[AicapAifap] Canadian Prisons

[Alliance of Incarcerated Canadians/Foreigners in American Prisons]

“No Reason to Treat Us Like Garbage”: Life and Death in Canadian
prisons
February 10, 2018 By El Jones 

1. The Weekenders
Recently, news stories circulated about incarcerated women in Arizona
being denied access to menstrual products. 
When we hear stories about prison conditions in the United States,
people in Canada often believe that these injustices do not happen in
our prisons and jails.
This is a mistake.
I have been hearing for a long time from women serving weekends in
Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility and their family members
about the terrible conditions they are subjected to.The Burnside jail.
Photo: Halifax Examiner
According to women who have served intermittent time in the Burnside
facility, feminine hygiene products are not adequately available to
women on the weekend range. Women have reported coming in with a
tampon inserted and having to leave it in for extended lengths of
time, or having to resort to stuffing toilet paper in their underwear.
Women have also struggled with getting access to clean underwear and
other hygiene products. Being forced to bleed on their clothes or be
unable to properly wash their bodies is extremely degrading and
humiliating and leaves the women feeling “like animals.”
Women also allege that mental health services are not accessible over
the weekends. One woman described how it took four years for her to be
sentenced, and in that time the stress of her case resulted in
significant mental and physical health challenges. During her weekend
sentences, she experienced severe urges to self harm, but she was not
able to talk to anyone.
Women have also reported that the weekend range is infested with ants.
This problem has apparently existed for a long time, and is not
improving. While the province is investing $1 million in body
scanners, including two for use at the Central Nova Scotia jail, women
are sleeping with ants crawling over their bodies, and they say they
have been told that funds for extermination are limited. Women report
that they have complained repeatedly, but nothing has been done.The
women also say they have no access to the day room while they are
serving weekend time, so they cannot get books or other recreational
products. One woman who is attempting to complete her GED during her
sentence shared that although the GED books are available, she could
not get a calculator to complete the math problems. Women also have
had difficulty getting pens or paper. The inability to engage in basic
activities like reading or writing to pass the time and occupy their
minds also has a significant effect on the mental health of those
serving sentences.
While the perception may be that since weekend sentences are
“short” (Friday night to Monday morning), a couple of days without
access to hygiene products or books or clean clothes is no big deal,
denying women serving these sentences basic rights and dignity should
not be acceptable just because they return to the community for the
week. While no prisoner should be subjected to degrading conditions no
matter what they are accused or convicted of, people serving weekends
are convicted of extremely minor crimes, and many maintain jobs and
are responsible for caring for children during the week. They should
not be subjected to more severe conditions of incarceration just
because they can shower or change on Monday.Many women describe how
the conditions they experience over the weekend significantly impact
their mental health in the rest of their life — for example, one
woman parenting a child with significant developmental challenges
spoke about the difficulty of spending the weekend suffering in jail,
and then spending the week at the hospital with her child while
struggling with depression and anxiety caused by the conditions during
her sentence.
Because they must return to the jail every weekend for their
sentences, and because many of them feel their employment or custody
is vulnerable because of their record, these women are afraid to speak
out about the conditions they face in case they experience
retaliation. Women reasonably fear that if they complain, their
employers or families may find out that they are serving time.
This extreme vulnerability and fear of being exposed as “criminal”
has made women unable to advocate for themselves and scared to contact
services like the Ombudsman or justice advocates even when they are
“free” during the week, and so the conditions have persisted. And
because the women are serving on weekends, they have little or no
access to what advocacy services there are inside the jail.
Many women are living in extreme anxiety all week for months as they
anticipate returning every weekend into traumatic and humiliating
conditions. As one woman put it, “we make mistakes in life, we pay
for them, and that’s how we learn and grow, but there’s no reason
to treat us like garbage.”
Editor’s note: We’ve asked the Justice Department for comment, and
will update this post when they reply.
2. Another Death in Custody
Another man has died in custody in New Brunswick, reports Rebecca Lau
for Global:
An inmate has died at the Southeast Regional Correctional Centre in
Shediac, N.B.
The 49-year-old man was found unresponsive in his cell on Thursday
night.
The Department of Justice and Public Safety says staff called 911 and
tried to revive the man, but he died at 6:35 p.m.
“Efforts on behalf of correctional officers and medical staff to
apply first aid, including the use of an automated external
defibrillator (AED), were unsuccessful,” the department said in a
statement.
“Paramedics were on site to provide resuscitation procedures.”
Coroner Services and the RCMP were notified of the death and will be
investigating. As well, Correctional Services Canada will launch an
internal review.
The department says they will release the man’s name once next of
kin are notified.Image from cbc.ca
In New Brunswick, as in Nova Scotia, there is no requirement for a
public inquiry following a death in custody.
Not only is there no public inquiry, but finding out the number of
deaths in jails and the names of the deceased is a struggle. As
Karissa Donkin reported for CBC in 2016:
A CBC News investigation has found that 13 people have died inside
[New Brunswick] provincial jails since 2004 but only four cases have
been subject to a public coroner’s inquest.
Details about the remaining nine cases remain largely secret.
The provincial government has agreed to start telling the public when
an inmate dies in jail.
But the Department of Public Safety won’t apply its new policy
retroactively to provide details about the 13 deaths.
In the death of Matthew Hines in Dorchester Penitentiary in 2015,
officers who beat and then pepper sprayed Hines repeatedly in the
shower while he begged for his life cleaned up bloodstains from the
scene, and claimed they found Hines in distress. Staff filed false
reports, and lied to Hines’ family. As Donkin reports, the guards
involved were not disciplined until 15 months after Hines’ death.
Two officers have since been charged with manslaughter and criminal
negligence.Matthew Hines. Photo: CBC
There was recently a fire at the Shediac jail in October started by
cigarette butts in a employee-only area. Justice Minister Denis Landry
described the smoking of staff in a non-smoking jail
“disappointing,” Karissa Donkin (again!) reports here on the fire
investigation, and also notes:
One day before the fire, the province’s ombud emailed the deputy
minister of justice and public safety to raise alarm bells about
rising tension at the Shediac jail between inmates in general
population and protective custody.
Charles Murray’s office saw a spike in the “volume and nature”
of calls with complaints about the jail. The ombudsman is responsible
for investigating complaints for provincial inmates.
“None of our investigators (some of whom have been with us 20+
years) can recall anything comparable,” Murray wrote in an email to
deputy minister Mike Comeau on Oct. 24.
Employees were doing their best, Murray wrote, but the tension level
wasn’t coming down.
“We’re concerned a major incident is likely if this trend
continues.”
Ironically, the jail fire may have helped defuse some of the tension.
The unit that remains out of order housed maximum security inmates,
who have all been moved to other jails, Murray said in an interview
Friday.
He also believes the fire improved relationships between staff and
inmates, who had to work together to escape the fire.image from
ctvnews.ca
So we have a death in a jail where employees have recently been
revealed to have been violating policy and bringing contraband to the
facility, at a time where there were prior concerns about the
likelihood of a major incident and an unprecedented level of
complaints, in a facility where there has recently been massive
upheaval due to the fire and where the building itself is damaged,
disrupting staff and housing arrangements.
Yet an internal investigation — which apparently can’t find a
smoker who caused a serious fire — is to be trusted to tell the
truth about the deaths of people in custody and to be honest about any
failures by staff that might have prevented this death, or worse,
contributed to it.
We know that staff were revealed to be willing to break the rules by
smoking and endangering the facility — and that the rest of the
staff are presumably also protecting the smokers and not revealing who
they are since the investigation is still ongoing — but we are told
we can trust that an internal investigation will be sufficient to hold
any staff accountable in this death if it’s necessary.
In 2014, officers from the facility held a protest about their
frustrations with their contract and working conditions.
The correctional officers are also raising concerns about the dangers
they say they face on a daily basis.
“We deal with violence, threats of harm against officers and our
families, we deal with contraband weapons, we deal with riots, uproars
and disputes,” says local CUPE president Cindy Welling.Image from
atlantic.ctvnews.ca
It’s of course possible that staff could have done nothing to
prevent this death. We have no information at this point to know what
happened. The point is that in order to determine what happened in a
transparent and believable way, we should not be relying on internal
investigations in facilities that hold complete power over the people
inside, by institutions that have been shown repeatedly to
“misrepresent” events inside their walls, and that historically
have covered up, stonewalled, and prevented access to information
about these deaths.
Every death in custody should warrant a full and public investigation.
More than a dozen deaths in provincial custody in a little over a
decade should be causing alarm. Sherene Razack has written about how
deaths in custody are seen as inevitable, just what happens to those
kinds of bodies. Consistently, the death is read as just a problem
within the weakened body (by drugs or alcohol, by the streets) and not
caused by policies in the jail, neglect by staff, or by the practice
of jailing instead of treating people in mental or physical distress.
Rather than reading deaths in custody as a systemic problem, the jail
is seen as a place where the person was sent to be saved, a place that
just can’t prevent deaths from the things people do to themselves.
And I can’t help but think that if the victims of deaths in custody
weren’t so often people suffering with mental illness, people with
addictions, and people who are transient, that perhaps there would be
more political will to care about preventing more deaths and getting
justice for families.
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/no-reason-to-treat-us-like-garbage-morning-file-saturday-february-10-2018/#1.
The Weekenders

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