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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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“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.”