A ministerial report says the Correctional Service of Canada hasn't improved the lives of inmates who are in isolation. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN.
The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) may have a new name for its segregation cells in penitentiaries, but according to a ministerial panel report issued on Monday, not much has changed.
In 2019, the courts ordered CSC to shutter its “administrative segregation” units saying that leaving people secluded over long periods of time was a human rights issue. Administrative segregation, or solitary confinement as it’s also known, “is generally defined as [an inmate] being in a cell for 22 hours or more without meaningful human contact,” according to the report.
Corrections came up with a new term – structured intervention units or SIUs. These units were supposed to shorten the time an inmate spends in a cell and without other human contact.
A panel appointed by the minister of public safety in 2019 issued its 11th and final report on how the CSC is handling inmates who are a risk to themselves or others in the prison population and sent to SIUs.
“The thread throughout these reports is that the Correctional Service of Canada is struggling to operate Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) in a way that best reflects the primary reason for their creation – the elimination of solitary confinement,” said Howard Sapers, lead author of the report.
SIUs are used to “provide an appropriate living environment for an inmate” and offer “access to services that respond to the inmate’s specific needs and the risks posed by the inmate,” according to the report.
Under the Corrections and Release Act, inmates should be kept in an SIU “for as short a period as possible,” be allowed to leave their cell for four hours a day and, “two of these four hours should involve meaningful human interaction.”
But according the report, time spent by inmates in these SIUs has “not improved (i.e., become shorter) for two especially vulnerable groups: Black and Indigenous prisoners. Prolonged stays in SIUs are somewhat more common for Indigenous and Black prisoners…”
“Overall, while “only” 19.3% of White prisoners stay over two months, 25.9% of Black prisoners and 23.6% of Indigenous prisons stay that long.”
Indigenous people make up about 32 per cent of the prison population despite only making up five per cent of the general population of Canada.
The report notes that some provisions have been made for Indigenous inmates including access to “cultural activities and Elders,” but, “Successive reports from the OCI [Office of the Correctional Investigator] and the Office of the Auditor General have pointed to the failure of CSC to move away from its colonial approach to Indigenous corrections. These same concerns are pertinent to understanding the circumstances of Black prisoners.
“One Elder specifically mentioned that SIUs reflect the worst of CSC, meaning there is no treatment, no help, and no hope,” the report said.
The report also says that “stays are just as long, or longer, under the new SIU model as compared to the old Administrative Segregation.”
“The SIU regime was meant to be different from the former Administrative Segregation,” the report said. “However, the data shows? that in 2023, SIUs looked very much like the last full year of the use of Administrative Segregation with very similar rates of long stays.
The report said there are 15 SIU units in Canadian prisons – 10 in institutions for men, five for women spread out across the country.
“We are not, in this report, challenging the idea that there are times when certain prisoners need to be isolated – for limited periods of time,” the report concluded. “… Canada has not eliminated the experience of solitary confinement with the construction and operation of the SIUs. Indeed, in terms of relatively long stays, we have repeatedly presented data that the rate of long stays in SIUs is comparable to the rate of long stays in segregation in Canada’s penitentiaries prior to the implementation of the SIU regime.
“Moreover, we see that many prisoners are not receiving their minimum hours out of cell and thus, a practice that SIUs were supposed to eliminate and that the courts prohibited, continues.”
Anne Kelly, commissioner of the CSC, thanked the panel for its work.
“Their input and contributions have been important in helping us fully implement and refine the Structured Intervention Unit model across the country,” she said.
