A flawed Compass: a human Rights Analysis of the Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety

Effects of Segregation

We have read and reread these paragraphs and struggled to understand the rationale for CSC's strategy of non-intervention. More than any case in our collective memory it illustrates the failure to integrate the dual roles of the Service for control and assistance within a legal culture that gives ultimate priority to respect for inherent human dignity. In words of its own creation the Mission Statement of CSC “clearly directs [CSC] to actively encourage and assist offenders in reintegrating as law-abiding citizens while maintaining control. Our aim is to assist and encourage to the extent that it is possible and to control to the extent that it is necessary.”³⁸⁸ Faced with a young woman, whose behaviour was enormously difficult to ‘control’ the Service seemingly lost sight of its responsibility to assist. If Ashley Smith was a danger to anyone, it was to herself.

The need for someone in a position to assist and step between Ashley and herself was lost. The very act of waiting and watching her self-destruct brings into focus the inhuman aspects of control. But In order to assist someone you must first recognize their shared humanity. It is the natural and necessary counter-weight to prevent control measures escalating to abuse of authority. In Ashley Smith’s case, was extreme isolation intended to improve her behaviour? Did management believe that it would frighten her if no one came into her cell and make her stop self-strangulating of her own accord? Was it intended to teach her a lesson? Was it purely a measure to protect staff? Whatever the rationale, it was clearly not helping her. Whose job then was it to help her? Why could no one be assigned to spend the day with her in her cell, or the yard, or in close proximity rather than on the other side of a food slot? Is it to be believed that there was really no psychiatrist, psychologist, empathic staff member, peer counsellor or community advocate who could reach out and touch her?

We have come to the conclusion that it was the correctional managers’ view, filtered through the lens of power and control, that Ms. Smith's noncompliant and self-destructive behaviour was a matter of choice; to change and control that behaviour and render her compliant and manageable the staff should do nothing to reinforce or reward her ill-conceived attempts to gain attention. This had already been taken to what we would have thought to be the extreme of letting her choke herself to the point of turning blue and have trouble breathing but on October 17, 2007 she was allowed, with the staff standing by, to strangle herself to death. In effect the correctional service, with the full coercive power of the state behind it, played ‘chicken’ with Ashley Smith’s life and she lost.

Since the CI’s report was written more disturbing evidence has emerged in a 142-page transcript of the cross-examination of Grand Valley’s security intelligence officer at the preliminary hearing for four GVI employees charged with criminal negligence in Ms. Smith's death. The new details bolster allegations that Ms. Smith's 2007 death occurred amid efforts by correctional managers to contain the amount of paperwork generated by her near-daily attempts at self-harm. The officer said the warden in the spring of 2007 told her to tailor some reports so they wouldn't be considered as involving force. "I was directed to classify it as a different classification." ³⁸⁹

If the staff of CSC interpreted Ashley Smith’s suicidal behaviour as an attempt to resist their authority and control, the independent psychologist contracted by the Correctional Service to review Ms. Smith's treatment during incarceration had a different view. That psychological review saw Ms. Smith's self-injurious behaviour in part as a means of drawing staff into her cell in order to alleviate the boredom, loneliness and desperation she had been experiencing as a result of her prolonged isolation.

CSC did not have to wait until after Ashley Smith's death to realize the dynamics involved in her behaviour. The damaging psychological effects of prolonged segregation under the conditions prevailing in Canadian segregation units had been identified and repeatedly condemned in the Canadian literature over the least 35 years. In 1975 in the McCann case the conditions in the segregation unit the B.C. penitentiary were found to constitute cruel and unusual punishment and treatment by the Federal Court of Canada.³⁹⁰ Michael Jackson has described the nature of the relationship between prisoners and staff in segregation units in the 1970s in a way that seems to fairly capture what was happening in the segregation unit in which Ashley Smith was confined over 30 years later;

There is a perverse symbiotic relationship between guards and prisoners in [segregation]. The guards, by perceiving the prisoners as the most dangerous and violent of [wo]men, can justify to themselves the intensity of the surveillance and the rigours of detention. Prisoners, by responding to that perception of dangerousness with acts of defiance, have at least one avenue of asserting their individuality and their autonomy, of making manifest their refusal to submit. The treadwheels of the 19th-century penitentiaries are no longer with us, but in [segregation] we have created a psychological treadwheel put into motion and maintained by ever-increasing hostility and recrimination.³⁹¹

One of the expert witnesses in the McCann case, Dr. Stephen Fox, testified that the purpose behind the rigor of the regime in segregation was to induce compliance with institutional rules and correctional authority. “It is designed, I believe, not so much for security purposes but to show that on instant demand you will comply, that you will not move a muscle that is not demanded, that is not requested, in the belief, of course, that compliance will move into the street.”³⁹²

Dr. Fox testified that the effect of this was to reduce the prisoner to a state where he had no self-respect, no identity, and no dignity. However,

“…to relinquish, to admit to the psychological suicide of non-identity, is essentially to violate all conceivable meaning in the evolution of mankind ...To come to have no meaning, to come to be nothing, is essentially the greatest human suffering, that is to say, it ultimately leads to insanity and suicide.”³⁹³

The Globe and Mail captured the horrifying effectiveness of escalating the intensity of segregation, “Only by killing herself could Ms. Smith draw attention to her humanity.³⁹⁴

The psychological effects of long-term segregation were also the subject of evidence before the Arbour commission from CSC's own psychologists who were working at the time in the Prison for Women. As described by Justice Arbour:

In October of 1994, the prison’s psychologists advised the prison staff of the psychological ill effects being suffered by the women. Their report read:

If the current situation continues it will ultimately lead to some kind of crisis, including violence, suicide and self-injury. They will become desperate enough to use any means to assert some form of control of their lives. The constant demands to segregation staff [are] related to needs for external stimulation and some sense of control of their lives.³⁹⁵

In her report Justice Arbour made these findings on the management of the segregation unit and the segregation process at the Prison for Women:

The prolonged segregation of the inmates and the conditions and management of their segregation was again, not in accordance with law and policy, and was, in my opinion, a profound failure of the custodial mandate of the Correctional Service. The segregation was administrative in name only. In fact it was punitive, and it was a form of punishment that courts would be loathe to impose, so destructive are its consequences . . .

There was no effort on the part of the prison to deal creatively with their reintegration. There were no programs available to them, and they were left idle and alone in circumstances that could only contribute to their further physical, mental and emotional deterioration… The bitterness, resentment and anger that this kind of treatment would generate in anyone who still allows herself to feel anything, would greatly overweigh the short-term benefits that their removal from the general population could possibly produce . . .

If prolonged segregation in these deplorable conditions is so common throughout the Correctional Service that it failed to attract anyone’s attention, then I would think that the Service is delinquent in the way it discharges its legal mandate.³⁹⁶

Now, 13 years since the Arbour Report, 10 years since the Task Force on Segregation, a 19 year old girl dies in a bare segregation cell. For those who would argue that the inhumane and deplorable conditions endured by segregated prisoners in the B.C. Penitentiary in the 1970’s and in the Prison for Women in the 1990’s can safely be consigned to the lessons of history, the Correctional Investigator’s findings stand as an indictment of the failure of the Correctional Service of Canada to take those lessons seriously.

1. The Panel’s Consideration of Segregation

We have in Chapter 5 criticized the Panel’s partial and inadequate scrutiny of administrative segregation. We faulted the Panel on several grounds; failing to acknowledge the documented historical record of abuse, and encouraging CSC to toughen up the conditions to discourage prisoners from seeking admission to voluntary segregation. Of particular note however, was the Panel’s failure to challenge CSC’s unwillingness to introduce independent adjudication of segregation decisions, in the face of the repeated recommendations from Justice Arbour, a Parliamentary Subcommittee, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the Canadian Bar Association and many others. In his report on the death of Ashley Smith the Correctional Investigator bears witness to the consequences of that recalcitrance:

I believe strongly that a thorough external review of Ms. Smith's segregation status could very likely have generated viable alternatives to her continued and deleterious placement on such a highly restrictive form of confinement.  There is reason to believe that Ms. Smith would be alive today if she had not remained on segregation status and if she had received appropriate care. An independent adjudicator - as recommended by Justice Arbour - would have been able to undertake a detailed review of Ms. Smith's case and could have caused the Correctional Service to rigorously examine alternatives to simply placing Ms. Smith in increasingly restrictive conditions of confinement. At that point, if it had been determined that no immediate and/or appropriate alternatives to segregation were available for Ms. Smith, the independent adjudicator could have caused the Correctional Service to expeditiously develop or seek out more suitable, safe and humane options for this young woman.³⁹⁷

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