Canadian Regime! Abu Ghraibs in Canada for Torture and Prisoner’s
Abuse?
Release Adam Capay
from solitary confinement: Editorial
"Nadir: Nine months ill-treated
by the Minister of Correctional Services"
HONOURABLE
CANADIAN MINISTER OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICES: Could you deny?
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2016/10/25/release-adam-capay-from-solitary-confinement-editorial.html
Adam Capay has
been held in segregation for more than four years without being convicted of
the crime he is charged with. This torture must end.
It is the height
of hypocrisy. Last week, as Correctional Services Minister David Orazietti was
expressing his concern for prisoners held in solitary
confinement in Ontario, a horrific example of the province’s treatment of
prisoners was underway in a Thunder Bay jail.
There, a young
aboriginal man named Adam Capay was in solitary confinement in a
Plexiglas-lined jail cell, lit 24 hours a day, where he has been held for more
than 1,500 days while he awaits trial. That’s right. Capay has been held for
over four years without even being convicted of the crime for which he is being
held in segregation – the alleged killing of another inmate.
This torture, as
the United Nations calls solitary confinement that extends beyond 15 days,
never mind 1,500, was going on even as Orazietti was announcing a 15-day limit
on the number of consecutive days prisoners can spend in segregation. He also
promised that from now on solitary confinement would “only be used under the
least restrictive conditions available.”
If Orazietti
meant what he said, Capay must be released on humanitarian grounds into a
hospital setting immediately. His mental health is fragile. He told Ontario’s
chief human rights commissioner, Renu Mandhane, who discovered his situation on
a tour of the jail, that he has difficulty talking because of the lack of human
contact. He also showed her scars from self-harming incidents.
Further, it
appears that Capay’s Charter right to be tried within a reasonable time has
been violated. He was originally in another Thunder Bay jail for misdemeanors
at the age of 19, when he was charged in 2012 with first-degree murder for an
alleged attack on another inmate, Sherman Kirby Quisses. It’s imperative that
his legal situation be resolved as quickly as possible.
As horrible as
his situation is, Capay is not alone in suffering in indefinite solitary
confinement. Last spring provincial ombudsman Paul Dubé reported on a prisoner
who had been kept in solitary for more than three years.
Yet the
government continues to rag the puck on this important issue. Orazietti’s
announcement last week was the outcome of a 19-month review of solitary
confinement in Ontario. But instead of making the difficult decisions that
human rights organizations have been demanding for years, Orazietti passed the
buck once again and said the government would hire a third party to conduct yet
another review due next spring.
This is not good
enough. The situation in prisons in this country has been studied to death and
it is clear, as the Ontario Human Rights Commission argued just this month,
that there is an “alarming and systemic overuse of segregation.”
It’s time that
federal, provincial and territorial governments legislated changes to ensure
that segregation is a limited, last resort at Canadian prisons, and not left to
the whims of correctional staff. And while they work on that, they should end
the unjustifiable mistreatment of Adam Capay.
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