There is a tendency to assume that the people who wind up behind bars are bad guys who’ve done bad things and deserve bad things.
Fallacies behind this assumption aside, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, if you are human you have human rights. That is a fundamental tenet of a free society.
When you’re in the custody of the state, the state is responsible for safeguarding those rights and taking care of you.
What’s more, almost everyone put behind bars will someday be released. And what happens to them in prison helps dictate what freedom will look like for them and for their communities — whether they reoffend and whether they wind up back in very expensive carceral custody.
I was reminded of this fact when I spoke with Joey Toutsaint. I was talking to him via video feed from a prison visit room and, I have to be honest, the audio was terrible.
But I could see him – a slim man with tattooed arms and self-inflicted scars worming their way from his wrists to his elbows. I could hear him when he told me that what he’d experienced – locked repeatedly in indefinite isolation under surveillance without clothes or even a book to read – was “torture.”
We obtained hours of video showing how Canada uses this form of isolation. One of them shows Toutsaint begging not to be placed in one of these cells. In another, guards pepper-spray him after he picks at a suture on his neck. I urge you to watch, but take care.
After spending almost his entire adult life behind bars, Toutsaint is struggling to win his freedom. His lawyers are applying for a Royal Prerogative of Mercy – a breathtakingly rare pardon (eight granted in the past decade, the government told us). They are arguing Toutsaint has suffered so much that he deserves clemency.
Is Canada setting him up for success in the event of his release? Or is his incarceration traumatizing him further?
Stories like Toutsaint’s drove me to ask this question: What kinds of confinement are flying under the radar in Canadian prisons, and how often are they being used?
What we found was striking: Canada, which officially has no solitary confinement federally, is locking vulnerable people up in conditions that appear to qualify as solitary under international rules Canada has ratified.
And Canada is doing this more often. We found there had been a 53 percent increase over a six-year period in the use of observation cells designed for suicidal and self-harming inmates like Toutsaint; and an 82 percent increase over a two-year period in the use of dry cells designed for inmates suspected of secreting contraband in their bodies. We found observation cells, especially, are being used disproportionately on Indigenous prisoners.
This story also speaks to government accountability: We know how frequently Canada uses observation cells and dry cells because Canada tracks their use. The government says it does not track some forms of hidden solitary and refused to disclose others. We are fighting for that disclosure – stay tuned.
This matters even if you don’t like prisoners. It matters if you care about human rights. It matters if you care about whether a prisoner will be in better shape leaving prison than when they entered. These forms of confinement have been shown to cause harm.
This will not be our last carceral story. This issue speaks to justice and rights and disability and Indigeneity but also affects public expenditure and prisoner rehabilitation.
Have ideas on what we should chase? I would love to hear them.
