Suffering in solitary
Inmates behave bizarrely, because ‘where can you go, but into your mind?’
The woman lay on the floor of her small seclusion cell, restrained and naked underneath a thick, heavy gown.
Her wavy hair was matted, defeat etched on her face.
She appeared groggy as she lay there, bound at the chest, ankles, thighs and wrists. A nurse stood watch at the door of the windowless 2-by-2.5-metre room. The bed was an unyielding concrete platform, 15 centimetres high.
“She couldn’t move at all. I got down on the floor, put my head down so she could see me,” recalls Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, describing the scene she encountered. The woman, whom Pate had met before through her advocacy work, was being held at the Regional Psychiatric Centre (RPC), a secure forensic treatment centre in Saskatoon. The facility is primarily a psychiatric hospital, but also a prison. It treats mentally ill offenders and accused and has a separate unit with about a dozen beds for women.
RPC staff told Pate that the woman, who had been arrested and charged with taking a social worker hostage in Nova Scotia, was in the seclusion room because she’d tried to harm herself.
The centre insists it’s not the same as segregation, but rather a clinical setting with observation by psychiatrists once every 24 hours.
Pate’s work takes her inside segregation cells to speak with female prisoners, most of whom are barely hanging on.
The woman she saw that day looked humiliated and defeated, Pate says, adding seclusion is “complete sensory deprivation.”
“It’s no wonder so many people develop bizarre behaviours and mental health issues when they’re in those conditions, because where else can you go, but into your mind?”
“We shouldn’t take it as a given that the only means of managing people who are troubled is to isolate them.” LAWYER ALLISON THORNTON COUNSEL FOR CANADIAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ASSOCIATION
WHETHER IT’S CALLED seclusion, isolation, segregation, “therapeutic quiet” or solitary confinement, lawyers at the Ashley Smith inquest representing Elizabeth Fry, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Smith family say the terms amount to the same thing: a prisoner locked in a bare room with no stimulation and basically no interaction with others.
Aside from getting to the bottom of how Smith, 19, died of self-asphyxiation in a segregation cell on Oct. 19, 2007, at the Grand Valley prison for women in Kitchener, a number of the groups with standing at the teen’s Toronto inquest, including Pate’s Elizabeth Fry, have another goal in mind.
They want to ensure the inquest leads to significant reductions in the use of segregation in Canadian prisons, and a ban on it for mentally ill offenders.
Segregation, these groups argue, causes severe and long-lasting damage.
Canada is “not on the cutting edge and we’re not trending in the right direction,” when it comes to the use of segregation, argues Toronto lawyer Allison Thornton, counsel at the Smith inquest for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
“We shouldn’t take it as a given that the only means of managing people who are troubled is to isolate them.”
The push is part of a larger effort in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere to begin dismantling, or introducing strict new measures, for inmate segregation.
Juan Mendez, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, has issued a report calling for all countries to reduce and in some cases abolish segregation.
Solitary confinement should only be used in “very exceptional circumstances” as a last resort, and for as short a time as possible, Mendez says in his findings.
The use of solitary for juveniles and people with mental disabilities should be abolished, he says. THAT CONCERN was echoed a few weeks ago by a representative for Howard Sapers, Canada’s correctional investigator, the ombudsman for federal offenders.
Ivan Zinger, executive director and general counsel for Sapers’ office, addressed an international conference hosted by the University of Manitoba’s law faculty on the subject of human rights and abolishing solitary confinement.
Sapers is calling for an absolute ban on the practice of placing men- tally ill offenders and those at risk of suicide or serious self-injury in prolonged segregation. In an interview, Zinger said segregation is a “grossly overused” prison population management tool. He points to Correctional Service of Canada statistics showing there were 8,700 placements in segregation during the years 2011-12, impacting 5,000 federal offenders, or about a quarter of the 20,500 inmates incarcerated in a penitentiary during that period. Zinger calls the figure astonishing. Aboriginal offenders were 31 per cent of those in segregation, blacks 10 per cent, women 5 per cent. The average length of stay was 35 days for men, seven for women. As an alternative to segregating mentally ill offenders, Zinger says Corrections Canada should put resources into creating “intermediate care units” that would be staffed with interdisciplinary teams of psychologists, nurses, social workers and psychiatrists. Inmates in emotional or mental health crisis could be sent to these units instead of segregation, Zinger argues. He says Corrections Canada missed an opportunity in its recent decision to spend more than $600 million to build new jail cells or refurbish existing ones, work that began about two years ago. Money should have been invested in creating intermediate care units, he argues. Currently only one such pilot project exists, at the soon-to-be-closed Kingston Penitentiary. The unit began in November 2010 and can handle up to 32 inmates. ASHLEY SMITH, a mentally troubled teen who had a history of acting out, and who, her inquest has heard, had a compulsive habit of self-harming, was kept in segregation for most of her three years in the youth correctional system, and the majority of her 11 months in the federal prison system. The Smith inquest has heard testimony from wardens, psychiatrists and a parole officer who worked inside one of the women’s prison she was held in, and they all maintain that, given her behaviours, the only tool available to preserve her life and safety was segregation. One psychiatrist suggested she was “ambivalent” about being in segregation, but there has also been testimony that she often became despondent alone in her cell, and expressed strong desires to get out. In a statement to the Star this week, a Corrections Canada spokesperson said segregation is used as a last resort for the shortest period of time necessary to manage the serious risk posed by an inmate’s association with other inmates. Specific legal requirements must be met in order to place an inmate in administrative segregation, spokesperson Lori Pothier said in a statement. Corrections Canada is currently enhancing its policies regarding the management of offenders with self-injurious and suicidal behaviour, and is conducting quarterly audits to ensure mental health considerations are taken into account in decisions to initiate or maintain segregation placement, the statement said.
Segregation provisions call for reviews within institutions for offenders who’ve spent 30 days in isolation, and Corrections Canada regional and national office reviews at the 60-day and 90-day points respectively.
But the Smith inquest has heard that these clocks were restarted whenever she moved into a new prison — her behaviour, and the search for the right institutional “fit” for the teen, meant she was constantly on the move.
And this past week the inquest heard how she spent most of her nearly 115 days from late 2006 to spring 2007 at RPC, the forensic hospital in Saskatoon, where there was no external review mechanism — though reports are kept on those in seclusion at the centre.
SOLITARY CONFINEMENT dates back to America nearly two centuries ago. At that time it was seen as a favourable tool, a substitute for capital punishment and a way to give prisoners time to think about their misdeeds.
Now some prominent U.S. voices are coming out against it.
Earlier this year, a committee of the New York state bar association issued a report urging prisons there to “profoundly” restrict the use of long-term solitary confinement.
Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, a leading expert on the mental health effects of solitary, addressed the Manitoba conference, and also used the term “grossly overused” with regards to solitary in the U.S.
“I have seen over and over again, individuals who have been kept indefinitely in solitary confinement for punishment of behaviour that is a product of serious mental illness, and that confinement just makes them sicker, more out of control in their behaviour, and thus subject to more and more punitive segregation,” he said in an interview.