Hundreds of former N S inmates could join class suit over solitary confinement cbc.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbc.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Globe and Mail David Moscrop Published April 17, 2021
Author: Catherine Fogarty
Publisher: Biblioasis
Pages: 312
In 2019, the federal government committed to ending solitary confinement in federal prisons. At the time, critics warned the effort was insufficient. Senator Kim Pate, the former executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, called the change a mere “rebranding.” Their concerns have proven correct. A 2021 report by Ryerson’s Dr. Jane Sprott and the University of Toronto’s Dr. Anthony Doob for the John Howard Society of Canada found that two years after the government promised an end to solitary confinement, the practice continued. Not only is it ongoing, some instances met the United Nations definition of torture due to the length of time inmates were kept in segregation.
Canada promised to end solitary confinement, report shows it has not aljazeera.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from aljazeera.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In November 2019, structured intervention units (SIUs) officially replaced solitary confinement in Canada.
Prior to SIUs, solitary confinement operated through administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation. The new system claimed to add safeguards, mental health supports and provide prisoners with four hours outside their cells per day, including two hours of meaningful interaction. Despite being in place for over a year, recent data shows this system is a failure: one in 10 prisoners in SIUs experience torture.
It is crucial for corrections to respond to this human rights failure. As a socio-legal scholar and a critical policy analyst who studies carceral policy, we believe possible solutions include reducing the number of people confined in SIUs, hard caps on days permitted in SIUs, penalties and oversight. Our goal is to push for institutional accountability and transparency, which has long evaded corrections.
Houses of hate: How Canada s prison system is broken
Justin Ling: Dangerous, racist and falling apart. By nearly every metric, the nation s penal system is not just failing, it s making things worse. Medium security range at Stony Mountain Institution in Stony Mountain, Manitoba (Correctional Services Canada/Flickr)
Michael Ignatieff was staring right at the Prime Minister. “I worked in a prison when I was a younger graduate student,” he said. “I worked with lifers. I’m utterly unsentimental about criminals, but one thing I know about prison: It’s that prison makes almost everybody worse who’s in there.”
It was a rare personable moment for Ignatieff, who normally has the air of a university lecturer, and it came in the middle of the televised leaders’ debate. “You’re going to end up with more crime problems, not less,” Ignatieff said, imploring Stephen Harper to drop his $13 billion plan for stiffer prison sentences and megaprisons. His hands held aloft, i