — can bear.
At the time the 19-year-old asphyxiated in her segregation cell at the Ontario prison, Bridgen was a middle manager who had qualified for promotion to warden and was waiting for a vacancy to open up somewhere.
She had the appalling title of Manager Intensive Intervention Strategy, or MIIS. A new job that was then part of a nationwide shuffling of the deck, it was supposed to involve managing high-risk, high-needs inmates just like Smith, those who had mental health and behavioural problems in spades.
But, as Bridgen acknowledged, “No one actually understood yet how this was going to work,” least of all her.
Like so many others who have testified here, Bridgen has developed a narrative of how Smith came to die and a vision of her own place in it. Probably, this is a necessary human response to such awful tragedy.
Smith, remember, strangled in her cell the morning of Oct. 19 while COs — among them those who liked her most and who were her best therapists — dithered outside it, unsure of whether they should go in to cut off the ligature.
And they dithered because over the previous months, their self-confidence had been shattered by ridiculous orders from their bosses, themselves under the gun from regional and national senior managers who wanted better statistics.
Guards were very often entering Smith’s cell to save her life, but each entry was deemed a “use of force” and each generated a ream of paper that made everyone look bad.
So was the most contemptible order born: Guards weren’t to go into Smith’s cell to cut off a noose if she was breathing.
That in turn led to absurd permutations — was she breathing normally? How tight was any given ligature? Did a blue face mean go in, or was it purple?
The other day, jurors listened to a manager explain how she had used Smith’s foot — butted against a wall — as a sign she was still breathing.
Sometimes, in fairness, a foot was all the guards could see of her, for Smith routinely hid herself and blocked windows and cameras in her cell.
If the COs went in, and it turned out she was still alive and, say, jumped to her feet (even with a swollen face) or started fighting them, the guards were later called on the carpet, some disciplined, for going in too soon.
It was chaos, utter madness, and after Smith died, Bridgen and many others had to come to terms with what had happened, and how they had conducted themselves.
Bridgen’s own story goes like this: She herself never told the guards not to go in Smith’s cell if she was breathing, not just that anyway. Why, she added qualifiers such as, walking, moving, talking. And yes, she heard the warden and deputy warden say that guards should wait until there was imminent danger.
As Roy put it, “They weren’t to head things off ?” Bridgen agreed. “They were to wait for just that moment of imminent danger and then go in?”
“I believe so, yes,” Bridgen said.
“The danger was that Ashley would die?” Roy asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Medical distress.”
“So staff should wait for imminent danger,” Roy said. “Imminent death?”
“I’ve never looked at it like that,” Bridgen said. “But that’s how it appears.”
Like the others, she was so deep in the hideous dance, all she could see were her own feet.