TORONTO -- After repeated COVID-19 outbreaks in Canada’s prisons, advocates have begun investigating the inmates’ living conditions during the pandemic.
The Prison Transparency Project – led by researchers from Canada, Argentina and Spain -- is trying to lift the veil on the conditions many inmates in their respective countries are subjected to.
“We have seen since the beginning of the pandemic that the conditions in our prisons and detention centres… have deteriorated rapidly,” Dawn Moore, Carleton University law professor and the primary investigator for the project, told CTV’s Your Morning last week.
“We’ve got a massive public health crisis on our hands and it’s not being adequately addressed,” she said, referring to an inability to physically distance, and a lack of adequate access to personal protective equipment and proper ventilation.
The project’s first phase, which finished in 2019, asked former inmates the conditions they were kept in and if they were subjected to abuse. And because of the pandemic, the second phase was refocused to look at how prisons in Canada and the other, Spanish-speaking countries were responding to the pandemic.
There are approximately 40,000 people within Canada’s federal and provincial prisons, 15,000 of whom haven’t been convicted of a crime, according to Statistics Canada and the advocacy group John Howard Society of Canada.
COVID-19 cases have more than doubled in federal prisons during the second wave of the pandemic, according to a report last month from Canada's prison ombudsman. Around 70 per cent of second-wave cases occurred at two Prairie facilities -- the Saskatchewan Penitentiary and Manitoba's Stony Mountain Institution -- with Indigenous inmates being disproportionately affected.
As of March 31, there have been a total of 1,540 confirmed COVID-19 cases and five deaths among Canada’s federal inmate population, which averages around 14,000 people; and 14 active cases currently.
CALL FOR RELEASE OF NON-VIOLENT INMATES
“One of the gravest concerns of the Prison Transparency Project is to ask why aren’t we releasing people in the context in which their health is deeply, deeply jeopardized,” Moore said.
She noted that inmates’ health was already poor before the pandemic and they are now more at risk of developing COVID-19 as they live in facilities that can have poor ventilation.
Moore, like many other prisoner advocates, is calling for the release of non-violent or elderly federal and provincial inmates, as well as those awaiting trial.
The practice is not unheard of, as it was done quietly in provincial and territorial institutions early last year but has since stopped. However, this practice wasn’t done on the same scale on the federal level, according to Statistics Canada.
“This has happened across the world, where they have done mass releases of people who have either been convicted of non-violent offences,” Moore said.
“Mass release has been common in the United States and Europe and South America and this is something Canada hasn’t even considered even in our immigrant detention facilities,” Moore said.
Last month, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported on the “dire” conditions for some who are held in a Montreal-area detention facility.
QUESTIONS ABOUT VACCINATION PROGRAM
Later this month, the feds will be rolling out COVID-19 vaccines to the remaining federal inmate population in 43 correctional institutions and 14 community correctional centres across Canada. But there could be delays based on trends happening already.
Some provinces such as Ontario have recently been offering the vaccine to inmates, with the feds doing the same for older federal inmates since January. But Moore said agencies such as Correctional Service of Canada and the Ministry of the Solicitor General in Ontario, need to do more to tackle vaccine hesitancy in the inmate population, which echoes segments of the general public, and among some racialized groups.
Kelly Markham, a registered nurse supervisor at Faribault Prison, administers the state's first COVID-19 vaccination to a medically vulnerable inmate, Edward Anderson, Monday, Jan. 4, 2021, in Faribault, Minn. (Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)
Some reports found that only 37 per cent of inmates received vaccines at the Ontario-run Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, Ont. last month.
Moore said far too often inmates “weren’t actually given adequate information” about their health care to make informed choices as to why they should take the vaccine. So Moore said the Prison Transparency Project will also endeavour to examine what has been happening on that front.
PHYSICAL DISTANCING 'IMPOSSIBLE'
She also said the project will look at how COVID-19 measures such as physical distancing can’t be followed by many incarcerated Canadians, particularly those housed in cells that can be double and even triple-bunked.
“So, the idea of being able to keep social distanced is that cell is impossible.”
Moore also criticized the lack of safe flow of regular visits from family, friends and even lawyers, which she and others say has been cut off for many inmates for months, prompting dozens of hunger strikes as a way to draw attention to the issue.
And this ties into the broader group of isolation policies inside the prisons, which her project hopes to look into.
Last month, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair asked Parliament for an additional $135 million to better build structured intervention units -- a form of solitary confinement -- in Canadian prisons, with Correctional Service of Canada already being given $300 million to do this.
But fellow advocates have heavily criticized both the use of solitary-like confinement during the pandemic as a means to punish or isolate inmates.
In February, a new report found excessive isolation in Canada's prisons amounts to torture and inhuman treatment, with many federal inmates not receiving a few hours a day out of their cells.
“Show me the criminological literature that says locking down people for weeks and sometimes months subjecting them to segregation-like conditions… doesn’t damage people,” Justin Piché, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview earlier this year.
“Show me the criminological literature that says that as communities we’ll be safer once folks who’ve endured the violence of COVID and the violence of lockdown incarceration eventually return to our communities,” said Piché, an organizer for the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, who’s also been tracking the biggest outbreaks of federal and provincial institutions throughout the pandemic.
The Prison Transparency Project aims to address questions like these in its next phase.
Edited by CTVNews.ca Producer Sonja Puzic
