Criminal Justice

The ongoing enquiry into the abysmally sad and needlessly stupid death of a young woman suffering from a mental condition that required medical guidance, not a prison sentence, has revealed much about the seemingly incorrigible backwardness of a prison system not geared to look after the needs of a desperate child, while revealing also the difficulty of coping with the desperate actions of such a child.  Ashley Smith was a child when she succeeded in ending her life.




She obviously didn't mean for her life to end. From all accounts she did not deliberately seek death. What she sought was human compassion. For someone in that great anonymous, hostile-to-life system where a troubled teen was taken into custody at age 17 and spent the next four years of her life in prison custody. She was transferred repeatedly from one prison to another, from one psychiatric counselling unit to another.

She should never have been imprisoned. Her loving family in New Brunswick feared for their child, adopted when she was very young, and as she reached her teen years, acting out in a manner that they weren't able to understand or to cope with. What brought her to prison is an absurd occurrence; she had thrown crab apples at a postal worker in the belief that the post office was withholding welfare cheques from her family's neighbour.

Moncton native Ashley Smith, 19.

By the time she was 18 she had graduated from pulling pranks in prison to attempting to tie self-made ligatures around her neck, and she was sent to an adult prison for women.

She died, age 19, a forlorn, frightened young woman, desperate to be with someone who might try to understand her, in her prison cell at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario. She died of asphyxiation, self-administered through one of the ligatures she was so accustomed to using.

She had always relied on the guards who kept a close watch over her, to rush in and rescue her from death. She felt confident that would always happen. She confessed to one guard who had become close to her and had given her as much verbal comfort as he could, that she didn't want to die, didn't mean to kill herself, wanted to be with her beloved mother.

It's clear the prison system didn't know how to manage Ashley Smith. Her attempts at self-harm took place multiple times daily. Guards were given precise instructions on how they were to respond. Some of those instructions were fairly heartless. The guards themselves were uncertain how useful those instructions were, and had to restrain themselves from the compulsion to rush in when they were sternly informed they must not.

Instructions given to those who had immediate oversight of her while she was in her cell, made little sense. The focus seemed to be on maintaining a distance. This, toward a confused and mentally disturbed young woman who could make no sense of her life herself, and who craved physical intimacy with others to reassure her that she was still human, that someone cared about her.

The response to her need, and to punish her when she was acting out and confounding the authorities was to place her for long periods of time - once for a full year - in solitary confinement. As a solution to a young woman's need for human contact, through the years of struggling with a mental condition that understandably under these conditions continued to deteriorate, was an utter failure, and cruelty beyond belief.

This was a sick, confused, vulnerable child in a woman's body. She was constantly humiliated, degraded, her needs abandoned to a system unable and unwilling to meet her needs. Surely, this country can do much, much better. She died while serving a six-year, one-month sentence for a number of young offender offences, according to a Correction Service of Canada release.

She was first taken into custody in October of 2003. She had reached the two-thirds mark of her sentence. She would have been eligible for release in November 2007, but she died in October, a month earlier. She lies buried under a beech tree in a cemetery in Moncton, New Brunswick. There is a tombstone there, shaped in a heart, where one day her mother will lie beside her.