ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — It was shortly after another death was confirmed at a notoriously harsh Newfoundland jail that Bob Buckingham wrote to his fellow defence lawyers to ask what they could do to better advocate for inmates.
The August death, which sources say was a suicide, was at least the seventh death since 2017 inside jails in the province, which between 2010 and 2020 had the highest rate of inmate suicide in Atlantic Canada.
Unlike the federal corrections system, there is often no independent oversight of provincial jails in Canada. Federal prisons are monitored by the Office of the Correctional Investigator, and Correctional Service Canada publishes statistics on inmate deaths. The agency alerts the press whenever an inmate dies, and deaths that are not from natural causes are investigated by a four-member team and reported on.
"In most provincial jails, what you're looking at is a closed box, it's a closed system," said Toronto human rights lawyer Corey Shefman, who exclusively represents Indigenous people and organizations."Generally speaking, the only people who know what's going on in provincial jails are the inmates, the guards and defence lawyers. And no one listens to the inmates. So there's a real lack of accountability.
Jen Metcalfe, executive director at Prisoners' Legal Services, a British Columbia clinic, says provinces should at least be required to publish data on deaths in their jails, including the cause of the death, the race of the inmate who died and the circumstances of their death, such as whether they had recently spent time in solitary confinement.
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