Like hostages in a never-ending drama, hundreds of prisoners have found themselves thrust into a more-than-two-year labour dispute at the Toronto South Detention Centre. As a result, those imprisoned within the superjail have experienced miserable living conditions that have drawn the ire of judges, criminal lawyers and human rights groups.
Most days in this superjail feature a 24-hour-a-day lockdown in a 3.6-by-2.4-metre cell, with two inmates to a cell. In February 2016, the security manager at the jail, Michael MacLennan, told a court this was “much like solitary confinement.”
While the provincial government and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents jail guards, argue about the number of staff needed to run the jail, the facility can be locked down simply because one jail guard calls in sick. Inmates are beginning to feel like collateral damage in a prolonged and bitter labour conflict.
The untenable labour situation must end soon, before any more harm is done to people confined in that facility, and to the administration of justice in this province.
Let’s share a glimpse of what lockdown is like for the prisoner. Try to imagine being locked in your bathroom with a stranger for days on end while meals are shoved through a hatch at the bottom of the door. Trying to prepare a defence? No access to counsel or Legal Aid. Necessities of life? No family visits, no showers, no change of clothes, no exercise. Privacy? All bodily functions are performed in the open, just steps away from your cellmate.
You might say this is all anecdotal reporting, so how do we know any of this is accurate? First, judges hear complaints about lockdown conditions on a daily basis. We are told that guards refer to the jail derisively as a “plea factory” — a reference to the belief that inmates take the first opportunity to plead guilty to get out of the superjail. Also telling is the corroborating evidence from another maximum-security superjail, the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, Ont. In a civil claim for a breach of Charter rights resulting from lockdowns occurring at the facility, the Ontario Superior Court awarded damages to two inmates in May 2016.
In Ogiamien v. Ontario, the court held that conditions of detention during lockdowns are much like solitary confinement.
“The inmate is holed up with another inmate not of his choosing,” said the decision. The court also found confinement for 24 hours a day, caused by lack of jail staff, was degrading and an outrage to standards of decency thus violating s. 12 (cruel and unusual treatment) of the Charter.
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What is noteworthy about the conditions at Maplehurst is that they are virtually identical to the conditions being reported from Toronto South.
To be clear, I do not speak for the Ontario Court of Justice and I take no sides in the labour dispute at the Toronto South; I just happen to be in a unique position to shine some light on what seems to be interminable suffering.
In Boone v. Ontario, Justice Robert Blair commented: “There has been a growing recognition over the last half-century that solitary confinement is a very severe form of incarceration, and one that has a lasting psychological impact on prisoners.”
And, as Justice Douglas Gray pointed out in Ogiamien, “being forced to co-exist in lockdown with a stranger 24 hours a day may be worse than solitary.”
Think of the possibilities. You could be holed up with the kindest, most gentle cellmate or someone who is seriously aggressive in any number of ways. That may help to explain the steady stream of Toronto South residents to our plea courts who are prepared to accept any sentence just to get out of that building.
Most inmates at Toronto South are on remand as they await the outcome of the charges against them and most days the jail is locked down, by all accounts. Not that anyone deserves this kind of inhumane treatment, but it is hard to overstate the harmful effect of placing presumptively innocent people in such horrific conditions. In a recent United Nations report on revisions to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (to which Canada is a signatory, 1975), the authors concluded that “fifteen consecutive days in solitary amounts to torture.” Does this treatment of prisoners at Toronto South somehow become acceptable if there are a few days of lockdown respite in any 15-day period, thereby just falling short of the UN definition of torture?
Daniel Brown, defence counsel and Criminal Lawyers’ Association director, made some comments on this matter in the Toronto Star in May. Brown pointed out that conditions like this are regularly condemned by Canada elsewhere, but when practised here, they are met with complacency as if they were “an acceptable form of correctional cost control.”
In Ogiamien, the court heard from a former inmate who testified about being deprived of access to counsel, family visits and showers while locked down, and was told by guards, “If you don’t like it, riot.”
Meanwhile, back at Toronto South, administrators have regularly informed the media that conditions are at a “crisis” level. Nothing has changed to date.
Surely, it is time for decisive action, such as an inquiry or task force with a brief reporting mandate. As a community, we need to end this lockdown crisis now and restore reason and fairness to what should be a safe, secure and humane environment. There has already been so much study of the problematic use of solitary in Ontario. Ending this abusive practice in pre-trial detention centres should be the highest priority.
Peter Harris is a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice.
