Criminally Segregating the Criminal Ill

The Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre on Innes Rd. in Ottawa. (DARREN BROWN/QMI AGENCY)

"What you have are correctional guards who really aren't properly trained to deal with individuals with more complex medical needs.
"For the correctional guard, it is easy to say 'This person is being difficult, I don't understand what they are doing or why they are doing this, let's put them in segregation or solitary confinement.
"While our client was in solitary confinement, she basically started mentally disintegrating and at times was acting out at staff, and they basically just left her locked in the hole.
"It's our view that Christina's treatment by the OCDC is the worst to ever come before a Human Rights Tribunal. It is our view that this kind of harsh and abusive treatment deserves the highest award of damages ever."
Paul Champ, lawyer

Mr. Champ is acting on behalf of 43-year-old Christina Jahn, a woman dying from breast and bone cancer. Aside from her very unfortunate death sentence of cancer, the woman has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and borderline anti-social personality disorder. She is, in other words, a woman hit with a double-whammy misfortune of mental health and a morbidly dread disease that is taking her physical essence, just as mental health dysfunction has given her psychotic moments in life.

This woman has also amassed a bit of a criminal history with a record for petty crime. Each time she appeared before a court for one of her outbreaks she would be sentenced to progressively longer jail sentences, as a repeat offender with whom the court was losing patience. Most latterly she had created a disturbance as she waited at the Ottawa Hospital cancer centre for treatment. She became upset over the length of the wait, to the extent that alarmed hospital staff and they contacted police.

When the police officer arrived at the hospital Ms. Jahn became belligerent. She was then charged with resisting arrest and causing a disturbance. There are many people without mental illness, afflicted by a physical illness they fear and which has made them exceedingly anxious. With their mind fixated on the illness, and hoping for some relief from the pain or anxiety they find difficult to endure, having to wait an extended period of time to have medical attention could provoke the beast in the best of us.

In 2012 she was returned once again to the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre after a shoplifting arrest. On this occasion also she was charged with resisting arrest, along with the charge of theft. She pleaded guilty, and spent 125 consecutive days in segregation. Segregation confined the woman to 23 hours of confinement in a small windowless cell. During which time jail staff failed to supply her with her cancer medication for which she asked, repeatedly.

Ms. Jahn, according to the guard on duty "began screaming, yelling obscenities through the hatch and generally being the thoroughly disgusting, rude and obnoxious inmate that all staff have experienced in the past". Her reputation well known, the general dislike of the woman appears to have guaranteed she would be ill-treated. She spent time in jail in 2011 and 2012; held on the first occasion in segregation for 83 successive days.

And during that stay was denied cancer medication, missed an appointment with an oncologist and as a result required an emergency mastectomy after release because of the galloping advance of the cancer. All of which led Christina Jahn to file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. She is seeking damages as well as to effect a systematic change in how the province's jails treat the mentally ill like herself. She claims staff at the jail withheld her cancer medication, left her cell lights on through the night, removed her mattress so she had to sleep on the floor and shut off water to her cell.

Her lawyer, Paul Champ, decried the "excessive use" of solitary confinement as a controlling tool with someone suffering from mental illness. Mr. Champ is seeking $250,000 on behalf of his client in damages for "harm to dignity, humiliation, mental anguish and reckless discrimination".  The greater purpose of the plaintiff for the tribunal to achieve is to direct the provincial ministry overseeing jails for an improvement in the treatment of mentally ill inmates, and the monitoring of segregation.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services gave no comment. In 2011 a report produced by the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre recommended that the province take steps to build a separate facility for mentally ill female inmates. To match the one that already exists for mentally ill male inmates. A secure female unit, their report said, could save $21-million in incarceration costs and about $5-million in health-care costs annually.

It's not as though the Correctional Services ministry is unaware of the crisis in their ability to handle the needs of the mentally ill. A report that they had themselves produced found that 26% of female offenders have serious mental health problems. In other words, it is highly likely that their mental condition has helped to make them the rebellious social outcasts, oblivious to expected social norms, that they express. Royal Ottawa Hospital authorities call on swift action because in their opinion the number of women with mental illness is steadily rising.

The Effects of Segregation -- The Pains of Imprisonment versus Behavioural Deep Freeze

The Arbour recommendation for independent adjudication was not, however, based solely on the need to ensure compliance with the law and the legal characterization of segregation. Because, on her assessment of the evidence and the literature, "There is no rehabilitative effect from long-term segregation, and every reason to be concerned that it may be harmful," placing a prisoner in long-term segregation subjects that prisoner to greater deprivation than originally envisaged by the sentencing court and therefore the use, and in her view, the overuse of long-term segregation, must be subject to independent oversight.
In coming to these conclusions, Madam Justice Arbour reviewed the debate in the scientific and criminological communities on the effects segregation has on prisoners who are subjected to it. This was an issue which had been the subject of evidence in the McCann case in 1975, and in Prisoners of Isolation I reviewed the available clinical and empirical research on the subject; in particular, a series of experiments conducted by Canadian researchers in the 1960s and 1970s who had concluded that solitary confinement did not induce any change in a prisoner’s self-identity or blood pressure and therefore was not demonstrably more stressful than routine prison life. The problem with these and other experiments was that they bore no relationship to the typical situation facing prisoners confined in administrative segregation. The subject of the experiments were volunteers, the periods of confinement were of short duration (less than 10 days) and prisoners could terminate their confinement at any point.

"We argue that she would not have been treated that way if she had a different kind of illness. If you had a physical illness, you'd get proper medical care. But because she has a mental illness, the treatment option is to put her in solitary confinement. It's well supported by the medical evidence that it has serious deleterious effects on mental well-being of people who are well, let alone already mentally ill", argued Christina Jahn's lawyer with perfect confidence in his perfect case.