I Won't Forget the Inmate Who Died After Canada’s Prison Strike

I remember feeling absolutely helpless. Laying on a concrete floor, writhing in pain, I was unable to get up and touch the only button that could bring me help.

I wasn’t in a hospital. I was in a prison cell. I knew that even if I did manage to hit the call button that would get the attention of guards, I could still die before receiving proper medical attention.

I had gallstones that infected my gallbladder. This turned into an inflamed pancreas that resulted in pancreatitis. I was in horrible shape, I was losing weight fast and oftentimes lay sweaty on the floor near tears from the pain. I saw a nurse and the institution doctor repeatedly, but no surgery dates were ever set while I was behind bars. The attacks went from once a month to once a day, and I served my sentence complaining to no avail.

There was no real healthcare until I was released—found on the halfway house floor and rushed to emergency surgery. The doctor questioned why I hadn’t came in for surgery earlier; I questioned the same thing.

Better health care is one of the requests inmates in Canada have made during a recent strike that stretched across North America.

The prison strike started in North Carolina by inmates fed up with inhumane living conditions, a lack of rehabilitative programs, slave-labour-like conditions regarding inmate work, and the many preventable in-custody deaths that continually plague the prison system. Inmates across 14 US states started a peaceful strike on August 21. The strike organizers called for all federal inmates to stand in solidarity, making it one of the largest strikes of its kind in North American history.

Inmates at Burnside, the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility in Dartmouth, released 10 demands when they joined this protest. Health care was at the top of the list followed by access to rehabilitative programs, and access to the library.

The strike ended September 9 and was not widely circulated in the Canadian federal prison system, and many publications did not cover it. Many people didn’t know it had spread to Canadian soil, although the issues are very much relevant to our federal prison systems and are reaching alarming levels.

Calling their demands “reasonable,” the Canadian prisoners at Burnside Correctional said they are “being warehoused as inmates, [and] not treated as human beings,” a sentiment I am all too familiar with.

“We have tried through other means including complaint, conversation, negotiation, petitions, and other official and non-official means to improve our conditions,” they said in a letter published in the Halifax Examiner.

The strikes—organized by the prison advocacy group Jailhouse Lawyers Speak—were a direct response to the Lee Correctional Institute riot in South Carolina in April. Many advocates say that riot was preventable and was a result of massive budget cuts to rehabilitative programming, amenities, deplorable living conditions and a lack of oversight. Several people died.

Ignoring inmate voices has historically led to many horrible and often fatal events in North America, and Canada is no exception. As recently as 2016, there was a deadly riot at Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert that stemmed from grievances over food, mistreatment of inmate kitchen workers and inadequate space and living conditions.

The Correctional Investigator of Canada Ivan Zinger noted in his annual report that the inmates were not being heard, adding that issues with food does not justify the loss of human life. (That riot also saw $36 million in damages, a significant cost that could have been better spent on programs to help inmates reintegrate into society once they are released, amongst other things.)

Zinger also noted deplorable living conditions across the board, calling conditions in federal Canadian cells an “unnecessarily stark and foreboding environment for human habitation.”

“Walls don’t just hold people in, they hold voices in,” John Hutton, executive director at the John Howard Society of Manitoba, told me. Hutton is concerned about reductions in food quality and programming over the last ten years. “I worry that the system has a lot of power and these people don’t have a lot of power.”

On September 10, a day after the strike ended, an inmate died at Burnside Correctional Facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was found unresponsive in his cell; he had mental health issues and a history of suicide attempts. This death has been called preventable and the family is poised to take legal action.

Inmates at Burnside released a statement at the end of their 20-day protest, saying that since the protest began they have been “locked down, with even less time spent outside.” The inmates sent condolences and love to the deceased family, asking “How many more people have to die in this facility until our cries for help are heard?”

The inmate voice is often dismissed because we committed crimes. But the “do the crime, do the time” mentality doesn’t take into account that in Canada we are jailing our most marginalized populations. We see crimes of poverty stemming from addiction and social problems that are only made worse in prison.

Between 2007 and 2016, while the overall federal prison population increased by less than five per cent, the Indigenous prison population increased by 39 percent, while at the same time only representing 4.3 percent of the total Canadian population. For the last three decades, there has been an increase every single year in the federal incarceration rate for Indigenous people.

As well black inmates comprised 9.5 percent of the inmate population while representing just three percent of the Canadian population.

Both Indigenous and Black inmates are over-represented in maximum security and segregation, and were more likely to be involved in incidents of use of force. These stats are hardly coincidence, and are indicative of a broader problem of systemic discrimination in all aspects of our justice system, from policing, to courts to corrections.

Bianca Mercer spent 34 months at Burnside Correctional. “You just don’t feel human anymore,” she recently told a panel of 100 former inmates, activists, and advocates. Released November 2017, Mercer spoke of deplorable living conditions and medical doctors that ineffectively attempted to conduct an ultrasound on her when she was pregnant. “Your rights go right out the door.”

Inmates are sentenced to spend time incarcerated, but nowhere does it say they should be given sub-par healthcare or living conditions that may result in death. I fail to find a sentence in the criminal code that says you will be stripped of basic rights and be subject to inhumane treatment.

The time people spend incarcerated should be used to rehabilitate the inmate, which benefits society upon their release. That’s why Correctional Service Canada has correction in their name.

In most cases in Canada, inmates will be released with the expectation of becoming productive members of the community. Without access to programs and libraries, and the basic treatments of fairness and equality, I’m not sure how we currently can expect that to happen. Inmates are already paying their dues to society, but we are heading down a path where punishment outweighs any basic rights.

Though the strike has since ended, it’s important not to forget the reasonable message of a population that’s often left voiceless. When I looked at the strikers’ demands, I see myself lying on the floor of my cell asking for help—asking to be recognized as a human, asking for a voice.

Those Canadian inmates ended their letter about the strike quoting Nelson Mandela:

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

Follow Ryan Beardy on Twitter.

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