7 Days of Resistance: #4 Solitary Confinement
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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“My son was not suicidal before he was placed into solitary confinement,” said Robert Roy, Chris’s father.
“He called us every day while he was in prison, but after 5 weeks in solitary, he stopped. And 3 weeks after that, he was dead.
I am heartbroken and devastated that when Chris was at his lowest, he was isolated and alone, held in solitary confinement with no idea when he would get out.
To me, that’s unconscionable. This brutal and debilitating practice must end.” -Robert Roy
Nearly half of all suicides in federal prisons occur in solitary confinement.The practice can create mental illness where it did not exist, and exacerbate it where it did.
Dear BCCLA supporters,
For decades the Canadian government has ignored repeated calls to reform its use of solitary confinement. So on July 4, 2017 the BCCLA and the John Howard Society put Canada's solitary confinement regime on trial.
Over 9 weeks this summer, a judge of the B.C. Supreme Court heard from people across the country who had been impacted by the crippling effects of solitary confinement.
Their courage and candour became the heart of our case.
Here are two of their stories:
- Andre Blair spent 363 days in a small cell in Millhaven Institution. For 23 hours a day, Andre sat in a dirty cell with a solid steel door. He had almost no interaction with other people. He couldn’t attend the classes he had been enrolled in to obtain his GED. He couldn’t see his family without a plexiglass barrier separating him from his wife and children. Andre felt abandoned. To Andre, prison guards and CSC officials could do or say whatever they wanted and would always win.
- Bobby Lee Worm is an Aboriginal woman of Cree heritage and a member of the Daystar Band in Saskatchewan. Her parents were intravenous drug users whose addictions often prevented them from caring for her and her brothers. She was abused as a child in every imaginable way. Her involvement with the criminal justice system began at age 12. By age 19, she was serving time in a federal prison. Bobby Lee spent 747 consecutive days in solitary confinement. She thought of killing herself. She hallucinated. She became overly sensitive to loud noises and large spaces. And most of all, she felt a profound sense of powerlessness. The same kind of powerlessness she felt as a child trapped in a home filled with violence and abuse.
It can be difficult for the voices inside solitary cells to be heard outside of the prison walls. It would have been nearly impossible for individual prisoners subjected to this cruel practice to mount a constitutional challenge.
It is only because organizations like the BCCLA and John Howard are able to support these voices over many years that they were finally able to have their day in court.
We expect to get the court's ruling on this case early in 2018.
Talk soon,
Caily DiPuma, Acting Litigation Director
r15 |r0
