Month: April 2023

“I just want to be treated like a human being.”

turnoverarocktoday Justice & the Penal Systems

In Canada?  Why would anyone say that?  What’s going on?  Who is this?  What is happening?

It’s not likely the average Canadian would hear it face to face from another person.  You might pick it up in a radio or television newscast, or when paging through a newspaper in hand or on-line.  Or could it be overheard from the conversation of others in a busy mall food court?  “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This isn’t about a journalist’s reporting from countries where human rights are ignored.  This is here, in this country, in real time.  “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This could come from a seasonal agricultural worker, brought here to help grow and harvest our food.  We know there are complaints about the treatment of foreign workers by some corporate farmers.  Or it could be the kids in our child welfare system, housed in foster and group homes where abuses are not uncommon, and where the overdosing of controlling drugs is too frequently a catch-all alternative to therapies.  Are victims of domestic violence and schoolyard bullying whispering this under their breath?

Most of us won’t hear this and don’t hear this from prisoners.  It’s there but it doesn’t get past prison security barriers “designed to keep people in as much as they are to keep people out,” as Canada’s Senate said in a 2019 report about carceral human rights.  The management of the prison “population is largely conducted away from public scrutiny,” the report continued.  Prison inmates can become inured to the vagaries, hypocrisy, and dishonesty that pervades the institutional environment and the air they breathe.  It smothers hope, it chokes the screams.  The words are there though.  Can you hear them? “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This space has frequently highlighted the proposed revision to a commissioner’s directive on media relations to bring inmate/media access into line with the law and the Charter.  It’s been over three years since Anne Kelly, the head of what we call Correctional Service of Canada, committed to make changes.  A draft is ready and available, but it isn’t in effect.  Why?

Despite all, word can escape the darkness.  Google Joey Toutsaint to read his 3-page complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Committee.  To see Joey Toutsaint in conversation, call up YouTube’s “APTN investigates – 2180 days inside corrections.”  Listen to Mary Wiens interview Nathanael Williams March 10 and March 23 of this year, broadcast on CBC’s Metro Morning.  As a by the way, Nathanael did not get parole.

“I just want to be treated like a human being.”

Soleiman Faqiri – Canada’s George Floyd?

turnoverarocktoday Justice & the Penal Systems

No, not if we continue to allow our police services and provincial government to erase Soleiman’s existence with a gag-order-settlement and a years-from-now nonconsequential inquest.

No, not if we don’t demand all three levels of government address the need for mental health initiatives and social programming in our neighbourhoods and change the way we treat people in distress who come into conflict with the law.

No, not if we don’t stop jail and prison guards from disregarding policy, the law, and just simple human decency.

Two events in early March presented another opportunity to keep Soleiman’s name in front of the men who would rather not hear it.   Two events that open this latest letter…….

April 5, 2023

Thomas Corrique, Commissioner,                  Mark Mitchell, Chief,
Ontario Provincial Police,                              Office of the Chief of Police,
Lincoln Alexander Building,                           Kawartha Lakes Police Service,
777 Memorial Avenue,                                    6 Victoria Avenue North,
Orillia, ON  L3V 7V3                                      Lindsay, ON  K9N 4E5

Commissioner Corrique & Chief Mitchell:

In the early hours of March 6, 2023, Jeffrey Munro was assaulted by four men and stabbed in downtown Toronto.  He died later in hospital.  Police in Toronto have named four men who have been or will be charged with second-degree murder.

Irvo Otieno died in custody at about the same date in a facility near Richmond, Virginia.  Seven sheriff’s deputies and three hospital employees have been charged with second-degree murder.

The outcome of the charges against these fourteen men and women will be determined by the courts, but police in both cases understood that Jeffrey Munro and Irvo Otieno did not die from an act of God, but rather was due to the deliberate actions of the people who have been charged.

And so it was that the Kawartha Lakes Police Service investigated the death of Soleiman Faqiri on December 15. 2016 at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, but could not assign blame.  A second investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police came to the same conclusion.  The OPP was prompted to look again, but with the same result.

You have the names of every person who entered Soleiman Faqiri’s cell during the assault.  You know the only reason the jail guards were there was to “teach the inmate a lesson” for giving them a hard time earlier, a common practice in Canada’s jails and prisons.  You know that every one of those individuals was either actively or passively responsible for this man’s death. 

The family and supporters of the thus-far absent justice for Soleiman are now to be satisfied with a far-off inquest, years from now when the man’s name will be archival to the general public.  The inquest’s recommendations will focus on avoiding future such deaths, even though others will die similarly in the meantime.

No matter.  It will come to nothing.  Good on you.


Charles H. Klassen

cc:       Myron Demkiw, Chief, Toronto Police Services         Wendy Gillis, Toronto Star
Michael Kerzner, Solicitor General, Ontario             Yusuf Faqiri

Nothing will change the narrative around Soleiman’s death without the participation of people like you and like me.

Nothing will change the outcome of future deaths in custody without the participation of people like you and like me.

You can’t do nothing when you can do something.
Joyce Milgaard (1930-2020)

The smell of bull dung?

turnoverarocktoday Brennan Guigue: Wars of my world

Brennan Guigue was speaking recently about the total absence of social or rehabilitative programming at Port-Cartier Institution in the far reaches of eastern Quebec where he’s been incarcerated since early November of 2021.  He dug into his personal archives for an earlier experience to underscore how little Correctional Service of Canada, or the Parole Board of Canada for that matter, cares about returning inmates safely to the community, then and now.

Brennan has been in prison on and off for most of his adult life.  He has repeatedly asked for mental health care intervention that would help break his cycle of criminal behaviour.  He’s still waiting.  Along the way, there has also been a lack of health care in general, which is the basis for so many inmate complaints to CSC, the Office of the Correctional Investigator, and the provincial professional bodies that regulate doctors and nurses.  Treatments for physiological ailments become more urgent with age, and inmate requests, pleas, and petitions for help often gather dust.

But for this outing, an experience from several years ago about safe reintegration into society is worth the telling.

Brennan was in a maximum-security prison several years ago, and approaching his warrant expiry date, that date a criminal sentence imposed by a court at sentencing officially ends.  The Parole Board of Canada in a scheduled hearing a few months prior had ruled he was too great a risk for an earlier release.  He would be held to the end of his sentence.  Brennan was getting no programing and of course no mental health care.  He asked the board for support prior to and after his release to lessen his risk to the community, post-release help like counselling and a residency period in a halfway house.  The answer was ‘no.’  The parole board would do nothing to help him or reduce the risk it judged him to be.

Now, some time before that scene played out, Brennan was in a session with a prison social worker.  He talked about his concerns for not completing his correctional plan because there were no programs available, how unprepared he was for the outside, and the fear he would do something to prevent his release.  After that last parole board hearing, the social worker went to the institution’s security unit and told them about that conversation.  No issue of confidentiality here.

Brennan was put into solitary confinement as a preventative measure for the entire three months before his release.  Better to increase his risk to the community with what has become recognized as torture than chance a mishap in the institution, according to CSC logic.  This was before Bill C-83 nominally eliminated solitary confinement in November of 2019.  The practice continues of course by other means, but that’s for another time, another place.

Thirty days before his release, Brennan wrote to the parole board, again asking for help to mitigate his risk to the community.  His letter was ignored.  He went to his institutional parole officer with the same plea.  His parole office told him it wasn’t his responsibility to help.

So, if he was considered too great a risk for parole before spending 90 days in solitary confinement, he would have been an even greater risk to reoffend when he was dropped off on a street corner at the end of his sentence.

How about this.  The Parole Board of Canada and Correctional Service of Canada are much more concerned about covering their own butts than they are committed to community safety.  Looks that way, doesn’t it.

As a by the way, how long do you think it was before Brennan reoffended?