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Locked in a cell all but a few minutes a day, Wayne Wilcox has to improvise to pass the time.
“There’s a table that’s in my cell,” said Wilcox, an inmate at the Edmonton Remand Centre. “I drew a chessboard on there. Me and my cellmate play chess once in awhile.” With no access to game sets, he molded his own pieces using toilet paper and toothpaste.
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Try refreshing your browser. Boredom, isolation and illness as COVID-19 s second wave batters Alberta prisons and jails Back to video
Chehala Leonard, Local Journalism Initiative
FILE PHOTO December 21, 2020 - 11:40 AM Robert Riley Saunders was granted bail by B.C. Provincial Court judge Monica McParland in Kelowna last week. Bail was set at $50,000. Saunders faces 13 criminal charges including ten counts of fraud over $5,000, one count of theft over $5,000, one count of breach of trust, and one count of uttering a forged document. Earlier this year in a separate legal matter, the Ministry of Children and Family Development settled a class action lawsuit, which alleged that “Saunders defrauded many children in the care of the Ministry of their food, clothing and shelter allowances.”
“It took a while to make, but we’ve got nothing but time.”
Wilcox knows how to do time. The inmate at the centre of a landmark Alberta habeas corpus case, Wilcox previously spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at the remand.
Nevertheless, Wilcox says he and his fellow inmates locked down around the clock to try to contain the jail’s COVID outbreak are struggling.
“You can see it, it’s causing issues for people,” said Wilcox. “Like, one day they’ll be they’ll be happy-go-lucky, going around talking to people as much as you can, anyway. And then even later that day, all of a sudden, they just switch, now they’re just mad.”
“It took a while to make, but we’ve got nothing but time.”
Wilcox knows how to do time. The inmate at the centre of a landmark Alberta habeas corpus case, Wilcox previously spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at the remand.
Nevertheless, Wilcox says he and his fellow inmates locked down around the clock to try to contain the jail’s COVID outbreak are struggling.
“You can see it, it’s causing issues for people,” said Wilcox. “Like, one day they’ll be they’ll be happy-go-lucky, going around talking to people as much as you can, anyway. And then even later that day, all of a sudden, they just switch, now they’re just mad.”
CALGARY More than 400 cases of COVID-19 are now linked to an outbreak of the illness at the Calgary Remand Centre and the issue has affected how quickly justice is being delivered in some criminal cases. The province says it has been notified of about 413 cases of coronavirus among inmates and staff members at the northwest Calgary correctional facility. There are 170 active cases at the prison and 243 people have recovered. One of the sick inmates is Justin Bennett, the man charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of three-year-old Ivy Wick. Wick, the daughter of Bennett s girlfriend Helen Wordsworth, was admitted to hospital in 2017 suffering from blunt-force trauma. Eight days later, she died.