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| John L. Hill |
Earlier, the head of Corrections Canada resigned when the Arbour report into incidents at Kingston’s prison for women gave a scathing criticism of the appalling treatment of women inmates. The investigation was sparked by the CBC’s airing of footage of a male riot squad stripping and shackling several female inmates at the Kingston prison in April 1994. Justice Louise Arbour admonished the service for failing to live up to its mission of openness, integrity and accountability following the events. Too often, she found, the approach was to deny error, defend against criticism and react without a proper investigation of the truth.
Once again, the brutal and possibly even criminal conduct of jail guards is the subject of investigative reporter Brendan Kennedy’s Toronto Star report, published on March 31. The newspaper sought access to videotape footage of the assaultive behaviour of guards at Ontario’s Maplehurst Correctional Complex that happened in December 2023. The tape depicted the coordinated collective punishment of 192 inmates, most awaiting trial, sitting cross-legged in a corridor, heads bowed, facing a wall, clad only in underwear. The jail’s Institutional Crisis Intervention Team was deployed. Over two days, the team moved from cell to cell, strip-searching the occupants, and in some cases using pepper spray or inflicting physical torture, including broken bones. It had been suggested that the deployment was retribution for an assault on a correctional officer by an inmate two days previously.
It was only after the media became involved that these abuses became public. The videos were released to the Star upon application to the Ontario Court of Justice, following the newspaper’s freedom-of-information request for a copy of the tape, which had been denied by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General.
Justice Colette Good of the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford said, “The media and the public have a right to watch these videos where this government institution and its members are breaking the law by abusing the very prisoners they have a duty to protect.” She added that if the court refused to provide public access, it would give the impression that the court was “protecting one of its own by trying to cover up evidence of a significant government scandal.”
Abuses at Maplehurst are well known to the criminal defence bar. Recently, defence counsel Jeff Hartman of the Toronto firm Lockyer Zaduk Zeeh focused on the conditions at the detention centre in arguing for a lesser sentence for his convicted clients. He has seen some success. In two recent cases argued by Hartman, R. v. Dooley and R. v. Sanchez-Neria, Justice Mabel Lai of the Ontario Court of Justice commented that Hartman was not wrong in characterizing the conditions at Maplehurst as a suspension of the rule of law. Enhanced credits for pretrial custody may be one way to impress upon the relevant ministry that it, too, must abide by the law.
Sometimes, even public exposure is ineffective in curtailing jailhouse abuses. A CBC story documented how a young Indigenous offender, Matthew Michel, begged staff at a Regina youth detention centre to kill him since he could no longer mentally deal with his head encased in a motorcycle helmet and his body bound by a device called the Wrap. His torso, legs and ankles were bound and connected to a shoulder harness that kept his body at a nearly 45-degree angle, with his hands cuffed behind his back locked to a carabiner. The Wrap was used by jail staff to punish Michel into compliance. The Wrap is authorized for use in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick. The day following the airing of the CBC report, this merciless way of treating youthful offenders made headlines as far away as Australia.
The program sparked a petition urging the federal and provincial governments to abolish the Wrap as a torture device. The petition noted: “The Wrap, which immobilizes a youth into forced compliance, threatens their physical and psychological well-being and growth. It is essential to acknowledge that youth in detention are already vulnerable, having experienced various abuses and traumas contributing to their custody and detention, particularly for Indigenous youth. Subjecting them to further harm through such a restrictive and punitive technique is unjust and counterproductive.”
Perhaps consideration should be given to the establishment of provincial correctional investigators whose duty it would be to see that the demand for law and order applies equally to those whose job it is to confine accused offenders.
John L. Hill practised and taught prison law until his retirement. He holds a J.D. from Queen’s and an LL.M. in constitutional law from Osgoode Hall. He is also the author of Pine Box Parole: Terry Fitzsimmons and the Quest to End Solitary Confinement (Durvile & UpRoute Books) and The Rest of the [True Crime] Story (AOS Publishing). Contact him at johnlornehill@hotmail.com.
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