Quebec class action lawsuit seeks damages for solitary confinement

CTV National News: Solitary confinement's price A class action lawsuit has put questions on solitary confinement in Canadian prisons back into the spotlight. Vanessa Lee reports.

A class action lawsuit has been certified in Quebec that alleges federal prisons are abusing a practice known as “administrative segregation,” which the lawsuit’s backers call “solitary confinement.”

Former federal inmate Arlene Gallone is representing the prisoners. Her suit seeks financial compensation for all mentally ill prisoners exposed to the practice, along with all prisoners who were segregated for 72 hours or more, over a particular three-year period.

Gallone, who went to the Joliette Institution for Women after being convicted in an armed robbery, says she spent two three-month stretches in “the hole” as punishment for alleged infractions.

Gallone says she is still negatively affected by memories from her time in segregation.

“Imagine being locked up with no windows in your room, no nothing, they feed you through a trap in the door,” she said.

Gallone says she couldn’t receive phone calls, was never told in advance how long she would be separated from the other prisoners and that the windows in her cell were blocked so she couldn’t see out.

“I don’t know how I got through it, honestly,” she said. “There was times when I just wanted to finish it. I just wanted to get it over with. I was like, ‘What is the point of me even being alive?’”

Her lawyer, Clara Poissant-Lesperance, says that Correctional Service Canada uses segregation as a management tool when it should only be used in emergencies.

Clara Poissant-Lesperance called it “not human,” and pointed to research showing it can lead to lost appetites, anxiety and distress.

Jason Godin, from the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, says that solitary confinement doesn’t exist in Canada and that “regular programming” and psychological services are available to “administratively-segregated” prisoners.

“Only difference is,” according to Godin, “they’re moved away from other populations for their own safety or the safety of others.”

Godin warns against taking away a “tool” that he says is used as a last resort and makes prisons safer.

“Our institutions are managing on any given day over 2,000 gang members in our system,” he said. “So you try to get them all getting along in one spot or another.”

Godin added that the union has been unable to convince the Correctional Service of Canada to provide “alternative tools” which might reduce use of segregation, such as “a special handling unit for high-risk women offenders who self-harm, who are aggressive and who have mental health issues.”

The issue has also made headlines in Ontario recently, after it was revealed late last year that accused murderer Adam Capay had spent four years stuck in a windowless cell.

In his 2014-15 annual report, former Office of the Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers wrote that segregation “is so overused that nearly half (48 per cent) of the current inmate population has experienced segregation at least once during their present sentence.”

He pointed out that the UN Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment recommends solitary confinement in excess of 15 days be prohibited.

Sapers noted that although there are mandated procedural reviews of segregation that take place at the five-day, 30-day and 60-day marks, there are “no legal limits on how long an inmate can be held in administrative segregation.”

In his mandate letter to Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked her to implement changes to the “use of solitary confinement and the treatment of those with mental illness” in prisons.

The Correctional Service of Canada said, in response to Sapers’ report, that it was working on a strategy “to reduce the reliance on segregation by creating better options and finding more innovative alternatives for safe reintegration.”

With a report from CTV Montreal