People are dying behind bars. Where’s the outcry? the Toronto Star
We still don’t know the name of the person who passed away while being detained at the Laval Immigration Holding Centre on Jan. 28, but we do know they were one of several people who have died behind bars over the course of only the past six weeks in Canada.
“We do not have any information about the person who lost their life while in custody of the Canadian Border Services Agency,” reads a press release by the Montreal-based migrant justice network Solidarity Across Borders. “All we know is that they were a migrant detained for administrative purposes: i.e. for not having papers. This person should never have been detained in the first place, and now they are gone. No one should ever be detained.” (Only British Columbia is currently reviewing the practice of incarcerating immigration detainees in provincial jails.)
A month earlier, 31-year-old Tamara Frances Lucier died while being held at the South West Detention Centre in Windsor, Ont. She was waiting for a bed in a mental health facility. “I went hysterical to hear my daughter was gone when she should have been safe,” said her father, Wilfred Lucifer, in a media interview.
And on Jan. 26, Jeffrey Ryan, 34, died after a “serious assault” in a prison in Drumheller, Alta. Following the inmate’s killing, the John Howard Society called for “urgent action to reduce violence in our federal prisons.”
These most recent deaths are only the latest examples of how Canada’s prison system remains deeply dysfunctional. As these cases point out, it sometimes fails to provide even a basic standard of care for people who are held for a variety of reasons, including their immigration status or based on charges related to issues of mental health. A 2017 report by Reuters found that 270 people were killed while in provincial jails over the span of five years, two-thirds of whom were legally innocent.
Annu Saini, a former inmate who was held in detention in 2010 for 90 days, has been writing to inmates as part of a coalition called Write On! Supporting Prisoners Through Correspondence. She told me in an interview that she was traumatized after she was held in solitary confinement.
“If I didn’t [have mental health issues], I would after that,” said Saini.
A report released last year found that federal prisons continue to breach human rights obligations with the ongoing use of solitary confinement, which in 195 instances constituted “torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” The research also showed that Black prisoners were held in these conditions for longer than other groups of prisoners, and that an inmate’s mental health was not taken into significant consideration. Furthermore, nearly 39 per cent of stays involved Indigenous prisoners. A subsequent study found a lack of adequate oversight.
“Many Canadians do not care how our prisoners are treated,” wrote academics Jane B. Sprott, Anthony N. Doob and Adelina Iftene, the report’s authors. “They are seen simply as people who committed offences. But Canadians should care if they care about human rights; or if they care that a government organization is being allowed to operate outside of the law.”
Solitary confinement is also an issue in provincial institutions. Over 12,000 people — 46 per cent who had a mental health alert on their file — were placed in segregation between June 2018 and June 2019, according to a 2020 motion filed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission to end the practice.
“Ultimately, we as a society need to acknowledge the failure of the prison system,” wrote Saini in a 2018 commentary. “It is a place that, at best, does nothing to reduce crime and, at worst, is where innocent people go to die.”
Where’s the justice in this system? Where’s the outcry?