A corrections officer enters the cells area in the segregation unit at the Fraser Valley Institution for Women during a media tour, in Abbotsford, B.C., Oct. 26, 2017.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
More than five years after Ottawa passed legislation designed to abolish solitary confinement in penitentiaries, the practice persists throughout the federal prison system, according to an expert oversight panel.
In its 12th and final report released on Monday, the 10-member panel concluded that the government needs to modify laws around prisoner isolation yet again to fully eliminate solitary confinement and other unlawful prison practices.
“The law and the administration of the law outlawing solitary confinement-like conditions in Canadian penitentiaries are each, independently, in need of change,” states the report from the Structured Intervention Units Implementation Advisory Panel.
The panel was created in 2019 to oversee prison reforms introduced in the wake of two successful lawsuits that challenged the legality of administrative segregation, a long-time Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) practice under which prisoners could be held in cells the size of hotel bathrooms for upward of 22 hours a day without meaningful human contact.
The federal Liberals officially scrapped administrative segregation in 2019 and replaced it with a new prisoner-isolation method called structured intervention.
Under the new regime, prisoners who can’t be housed in the general prison population for security or safety reasons can be placed in isolation (called structured intervention units, or SIUs), but they must be offered at least four hours a day outside their cells, including two hours of meaningful interaction with other people.
SIUs were designed to circumvent international guidelines around solitary confinement. The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners defines solitary confinement as imprisonment for 22 or more hours a day without meaningful human interaction. If those conditions stretch beyond 15 days, the UN considers it “prolonged” solitary confinement, a practice that amounts to “torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
In practice, however, federal penitentiaries continue to use solitary confinement, the panel found.
“The picture painted by the data consistently shows that the practice of solitary confinement continues, and vulnerable groups appear to be especially at risk of experiencing its negative effects,” states the final report.
From its first report, issued in 2020, the panel has stated that prisoner placements in SIUs routinely last more than 22 hours a day and stretch beyond 15 days. The 12 publications the panel has issued over the last five years use CSC data to show that SIUs are “operating in a manner that is inconsistent with the intent of the law or the law itself,” according to the final report.
The latest report, for instance, shows that approximately 20 per cent of SIU placements last more than two months. Around half of people in SIUs don’t receive two hours of human contact a day for a majority of their placement.
“Very few SIU prisoners get the benefit of four hours out of their cell every day, and even fewer get the benefit of two hours every day of meaningful human engagement,” said panel chair Howard Sapers in an interview.
The panel’s most recent work also found that Indigenous and Black prisoners are overrepresented in SIUs – along with prisoners who have mental-health challenges.
Mr. Sapers said that the panel’s work raises doubts as to whether CSC is complying with court decisions that came out of the two lawsuits.
“These units were created because two courts of appeal in Canada found that the way CSC was utilizing isolated conditions of confinement was unconstitutional,” said Mr. Sapers. “They broke the law. And I can tell you from what we found on the panel, there are some serious concerns remaining about whether or not those issues identified by those courts have been properly addressed.”
The units are now in place inside 15 of CSC’s 42 institutions.
In a statement, Public Safety Minister David McGuinty thanked Mr. Sapers and the rest of the panel, saying their reports “have proven to be valuable sources of information and insight.”
“Their work and findings will continue to support the Public Safety portfolio’s ongoing efforts to strengthen policy, processes and the overall operations of the SIU model,” he added, saying the SIUs have now entered the “operational” phase.
The panel’s mandate officially ended on Dec. 31. Without their work, advocates for prisoners’ rights will lose one of the few windows they had into SIU operations.
“The panel’s work was meticulous,” said Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society. “They backed everything up with statistics and they clearly showed that SIUs don’t conform with the law and don’t achieve their initial policy objectives.”
The legislation creating SIUs committed the government to reviewing the new regime within four years of it coming into effect. That review has yet to take place and Ms. Latimer says nobody within the government can tell her when it might happen.
“I think they need to go back to the drawing board,” she said.