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The new report on failings at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre on Innes Road is about a lot more than the jail.
It’s not just that the jail has been run poorly, though that’s certainly one of the place’s problems. What prompted Correctional Services Minister Yasir Naqvi to commission the report in March was grievous overcrowding, inmates sent to sleep in showers because there was nowhere else to put them.
But if overcrowding were the only problem, it would be easy enough to fix. Build another jail or expand this one and we’re done.
That is not the only problem.
The report, by a cross-section of corrections officials and outside experts, itemizes how the jail has been asked to do much too much, to deal with the consequences of failures in Ontario’s social-welfare system, its health system (especially when it comes to mental health and addictions), its courts.
Consider this recommendation for changing the way bail hearings work at the courthouse: “Bail cases that are not ready to proceed in the morning should be held down until later in the day. All hold down requests that are intended to facilitate the timely release of the accused should be granted by the presiding justice.”
Courtrooms, especially the ones that deal with people accused of petty crimes, are a lot more like a stereotypical Department of Motor Vehicles counter than a grand Law & Order venue than you might think. The accused line up, shuffle through, get their cases moved along or held up, next please. If something’s wrong with the paperwork or somebody isn’t ready when the case comes up, well, sorry, come back tomorrow.
Or, maybe, go back to jail until next week, when we’ll try again.
What this recommendation is about is making sure that prisoners who are going to get out on bail, who everybody knows will get bail, who will be able to leave the courthouse and go back to their families and work and pay the rent and not have everything else in their lives fall apart over a possession-of-marijuana charge, aren’t prevented from doing so for stupid reasons.
In the interim, they take up a mattress at the jail and we all pay to feed them and they clog up a system that’s having enough trouble handling the people who really need to be kept in.
The jail needs a mental-health unit, the report says, and another “step-down unit” for inmates who aren’t in full-blown crises but can’t handle general population. It needs to do a better job of making sure inmates get prescribed medicine, too.
A stunning 50 per cent of the women in custody at the jail arrive with mental-health flags on their files. Only 22 per cent of the men do, but that proportion has more than doubled in a decade. More than half the women are addicts, and nearly half the men are.
It’s hard enough for a basically functional person with a mental illness or a drug problem or both to find his or her feet on the outside — what happens when someone who’s already in jail doesn’t get proper treatment? Exactly what you’d think. They act up, causing problems for everyone, and delay their own releases.
The jail system has dumb features that discourage even stopgap measures to deal with overcrowding. How about this: inmates can make collect calls to their families from jail, but those calls get dramatically more expensive if they’re moved to another provincial facility, so prisoners who want to stay in touch with people on the outside sometimes don’t want to go to a less crowded place.
What if, the report proposes, we try to keep those long-distances charges down? What if we say everyone gets one free call a week, wherever they happen to be? If you can call your mom or your boyfriend or your kids without bankrupting them, maybe a stint in Penetanguishene or Lindsay wouldn’t seem so terrible.
Who cares, you might say. These are scumbags. Why do we care about whether scumbags are happy about being moved to a different jail?
Even if we say that everyone in jail is a scumbag, it’s in our interest to help them stop being scumbags. Jail should, at the very least, not make people worse than they were going in. As it is, what’s come to our attention as overcrowding at the Ottawa jail is really a set of problems and failings that set people on downward spirals where they become bigger and bigger problems, for themselves and for us.
Simple overcrowding would be a whole lot easier to fix than all this.
(This column will be updated after Naqvi responds officially to the report on Wednesday morning.)
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
It’s not just that the jail has been run poorly, though that’s certainly one of the place’s problems. What prompted Correctional Services Minister Yasir Naqvi to commission the report in March was grievous overcrowding, inmates sent to sleep in showers because there was nowhere else to put them.
But if overcrowding were the only problem, it would be easy enough to fix. Build another jail or expand this one and we’re done.
That is not the only problem.
The report, by a cross-section of corrections officials and outside experts, itemizes how the jail has been asked to do much too much, to deal with the consequences of failures in Ontario’s social-welfare system, its health system (especially when it comes to mental health and addictions), its courts.
Consider this recommendation for changing the way bail hearings work at the courthouse: “Bail cases that are not ready to proceed in the morning should be held down until later in the day. All hold down requests that are intended to facilitate the timely release of the accused should be granted by the presiding justice.”
Courtrooms, especially the ones that deal with people accused of petty crimes, are a lot more like a stereotypical Department of Motor Vehicles counter than a grand Law & Order venue than you might think. The accused line up, shuffle through, get their cases moved along or held up, next please. If something’s wrong with the paperwork or somebody isn’t ready when the case comes up, well, sorry, come back tomorrow.
Or, maybe, go back to jail until next week, when we’ll try again.
What this recommendation is about is making sure that prisoners who are going to get out on bail, who everybody knows will get bail, who will be able to leave the courthouse and go back to their families and work and pay the rent and not have everything else in their lives fall apart over a possession-of-marijuana charge, aren’t prevented from doing so for stupid reasons.
In the interim, they take up a mattress at the jail and we all pay to feed them and they clog up a system that’s having enough trouble handling the people who really need to be kept in.
The jail needs a mental-health unit, the report says, and another “step-down unit” for inmates who aren’t in full-blown crises but can’t handle general population. It needs to do a better job of making sure inmates get prescribed medicine, too.
A stunning 50 per cent of the women in custody at the jail arrive with mental-health flags on their files. Only 22 per cent of the men do, but that proportion has more than doubled in a decade. More than half the women are addicts, and nearly half the men are.
It’s hard enough for a basically functional person with a mental illness or a drug problem or both to find his or her feet on the outside — what happens when someone who’s already in jail doesn’t get proper treatment? Exactly what you’d think. They act up, causing problems for everyone, and delay their own releases.
The jail system has dumb features that discourage even stopgap measures to deal with overcrowding. How about this: inmates can make collect calls to their families from jail, but those calls get dramatically more expensive if they’re moved to another provincial facility, so prisoners who want to stay in touch with people on the outside sometimes don’t want to go to a less crowded place.
What if, the report proposes, we try to keep those long-distances charges down? What if we say everyone gets one free call a week, wherever they happen to be? If you can call your mom or your boyfriend or your kids without bankrupting them, maybe a stint in Penetanguishene or Lindsay wouldn’t seem so terrible.
Who cares, you might say. These are scumbags. Why do we care about whether scumbags are happy about being moved to a different jail?
Even if we say that everyone in jail is a scumbag, it’s in our interest to help them stop being scumbags. Jail should, at the very least, not make people worse than they were going in. As it is, what’s come to our attention as overcrowding at the Ottawa jail is really a set of problems and failings that set people on downward spirals where they become bigger and bigger problems, for themselves and for us.
Simple overcrowding would be a whole lot easier to fix than all this.
(This column will be updated after Naqvi responds officially to the report on Wednesday morning.)
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
