Justice system 'courting disaster'
Source: The Ottawa Citizen online
URL: http://tinyurl.com/3zbph
Date: November 01, 2004
Detention centre guards say they're forced to work in unsafe, unsanitary conditions
Unsanitary, unsavoury and unsafe. That's how corrections officers at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre describe working conditions at the jail that have become so abysmal that lawyers are asking courts to count each day an offender spends inside as the equivalent of three days served.
Union official Bob Eaton tells a grim joke about it: criminals are getting triple credit on prison sentences for time in custody in the facility because of overcrowding and other bad conditions, but nobody is offering the corrections officers triple pay for working in "horrendous" conditions.
Guards may be summoned to court to testify about the conditions in a case beginning today that accuses the Ministry of Corrections of violating human rights and prisoner treatment standards. They are not keen to testify without whistleblower protection, said Mr. Eaton, because the ministry runs "a reign of terror" over employees and careers would be at stake. "The union has spoken out very loudly and clearly and, hopefully, the judiciary will get the hint that conditions are horrible in that institution."
The officers say cells are sometimes so full of inmates sleeping on mats the guards cannot get in. A guard described recently entering a cell that held five people on the floor. "You have next to no room to walk," the guard said.
"It's not safe for us and it's definitely not in their best health interests to be on the floor. We can give you a brand new mattress when you come in and once you put it on the floor, the mattress is ruined. We'll never get it clean again."
The floors cannot be properly cleaned because of overcrowding. "How can you clean when there's mattresses all over the place?" the guard asked. Even when stained or ripped mats are thrown away and new mats, costing taxpayers $100 each, are provided, they go on grimy floors.
To avoid being near the urinal in a cell, some inmates sleep with their mattresses shoved in the narrow space under the bunk bed, with just their head poking out.
"If you have three or four large men in a small cell for a prolonged period of time, sleeping with their heads up against a urinal, at the end of the day that won't produce a productive member of the community," said Mr. Eaton, a veteran probation officer and the Brockville-based vice-president for Eastern Ontario of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
"A lot of our members have university degrees. They are well-educated people who sought out training. They are not Wal-Mart guards. This is their profession. It is thanks to their courage and their tenacity to keep things under control that there are not more incidents behind those closed doors."
The union is currently preparing for negotiations on a labour contract for the Ottawa correctional officers. The contract expires Dec. 31. Guards who work at the facility provided photos and spoke to the Citizen -- about cramped conditions, bad air, inadequate security resources and insulting treatment by management -- on condition of anonymity, certain of reprisals if they are identified.
The corrections ministry has denied the Citizen's request to tour the facility on grounds the staff "are sufficiently taxed" with their regular responsibilities; it has also refused to comment, in advance of today's court case, on the issues raised by the guards. Lawyers, probation officers and others have also been experiencing problems seeing clients in the facility.
The officers said low morale among the staff because of poor working conditions inevitably has an impact on the detention centre inmates. They say they lack staff. They are overworked. They have no staff facilities, no lunch room and have to eat at their work stations.
"You start eating and they bang on the glass, 'Hey I need this, I need that.' We don't have a place to go and get away from the inmates and wind down, let alone a place where it's sanitary to eat." There are no showers for the times when an officer gets covered in vomit or urine; they get sent home.
The guards say the detention centre has room for 457 beds, 192 of them in the new pie-shaped pod that opened a couple of years ago, and the rest in the old part of the facility, which is being renovated. They say the renovations are contributing to the overcrowding and have not been well planned. One of seven 24-bed dorms, for example, is currently closed to house a temporary kitchen while a new kitchen is built.
"All during the day, those in the courtroom could hear the man banging his head against the cell bars."
Lawyer Mark Huckabone was in the courtroom that day. "It was like something out of a really bad movie," he recalls.
The Pembroke jail closed in April, the most recent of several small Eastern Ontario jails closed by the provincial government in the last few years. The Rideau Correctional and Treatment Centre in Burritt's Rapids closed in January and the Cornwall jail was shut in November 2002.
This was done under the former Tory government's provincewide policy of replacing rundown, old jails with new or upgraded regional facilities. But Ottawa's upgrade is still under way and a planned new facility in Brockville has been put on hold by the current Liberal government.
The closing of small facilities has increased overcrowding at the detention centre because that's where people who used to be sent to their area jail, close to family and lawyers, are now sent. The centre holds people awaiting bail hearings and trial, all innocent until proven guilty, as well as people sentenced to up to two years less a day in jail.
People from Renfew County who are taken into custody now have to travel more than 150 kilometres to the Ottawa jail to await bail or trial. They are ferried back and forth from the jail to their courtrooms by the Ontario Provincial Police. As many as 24 prisoners are put into what some of the lawyers call "the meat truck" at 6 a.m. in Ottawa to arrive at the Pembroke court at 8:30 a.m. On certain days, the truck makes stops in Renfrew and Killaloe, 70 kilometres past Pembroke. Sometimes the truck arrives as late as 11 a.m., hours late for court dates, the lawyers say.
Penny Barager, the staff sergeant in charge of the OPP prisoner transportation program, says the vehicles run on time, are safe, and have air conditioning and heat. No one is left sitting in the vehicles for hours, she said. She "does not share the concerns" over safety. Special constables who transport the inmates are trained for emergencies and have had an accident-free record, with one minor exception, since operations began in July 2002, she said.
Pembroke lawyers want their jail back and have even pooled a few thousand dollars of their own money to come up with a proposal for a small remand centre. It was backed by city council and private investors were willing to build it, but it was rejected on grounds of "economies of scale" by the former Conservative government and the current Liberal government.
The new situation has created logistical nightmares, as these people are ferried to and from Ottawa for court hearings that may last only a few minutes and for meetings with lawyers that can be overheard in the courtroom and in the hallway. If a lawyer drives to Ottawa for a meeting with a client at the centre, almost the whole day is shot and the meeting facilities there are inadequate.
The lawyers have many horror stories.
One told by lawyer Mike March involves a severely mentally disabled man who wound up at the Ottawa facility after police charged him with dangerous driving and fleeing police. He was pursued while driving an all-terrain vehicle. Inmates in Ottawa told him "he would be bounced if he didn't get off the range." That's jail-talk for a threat of being beaten to the point that guards would have to take him out. Mr. March said his client spent about 75 days in solitary confinement "because he didn't fit well within the jail culture."
Mr. Cleaver told of a young man who was delivered to court on a Wednesday wearing the same blood-soaked T-shirt he was wearing when arrested on a Saturday. He said the Ottawa jail staff said he could only have a clean shirt if his family brought it to Ottawa. No family came.
In another case, a 17-year-old girl, a ward of the Children's Aid Society due to sexual abuse, was transported in the same vehicle as adult male offenders who made sexual comments to her during the trip, and when they were in adjacent holding cells. He says two of his clients, one detained on a petty theft charge, were sexually assaulted at the Ottawa jail.
"It's really hard on the families of people who are serving shorter jail sentences, on the people who are not hardened criminals," Mr. March said.
"The stigmatization of being sent to a larger centre and having good folk from Renfrew or Lanark County or the other places having to travel all the way to the east end of Ottawa to visit loved ones takes an incredible toll on not just the inmates, but on all the people who love and support the individual. It's a real tragedy.
"What I fear most is for younger offenders who end up in that situation. They become exposed to a jail culture on a much grander scale than they would ever witness being kept at a smaller local jail."
Mr. Cleaver said people serving intermittent sentences in Ottawa (serving sentences on weekends) are bused from Ottawa to the superjail in Lindsay when Ottawa is overcrowded, and then bused back to Ottawa very early on Monday to be released, before going to Pembroke on their own. Lindsay to Ottawa is three hours' driving, and it's another two hours from Ottawa to Pembroke.
"It's surreal," says Mr. Cleaver. Some inmates ask to serve straight time, defeating the purpose of intermittent sentences, which is to enable people to keep their jobs. The old Pembroke jail had room for about 40 inmates. The Ottawa facility has room for about 450 and Lindsay holds 1,184.
"What used to happen would be that people would be in the local jail and a few would be brought over to court at a time as required," says Mr. Kelly, president of the Renfrew County Law Association.
"Now, because the meat truck brings everybody all at once, they either sit in the meat truck -- and I can't imagine how that's going to work in January in sub-zero temperatures -- or are brought into the holding facilities in our Ontario Court of Justice facility, such as it is. It is a renovated OPP station with a portable added onto it. It's extremely small. It's impossible to have a private conversation. How do you talk to your client, who you couldn't talk to when he was in Ottawa, when he comes up to Pembroke, the truck's late and he's sitting in a cell with five guys?"
Mr. Kelly told of frightening situations where a dangerous repeat offender is cooped up in a cell with an 18-year-old, or somebody's dad who has never been in trouble before and is not equipped to deal with a guy who's got a rap sheet three pages long.
Mr. Huckabone and others also worry about the truck getting into an accident in winter, full of inmates locked inside. And he reports that some clients dread their return to the Ottawa jail at night, when fellow inmates have threatened them with beatings for having woken them up that morning at 5 a.m. in time to get on the truck. He describes the Pembroke situation as "shameful." He punctuates his comments with a bitter note: "Who gives a s--t about Pembroke, really?"
Dogged efforts by lawyers to get someone in government to pay attention have been greeted by a byzantine, bureaucratic response.
Mr. Cleaver spilled out the concerns in a letter to Monte Kwinter, minister of community safety and correctional services. Mr. Kwinter's assistant deputy minister, Gary Commeford, replied that holding cell facilities are the responsibility of the attorney general and prisoner transportation is the responsibility of area police and the OPP.
Attorney General Michael Bryant finally responded to Mr. Cleaver last month, promising more interim holding cells will be made available in December "to serve the needs of the Pembroke community" until a new courthouse is built. He announced the reconstruction and renovation of court facilities last summer, but it won't be ready until the spring of 2007. While that may provide better holding facilities in a few years, detention will remain in Ottawa. Mr. Kelly and the other lawyers say that is not good enough; they will keep fighting for a jail in their own community.
"You need a jail in a community for the proper administration of justice," Mr. Kelly said. "You need proper court facilities for the proper administration of justice. When you take away proper court facilities and you take away a jail, it's a pretty slippery slope."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2004
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