Why we know so little about Canadian prisons

The restrictions placed on communication with the outside world mean that access-to-information is one of the only ways the few journalists covering prisons can unearth the realities of people incarcerated in provincial and federal institutions. Experts explain what that costs us and how to break through the bureaucracy

When the Edmonton Journal first reported an incident inside Edmonton Institution, a maximum-security federal prison in Alberta that sent two prisoners to hospital on Jan. 8, 2022, there was no mention of a shooting. But about five days later, lawyers, advocacy groups, and journalists started hearing a different story.

Accounts from multiple prisoners — collected by their lawyer —  indicated that after a fight broke out between two prisoners, correctional officers fired their weapons, allegedly as  “warning shots,” which resulted in injury to a third incarcerated person who was not involved in the fight. The Alberta Prison Justice Society, an organization which provides advocacy services in Alberta, was told by people in the prison that guards shot their guns as their first response, and that one of the “warning shots” pierced a door, injuring a prisoner on the other side. The APJS was also told that on Jan. 9, one day after the fight, welders and painters arrived at the unit and quickly fixed the damage. 

On Jan. 13, 2022, a statement was finally posted to Correctional Service Canada’s website confirming that a “physical altercation took place,” but there was no mention of injury to the third prisoner. VICE news reported that CSC had refused to confirm that shots had even been fired until after “repeated questioning.” 

While Edmonton Institution may be one of Canada’s most notorious prisons (a 2019 report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator has pegged the facility as having some of the highest number of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and uses of force, the COVID-19 omicron variant worsened existing prison conditions, fuelling staff shortages, cancelling programs and visits with family, as well as causing lockdowns in the prison. The intense isolation has caused prisoner mental health to deteriorate and tensions to run high. But this incident is also indicative of the struggle over what information journalists and the public can learn about what happens behind prison walls, including documenting the effects of the pandemic on the vulnerable populations housed in correctional facilities across the country. 

Canada’s prison system continues to incarcerate Indigenous women at staggering rates, and employs risk assessment practices that are stacked against Black and Indigenous prisoners, keeping them at higher security levels in prison and limiting their chances of parole. Inquests and investigations into brutal deaths tend to garner media attention to prisons and jails, while reporting on issues that affect the daily life of incarcerated people, such as programming and food, can often fall to the wayside. After the federal government’s Bill C-83, which claimed to end the use of segregation in federal prisons received Royal Assent in 2019 put prison issues in the news cycle, the pandemic renewed some media interest in correctional facilities, as advocates and Canada’s public safety minister called for consideration of the release of certain incarcerated people, such as those who are non-violent or awaiting trial, to help slow the spread of the virus in prisons. 

As journalists began reporting on outbreaks within these public institutions, transparency concerns became apparent. Tracking the pandemic within correctional facilities has been made difficult by correctional authorities’ lack of proactive release of infection and outbreak numbers.

This means that the estimated 22,428 COVID-19 cases as of the end of February 2022 in jails and prisons countrywide may only be the tip of the iceberg. But the issues surrounding the release and the quality of pandemic data from corrections officials is not new. Challenges of transparency, accountability and verification are consistently experienced by families of incarcerated people and the media trying to report their stories. One family waited five years until getting confirmation that their loved one died at the hands of guards at an Ontario jail, and a string of deaths at an Alberta remand centre has left many families looking for answers.

Rules for journalists’ access to those in federal prisons are laid out under the Commissioner’s Directives, the policies that guide CSC. The directive on media access requires journalists to get CSC’s approval for either an in-person or telephone interview, through a written or verbal request. The warden’s decision to approve or deny the interview should be based on potential security and risks. 

In response to concerns from an unnamed media outlet about CSC’s delays in processing and reconsidering a denied request, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, Ivan Zinger, raised issues with the directive in a letter to CSC’s commissioner, Anne Kelly. The letter called out certain criteria in CSC’s media access directive, such as the potential for the interview to influence how the prisoners “conduct(s) themselves and how they demonstrate respect for other persons” as entirely unrelated to security of the prison or safety of the public, and amounting to “censorship.” Zinger also noted the directive’s failure to consider the principles of media access in a democracy. “An incarcerated person does not forfeit the right to freedom of expression, and the wider public has a right to be informed of what goes on behind prison walls,” Zinger wrote.

One of the most basic ways to get information about what’s happening on the inside — talking to prisoners — comes with a variety of barriers. People incarcerated in federal prisons (those serving sentences of two years or more) must first have the name and phone number of the person they would like to call approved by CSC and added to a phone card. Except for phone calls with “privileged correspondents,” such as a lawyer, CSC has policies that allow it to listen to the phone conversations of prisoners. In Ontario correctional facilities (housing those serving sentences up to two years or awaiting trial), prisoners are not required to get phone numbers added, but every phone call comes at a cost to the prisoner: they must either have funds in their account to make a call or the party receiving the call must pay for the call, and the phone line disconnects after 20 minutes.

Speaking with a prisoner requires the prisoner to initiate the contact — journalists cannot call in or schedule times with the facility. Journalists can learn of prisoners who would like to speak with them through third parties, including family members, advocacy groups, or lawyers, but the prisoner still needs to get the journalist’s phone number and call them directly. Most facilities prohibit three-way calls, preventing family members from connecting their loved one with a journalist while on a routine call.

In addition to the call-time limits, costs, and often cumbersome processes for getting a journalist’s phone number to a prisoner, there are also significant concerns about the retribution imprisoned people may face for engaging with journalists. Fears over correctional staff taking away “privileges” such as phone access are especially grave as the telephone is one of the few means of contact with the outside world. During the past few years of the coronavirus pandemic, phone access has already been limited for incarcerated people across the country as correctional facilities increased their use of lockdowns and minimized out-of-cell time to prevent the spread of the virus — approaches which have been criticized by advocates. Gilliana Shiskin, a criminal defence lawyer in Calgary, says her clients at Edmonton Institution are only allowed out of their cell for 15 minutes to shower and use the phone during the pandemic. “You’re already having to decide between ‘Do I call my wife? Do I call my mom? Do I call my kid? Or do I call my lawyer?’” she says. “‘Or do I try and call the media? And then have my calls cut off, so I don’t get to talk to anyone?’”

The prisoners that do have the means and opportunity to speak out from the inside do so at a great personal cost. Justin Piché, co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, says that imprisoned people who have spoken out have faced reprisals, such as being put in solitary confinement or being denied parole or other compassionate release. “If we don’t appreciate the structures of violence that give rise to human caging and expose people to the deprivations of liberty and the pains of imprisonment,” he says, “then I think it sanitizes what’s going on.” 

It’s always been challenging for prisoners to get their perspective out into the public realm, but there was a time when communication with the media was better. It took the form of a penal press — publications produced inside the prison, by prisoners. 

Melissa Munn, a criminologist at Okanagan College who maintains an online open-access archive of penal press publications, says that public concern over prison conditions and prison riots led to a Royal Commission on the Penal System of Canada, which released its report in 1938. At the time, the penal press was envisioned by one of the commissioners as a channel for the public to see the changes to prisons brought by reforms. During the height of the penal press in the 1950s and ‘60s, the mainstream press bought subscriptions to publications and journalists were able to form relationships with the editors of the prison publications, where content was exchanged between newspapers and the penal press.

“There were several writers, several journalists, who actually formed real strong connections with the prison editors, the prison writers, and they would go into the prison — the prisoners would invite them in for events,” she says. “So it was a real back-and-forth kind of communication.” The decline of the penal press in the 1980s came with the ushering in of the “law and order” era and governments with “tough on crime” conservative agendas. 

Munn says the cutting of government funding made it difficult for the penal press to operate and incarcerated people became increasingly nervous about speaking out.

Currently, prisoners’ lack of access to information about what is happening on the outside is combined with an inability to get information out either through phone calls that can be listened to by the prison administration, restricted in-person interviews, or opened and vetted letter mail. Munn says it’s hard to know what information isn’t getting out about the inside. “If you control media access in both directions, from journalists going in and prisoners being able to talk to journalists or publish their own newsletters,” she says, “then you control the discourse, and you control the image that people have.”

In 2016, Jones, who has been awarded for her work in prison justice, began co-hosting a radio show called “Black Power Hour.” The prison focused show, which airs on CKDU 88.1FM, was started out of a collaboration with the show’s co-founder Randy Riley, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for the murder of a pizza delivery driver in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 2010, despite Riley’s co-accused testimony exonerating Riley (Riley is currently on bail awaiting a re-trial next year after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2020). Black Power Hour hosts discussions of prisons, policing, and state violence. Though the show now focuses primarily on news and music, during its early years, it was filled with calls-in and music requests from people in prisons. “We were going to fulfill requests because if people are in prison or jail in this case, and that may be the only request of yours you can have met in a week,” Jones says. “We were about creating that agency and about not acting as parole officers and policing what music people can listen to.” She notes that incarcerated voices are often mediated through the frame of reform, where a prisoner was “bad”, went to prison, and now they’re “good.” But Black Power Hour was different–prisoner voices were not filtered, they could read poems that had content about drugs if they wanted to for example, or request songs that had profanity, but would still be played. Jones says this was the source of initial backlash to the show. “If you do this discourse of ‘I’ve taken responsibility and I’ve changed my life,’ that’s what people want to hear. And then if you’re hearing from somebody from prison talking about drugs or something–even though you talk about drugs–then, all of a sudden, it’s a problem. People just have this need to police prison voices.” 

More recently in 2021, Briarpatch magazine used the COVID-19 spurred conversations and decarceration of provincial jails as an opportunity to publish prisoner voices without using a traditional reported story approach. The magazine published its September/October issue dedicated to prison issues. Titled the Prison Abolition Issue, it emerged from a partnership with 2020 Abolition Convergence, and Canada-based Free Lands Free Peoples, and the stories were written exclusively by prisoners. In it they documented their experiences living through COVID lockdowns, different and unequal treatment of women and men, the impact of intergenerational trauma, hunger strikes and critiques of the prison complex itself. 

While Jones says that there has been more prison reporting among traditional news outlets in the past few years, and especially since COVID-19, we are still lacking understanding about what happens in prisons on a day to day basis. “A lot of the reporting I was doing was just from experiencing it and just being like, ‘How is this the system? How is this actually happening?’ You have to really engage with the system to understand it,” she says. She emphasises that much like reporting on immigration or deportation, good reporting on prisons requires a long term commitment to understanding the inner workings of prisons, including the efforts institutions go through to control communication, and building trust with those on the inside–things that the framework of traditional reporting doesn’t usually make easy. “Often the things you do to build trust are things that I suppose reporters would find unethical like making a three way call for somebody or paying somebody’s phone package or talking to their family…journalists aren’t supposed to do anything but the story. But then that’s hard to build this kind of long term trust,” Jones says. 

Speaking directly with prisoners is not as simple as calling up people in the ways that journalists use for sources on the outside, and this is just one part of the difficulties surrounding  verification when reporting on correctional facilities. Vague statements, especially surrounding incidents in prisons, is characteristic of CSC, but correctional facilities make it difficult for reporters to understand an incident when they can’t see the scene themselves or talk to witnesses as easily as they can outside of prison walls. 

Alyshah Hasham, a court reporter for the Toronto Star, has been able to get some information from imprisoned people through their testimonies in court, but verification is still a challenge. Recently, for example, an incarcerated person told the court through their lawyer that they were placed in isolation for COVID-19, which they claimed they did not have, and that the placement was a punishment, not for legitimate medical isolation. Hasham says that the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General would not comment on specific cases because of privacy reasons, despite the statement made in open court. She has also waited up to seven months just to get confirmation from the ministry about COVID-19 being a reason for the death of a man in custody.

While CSC provides numbers of COVID-19 outbreaks, infections and deaths at federal correctional institutions across the country on a public government website (although they don’t give numbers for COVID-19 cases in staff), it’s a different story at correctional facilities in Ontario. These facilities don’t even issue news releases for any deaths in custody, making it difficult to track COVID-19-related deaths in custody and deaths after release, or even deaths from overdoses or suicides. The Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General provides “information notes,” which summarize outbreaks and infections in prisons to the court for use in bail hearings or sentencing decisions, but that official document is not released publically and only become public through their use in court. Anecdotes from lawyers or family members are often how information about conditions and incidents in correctional facilities comes to light. “There’s so much concern about this population of people who are vulnerable in really specific ways. And there’s a lot of concern about how COVID would affect them and we don’t actually know, on a systemic level,” Hasham says. “I find that shocking and appalling.”

The information that federal and provincial correctional facilities do provide, especially information about incidents in prisons, has been known to be delayed or unreliable. In one case, a Cape Breton family believed that their brother, Matthew Hines, died while in prison because of a seizure. More than a year later, Hines’ family found out that he had been pepper sprayed multiple times by prison guards, and had died of suffocation. When CSC gave the family a copy of its internal investigation, the report had redacted details, including that a manager had ordered blood to be cleaned up before the RCMP arrived. The press release that was published by CSC after Hines’ death omitted information and included false statements, indicating that CSC staff had performed CPR on Hines (when a later released 56-minute video showed no indication of anyone giving Hines CPR at the prison) and did not mention that he had been pepper sprayed at close range at least four times. 

In another instance, it took Christophe Lewis almost eight years to get a video depicting use of force against him while he was incarcerated at Millhaven Institution (he has since asked for a criminal investigation into the incident). The video, which was given to Lewis by the Office of the Correctional Investigator, shows prison guards moving Lewis into a corner and spraying him with pepper spray while he can be seen talking (the video, however, was provided without an audio track).

It’s not just prisoners, family members, and the media that struggle to get information from CSC. When an appointed commission was created to assess the new “Structured Intervention Units” after the legislated elimination of “administrative segregation” in federal prisons, delays in providing the data lasted so long that the commission was finally dissolved. When professors on the defunct commission finally received the data, they found that conditions of some of prisoners’ stays in these new units amounted to the definition of torture under the United Nations’ Mandela Rules, which require prisoners to be treated with respect and not abused.  “If they’re going to appoint a commission to look at something and not even give that commission unfettered access to data and information, then what hope do journalists have of getting it?” says Okanagan College’s Munn. “And that has become a conundrum in a democratic society.”

Considering all the barriers to directly accessing prisoners and official accounts that are at best vague and at worst inaccurate, the access-to-information process can help give journalists, advocates and researchers a look into trends behind prison walls, but also an avenue to verification. 

“There’s so many abuses that happen behind locked doors that the public really should know about, and I think a lot of people would be really shocked at the kind of abuses that we’re hearing about every day,” says Jennifer Metcalfe, executive director at PLS.

The federal access to information and provincial freedom of information laws are generally held to be one of the strongest legal expressions of the public’s right to know. The delays and lack of information provided in response to requests means that, combined with the barriers to accessing prisoners and the history of correctional facilities providing untimely and sometimes unreliable information, the public can’t get an accurate perception of the correctional system. 

“At the end of the day, we are, as a society, deciding to put people in these places and we should understand what that is like and the consequences of doing that, and whether it’s the right thing to be doing and if there are alternatives or changes that could be made to make it better,” Hasham says.