WHILE WAITING, THERE’S STILL WORK TO DO.

Back on February 14, the Globe and Mail published Patrick White’s “Solitary confinement headed for showdown at top court.”
“Canada’s top court has agreed to hear arguments on the constitutionality of prolonged solitary confinement, setting up a final showdown in a years-long legal push to ban isolation practices in federal prisons.”

The government passed Bill C-83 last year to mollify critics and address the shortcomings of current practices, but “Bill C-83 was widely panned in prison law circles. In a letter to Ottawa, more than 100 lawyers and academics argued that it authorized ‘solitary confinement under another name’ and ignored lower court orders to adopt binding independent oversight and a 15-day limit on placement in isolation.”

Tucked deep into Mr. White’s account was, “Correctional Service of Canada has also appointed University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob to head a panel that will monitor implementation,” referring to Bill C-83.

To this point, federal prisons haven’t fully executed the provisions of the Bill’s promises, and there are grim indications of a subversive bias at the institutional level against any change from prior policies and practices. CSC’s national headquarters is either not aware of this antipathy in the trenches or assumes all is well up and down the line and anticipates an at-arms-length scrutiny will echo its own bow to compliance.

Anthony Doob is a prominent Canadian criminologist and professor emeritus of criminology at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. According to Wikipedia, he is “one of the most prolific criminologists in Canada and is consistently one of the three most cited Canadian scholars in the field. His research has included studying the effectiveness of certain crime-reduction policies, including carding.”

We can expect Professor Doob to be objective, inclusive and thorough, but there is no harm in offering encouragement:-

March 27, 2020

Professor Emeritus Anthony Doob, C.M., FRSC,
Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies,
Toronto, ON M5S 3K9

Re: Bill C-83

Dear Professor Doob:

Patrick White’s “Solitary confinement headed for showdown at top court” published in the February 14th Globe and Mail includes, “Correctional Service Canada has also appointed University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob to head a panel that will monitor implementation,” with reference to Bill C-83.

No doubt your experience tells you the work the panel you head will do must include the perspective of inmates, and in numbers at least equal to CSC staff members interviewed. Of importance too is that you follow your own counsel in observations and inspections to arrive at acceptable objective assessments.

Be forewarned. The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights released “Interim Report – Study on the Human Rights of Federally-Sentenced Persons: The Most Basic Human Right is to be Treated as a Human Being (1 February 2017 – 26 March 2018)” in February of 2019. To excerpt from page 64 of that report, “….the committee was informed that a number of federally-incarcerated persons refused to meet with the committee for fear of reprisal. The committee was very concerned to find that this fear extended to communications with senators during site visits. In this context, it was particularly disturbing that at certain institutions, correctional staff surreptitiously listened to the committee’s confidential meetings with federally-sentenced persons, despite the committees (at times repeated) requests for privacy.”

With my best wishes for continued successes, I am,

Yours truly,

Charles H. Klassen

Good advice never gets old.