For many female inmates in Canada’s prisons, a routine trip to the gynecologist could mean being shackled to a bed. This is according to a 2016–17 investigative report from Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI). About one-quarter of female maximum security prisoners interviewed in the investigation reported being restrained during off-unit movement, including health care appointments and visiting hours with children. According to the report, male prisoners are not subject to the same movement restrictions. This is one of several alarming statistics related to Canada’s justice system reported in the past year. While overall rates of adult incarceration declined slightly in the past decade, rates of women and Indigenous people in Canada’s prisons are on the rise. Yet the OCI report notes no increase in female criminality in Canada over that period. Here are the numbers:

30%
The approximate increase in the number of federally sentenced female inmates in the past decade.

60%
The increase in the number of Indigenous female inmates over the same period. The greatest increase came in British Columbia. In 2016–17, 47 percent of women admitted to federal custody in B.C. were Indigenous—nearly double the percentage 10 years ago.

50%
Indigenous women represent 37 percent of all women behind bars, but they make up 50 percent of the maximum security population in federal prisons. Ninety percent of the women interviewed for the OCI investigation reported being segregated during their maximum security sentence, and 83 percent also reported having mental health problems. One region noted that women in segregation are provided earplugs to block out the screams of others in segregation in the same wing.

3
The number of recommendations presented to the Canadian Senate at an open caucus this year to keep women out of prisons and successfully reintegrate offenders into communities.
1. Strengthen community programs that alleviate poverty and prevent crime
2. Reform sentencing, classification and segregation
3. Make the prison system more transparent and accountable

Thousands of federal offenders are serving life sentences in Canada’s justice system, and critics say they aren’t getting the rehabilitative support they need.

“A life sentence is quite different from a traditional sentence,” explains Anita Desai, executive director of the St. Leonard’s Society of Canada. People serving life sentences, or “lifers,” often grapple with a greater sense of hopelessness than other inmates, she says, and they require targeted supports to help them work through that.

That support used to be given through a federally funded program called LifeLine, which helped lifers envision, and then prepare for, a future outside of prison. The federal government scrapped the program’s funding in 2012 as part of massive cuts amid Stephen Harper’s tough-on-crime agenda. Advocates want the funding reinstated, but the current government doesn’t appear interested in the program either.

From 1991 to 2012, LifeLine paired prisoners with mentors who themselves served life sentences and then successfully reintegrated into the community. The mentors guided mentees on adapting to life in prison, helped them prepare for life on the outside, and supported them once they were paroled.

LifeLine won multiple international awards while it was running, and correctional systems in other countries have emulated the program. Before it lost funding, LifeLine was employing as many as 26 in-reach workers to provide services to over 2,200 lifers. The program was not only effective, it was relatively inexpensive as well, costing just $2 million a year.

When LifeLine’s funding was cut, a coalition of community groups raised money to run a stripped-down version of the program. That funding ran out in March 2018, further jeopardizing the future of LifeLine.

Desai and other advocates for prison reform say it’s time for the federal government to fund the program again. Ivan Zinger, Canada’s federal prison ombudsman, agrees. In his 2016/2017 annual report, Zinger called on the Liberals to do just that.

But a spokesperson from Correctional Services Canada (CSC) says the government isn’t considering reinstating funding for LifeLine at this time. The CSC says LifeLine has been replaced by the Lifer Resource Strategy—a set of materials in binders available for prisoners in their libraries.

Desai says the Lifer Resource Strategy isn’t adequate. She compares it to giving a student a textbook but no teacher. “Ultimately,” Desai says, “a life sentence is handed out by the government, and it should be the responsibility of the government to fund a program that’s demonstrated to support this specific population.”

In the fall of 2016, an inmate spoke to Renu Mandhane through a small hole in the glass at a provincial jail in Thunder Bay, Ont. He told her he had been in segregation, or solitary confinement, awaiting trial for more than four years.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission and Mandhane, the chief commissioner, brought national attention the case of Adam Capay, and the segregation of Indigenous people and those with mental health challenges inside provincial jails. We spoke with Mandhane about why this is happening and the Commission’s call on provincial jails to end solitary confinement.

How is someone suffering from mental health issues more susceptible to being segregated?

With the closing of big mental health residential facilities in in the 1980s and ’90s, we didn’t see a creation of appropriate community support to address the needs of those people who are no longer being held there. Those people are at more risk of being criminalized. So, a large proportion of prisoners—I think it’s somewhere around 40 percent—are identified as having mental health issues and disabilities. And then, of course, the institutional environment often exacerbates those issues.

Just as an example, Thunder Bay Jail has a psychiatrist come in twice a month to deal with a jail with a capacity of 130. So people who have complex mental health disabilities are not getting the support they need, or even the support they may have been getting in the community. Those people may feel vulnerable, and either ask to be segregated or are segregated because their behaviour is perceived as creating a risk to themselves or the institution.

Are Indigenous people more susceptible to segregation?

Again, we don’t have [the] data. We know that’s true in federal jails so that’s a strong indicator that it would be the case provincially. But, Indigenous people are overrepresented in the entire criminal justice system—they are over-policed and [represent] a higher population of the prison population—and so are more susceptible to being placed in segregation.

Many Indigenous people are also housed in facilities in the north, more than southern Ontario, and that means their proximity to treatment centres is much farther. It requires them to really give up family support if they want to transfer to that kind of institution. Many of their lawyers will also be in Toronto or Winnipeg, so they aren’t there on a day-to-day basis to see the conditions of confinement or advocate for their clients. I think the issue of the impact on Indigenous people also can’t be divorced from the geographic isolation of the places they find themselves in.

What was the Commission hoping for when you came out with the information about Capay?

I like to pause and reflect on success obviously. There was, since the revelation of Capay’s case, an investment of approximately $55 million in the criminal justice system to deal with some of the systemic issues. There was also a commitment to hire hundreds of staff in correctional facilities to address the issue and some measure to implement more oversight.

That said, we know that one other individual died by suicide at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre in segregation who had schizophrenia, and we know that another individual has died under, for lack of a better word, suspicious circumstances, at the Central East Correctional Centre. So we’re not going to be satisfied until—you know, setting the bar really low—people stop dying.

What are other options aside from segregation?

Segregation is relatively cheap in the short term. As long as you have a specialized cell, it doesn’t really cost you that much money. The kinds of solutions that we think need to be implemented are more costly in the short term—things like having mental health treatment plans for prisoners, having support readily available, and expanding on the number of beds for people with complex disabilities.

But I also think we need to look beyond prisons and jails, and start thinking about what kind of supports we could have in the community from the Ministry of Health perspective that would actually triage some of these people out of criminalization. People say it’s impossible to phase out segregation, I think it’s impossible for individual jails. I don’t think it’s impossible for the system. I think alternatives cost money, but it’s very expensive to jail people in the first place. And ultimately, those people will re-enter society, the vast majority of them, and it’s in our interest as a society to have a system that produces people who are rehabilitated.

Do you think it’s important for the public to care about issues like these?

Absolutely. This is a system that’s neglected mostly because there are no political points to be won by investing in the criminal justice system. These aren’t stakeholder populations that tend to vote.

I think what spurred the provincial government to act after Capay’s case was surely the situation of his case, but also that the public demanded action. We can say something is human rights abuse, but it really only has the power to persuade politicians if the public echoes those concerns.

Photo courtesy of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

In the late ’90s, the Canadian government debuted what was supposed to be a new, golden era of rehabilitation in women’s prisons. Yet, less than two decades later, the dream has failed. What one former inmate’s struggles and successes tell us about a broken system

RIGHT BEFORE WE MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME, AVA* SENDS A TEXT. “I got here early.” She includes a description: the blonde woman wearing black. My bike bumps along Toronto’s Dundas Street bringing me closer to the café where we’ve agreed to meet. It’s an airy café, fairly full. Neatly framed artwork has been arranged, carefully decorating its walls. On this late October 2013 evening, it’s about a half hour until sunset. Nearly golden light streams in and coffee cups clink on saucers as I walk down the row of tables looking for Ava. A blonde woman sits alone. I see her from the back first. She’s wearing black. It’s her.

We introduce ourselves politely. When Ava smiles the corners of her eyes crinkle a little. Her blonde hair falls in soft waves just past her shoulders. She wears a freshly scented fragrance and subtle makeup. At 41, she wouldn’t look out of place lecturing behind a university podium, dashing down Bay Street in the morning, or picking a child up from school. Ava starts our conversation with, “I like your nail polish,” and in the same girlish raspy voice she says, “My story is complicated.” For the past several years, Ava has been a prisoner inside Grand Valley Institute, a Kitchener, Ont.-based federal institute for women. She began serving her sentence in 2007, and was released on early parole in 2008; by 2009, she’d re-offended and was back in prison. In May 2013 she was released on parole again, a series of drug trafficking and fraud charges behind her—or at least starting to be.

While at Grand Valley, Ava earned a degree from Laurentian University. She is now going to college, planning a career helping women who have been abused. On the surface, it all sounds good, but as Ava has told me, her story is complicated. While she’s believes she held privileges in prison—being white-skinned and educated— in many ways, she also thrived despite the criminal justice system. She’s a rare success story born from a poorly-run prison, where the system is anything but conducive to rebuilding women’s lives—even though, as a rethink of the punitive model, it was designed to do exactly that. In a very real sense, she is one of the lucky unlucky ones. Ava tells me she recently moved out of the halfway house, where, as part of her parole, she was mandated to live from May until October. The server brings her a mug of chai tea and almond milk as I do the math: This is her fifth day of complete independence in years. Ava looks up at the server. “Can I have two sugars, too?”

A CANADIAN WOMAN with a sentence of two years or more serves her time in federal prison. Orange is the New Black may have viewers captivated by the idea of what serving time is like but there’s more going on between scenes—in the Canadian system and at Grand Valley in particular. Between March 2010– March 2012, the population of federally sentenced women topped 600 for the first time, representing a 21 percent increase in just two years. Inside the grey of Grand Valley, women live packed like maraschino cherries in a jar. There, the population is about 180, or three times what the institution was originally designed to accommodate. Gymnasiums, visiting units, and the interview room of the maximum security unit have become makeshift cells. The max unit, where high-security offenders stay, now has two beds in cells that were only designed to hold one.

On top of this, Canada’s prison ombudsperson, Howard Sapers, is concerned about violence in Canada’s women’s institutions. Inmate fights, use-of-force interventions, self-harm, and charges during prison stays and are all trending in the wrong direction. About 69 percent of women offenders also needed mental-health treatment in 2010–2011. Most of the women, 85 percent, have physical abuse in their past and 68 percent have been sexually abused. Family visits are rare—there are only five female-only prisons in Canada (plus a healing lodge) and many incarcerated women have been transported great distances. Sometimes prisoners’ families are even blocked from getting inside.

Grand Valley wasn’t supposed to be like this. Opened in 1997, the prison was designed to be an alternative to the Kingston Prison for Women’s (P4W) rigid and inhospitable environment. Until its closure in 2000, the Kingston prison housed every woman convicted of a federal offence in the country, no matter which corner of Canada she came from. During its 66 years, the prison was under constant scrutiny. From its opening until 1993, it faced 13 investigations commissioned by the government, many of which suggested the prison be shut down. Lack of programming, education, and therapy combined with distance from family lead to inmate despair, depression, claustrophobia, self-harming, and suicide. Between 1977–1991, at least 12 women committed suicide while incarcerated.

In response, the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, including members of the government and advocacy groups such as the Elizabeth Fry Society and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, released a report called “Creating Choices” in April 1990. It outlined areas that needed to be improved for women serving their sentences. After its release, it was decided the Kingston Prison for Women was unfit and would close (at least in theory) in 1994. Then, in the year it was supposed to have closed, a video surfaced, showing an April incident in which male guards brought eight inmates out of their cells for strip searches; they cavity searched seven of the eight the following day. At one point, inmates were also left in empty cells wearing nothing but paper gowns, and in restraints and leg irons. It was a pivotal point in garnering media attention—and even more criticism. It took from 1990–2000 for every single woman to be moved out of the prison and then it finally shut its doors for good on May 8, 2000, when the last woman left.

Kingston’s closure was meant to mark a move toward the new values outlined by the “Creating Choices” document. As the title suggests, it said new values would help create choices for women inmates, operating under the premise they would then be better functioning members in the community upon their release. “Creating Choices” identified key problems facing federally-sentenced women: they were among those who had most suffered from sexism, racism, physical, and sexual abuse, plus poor education and employment. The report’s authors concluded these women didn’t need more punitive measures, but empowerment, programs, and work options to take responsibility for their lives inside prison—positive behaviour that would
ideally extend beyond prison life. In addition to promoting rehabilitative-focused programming, the report declared women were housed with little access to fresh air, light, and social interaction, all detrimental factors to healthy rehabilitation.

When Grand Valley first opened, things were optimistic. It embodied the five principles of “Creating Choices” (empowerment, meaningful and responsible choices, respect and dignity, a supportive environment, and shared responsibility), right down to the cottage-style buildings, where a woman’s children and family could come and live for
extended visits. Back then, it only housed 64 women. For incarcerated women’s advocates, it was a much needed change for Canada. “It opened under a whole new vision for how correction for women in Canada was going to operate,” says Father Con O’Mahony, a former Grand Valley chaplain. “It was geared towards a much more
integrated experience for the woman.” One, he adds, that worked well for the first few years.

O’Mahony finally left Grand Valley in 2009, after spending 13 years watching its once great plans disintegrate. He first began to see things change after the federal Conservative government began to implement the first wave of “tough on crime” policies in the mid-2000s. O’Mahony became further disquieted when he noticed inmates’ mental health issues had began to largely be addressed through medication, and nothing else. Then, there was the overcrowding—and worse. Programming was cut. In 2010, the inmates at Grand Valley filed over 120 formal complaints with the Official of the Correctional Investigator, more than any other women’s prison in Canada. In 2012, the Conservative government sliced $295 million from CSC’s overall budget over a two year period. But, there were little things, too.

Guards who once wore casual clothes came dressed in dark navy uniforms. They began to carry what O’Mahony says looked like tasers. Before things started to change, he was buzzed through only one door before entering a main area where women would approach to talk. “I think it encouraged adults to be adults and it encouraged adult conversation,” he says. Now though, there are two levels of security before reaching the entry area. Everybody gets screened. When he went in for mass, often his Bible or his identification were swabbed for drugs. “It was a very different feel,” he says. Now, a disoriented Grand Valley has lost its sense of direction and is heading backwards, fast—taking most of its female inmates along with it.

BEFORE SHE WAS AN INMATE, Ava cross-country skied along Sudbury trails. She studied religious studies at Laurentian University. She made gift baskets to sell in the café she coowned with her boyfriend. But these are the highlights. When I first met her in October, Ava described her life as “dark and bleak” but left it there. Seven months later, she fills in her story. “I had several experiences of sexual abuse starting from the age of four.” She notes that the majority of incarcerated women have been sexually abused—that’s a common theme. “To be brutally honest, yes I mean rape.”

Her relationship with the boyfriend who she owned the café with started in her mid-20s and lasted roughly five years. It became violent in the early stages. Ava’s mother was also abused. So was her grandmother. Still, Ava says she found her place in the café, and loved it. She got along well with the customers and liked making their gift baskets. But slowly, the abuse became too much. She left the relationship and, shortly after,
her northern Ontario town, heading to Toronto for a fresh start. But things continued to go in the same direction. “I’d escape from one abusive relationship to another and leave with nothing but the clothes on my back and try to start over,” she says. “Eventually I just kind of gave up.” In one of our interviews, she tells me it feels like it was inevitable for her life to go in the direction it did, but then adds: “what’s different for me is that I was able to move past it.”

In Toronto, Ava got a reputation for being impulsive. She moved to the city at age 30. There were times when she abandoned her apartment, not giving her lease a second thought. She got involved in another abusive relationship. She kicked him out; he stole everything from her. He was a con man and had ripped off a lot of people already. “They came looking for him and raped and beat me. I got evicted from my apartment.”

From there, Ava turned to crime for the first time. In 2001, she started selling cocaine, then got into sex work, then started using the cocaine to recover from the sex work, then made her way to heroin which she both used and sold. At one point, right before she got arrested, she tried to pull away from her lifestyle and had even started making gift baskets again. But just a few months after she was arrested for selling drugs to an undercover police officer and possessing firearms. Found guilty, she was sentenced to five years in prison. After a year, she was released on early parole. She returned to crime and violated her order within days. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a shit,’” she says. “Everyone’s told me I’m a piece of shit so that’s what I am and that’s what I’ll continue to be.’” After her parole violation, she was sentenced to an additional three years and four months.

“I work hard to achieve things and then I just fuck them up,” Ava says. “While I’ve been impulsive, I’ve also been the kind who likes to lay down roots and build things. I’m self-destructive and destroy them, which probably led to the impulsivity … That’s why I have this tattoo.” She rolls up her sleeve and inscribed in cursive is a message about not tearing down what you’ve built for yourself. She got it in Grand Valley.

AVA’S FIRST STOP ON THE WAY to Grand Valley was the Vanier Centre for Women, a provincial jail in Milton, Ont. If a sentence is less than two years, a person stays in a provincial jail, but many women are also held in custody in a provincial jail as they await their sentence. Ava lived in the high security area of Vanier from March 2009–March 2011 before being transferred.

“It’s actually so scary,” she says. The first time she entered the doors of Vanier she says, women were in her face: “What have you got? Do you have a package?” They meant drugs. In provincial jail, there’s no methadone treatment. You wait until you get out or get to federal prison. On her first stay, Ava walked past plenty of women who were throwing up or had diarrhea. Withdrawal. It’s a dirty place. There is no soap for your hands. When someone left the bathroom, someone else would say, “so and- so’s been smoking crack again.” Some women tucked drugs into their bodies; other women knocked them out in the shower to get them. One day, while being escorted out of the high security range to visit a social worker, a guard looked at her and said, “She’s a fucking waste of time.”

Every day for every meal, she would line up for a spoon. She lined up to give it back. She usually didn’t hand it back. Instead, she stuck it through a hatch. Most guards wouldn’t touch it, but some would take it from her with a glare. At night, she would go back her cell, back to her mattress on the floor. Clean laundry was still dirty. Sometimes, there would be no socks for a week. The metal door with the slot for meals stayed shut. “It’s a relief when you get to Grand Valley,” she says. “Believe it or not.”

IN GRAND VALLEY, Ava lived in a unit with 10 women. Everyone at the prison receives a food budget of $35.56 per week. While there, Ava would make her list and then another woman picked up the items at the prison’s industrial food area. On a typical day, she would wake-up at 5:30 or 6 a.m., make breakfast, and go to work. During her time there, she filled a number of positions—librarian, photographer, and member of the inmate committee. She received a release to work at the Humane Society. The highest a woman can earn at Grand Valley is just shy of $7 per day, a
wage that has been static since 1981. Pay is situation-dependent and can be as low as $1 per day. Women use the wages to buy basic hygiene needs and pay phone fees to call family. (Just this past fall though, a new rule was established requiring inmates to give 30 percent of their pay back for room and board.) Ava likes buying shoes. She would save her $6 daily wage for months and months, eventually picking the exact right pair from the prison’s Nike catalogue.

While many women at Grand Valley worked, others slept away their sentences, she says. At Grand Valley, there is a 90-day evaluation period before an inmate can be entered in core programming. Oftentimes, though, there’s a waiting list for programming as well, and there is no guarantee a woman will start programming after the evaluation period. Inmates cannot apply for parole until the programming is complete. Ava has seen women begin their mandatory programming so late, they miss their chance to do so. “The beds are staying full,” she says, “and nobody’s moving.”

The work day for inmates lasts the full morning. After work, Ava would head back to her unit in time for the guards’ regular 11:15 a.m. headcount. Ava’s clearance came each day at about 12:30 p.m. From there, she went to programs until 4 p.m. Then,
another count. It cleared at 5:30 p.m. After that, free time until 9 p.m. Ava would usually head to the gym. “That was my sanity place,” she says. “That’s what I loved to do.” In the beginning they had a weight room, but it was later turned into a guard’s office. At one point, there was a step aerobics class. The steps broke, but they used them that way anyway—until they got taken away. Eventually the women received a new shipment of cardio equipment: one elliptical, two treadmills, and two bikes. Ava says the women fought over them constantly. Sometimes Ava would watch TV after. Inmates are allowed 15-inch sets in their cells. They have to pay for cable, whether they have a TV or not.

At Grand Valley, there was one thing that Ava could use to move herself forward. Ava had started a degree in 1992, but says she quit one credit short of graduating. Initially, she just wanted to finish that credit, and decided to take a women’s studies course through correspondence. “Then I was like, ‘Hey, I would really like to continue studying this.’ So I had to do 36 credits in women’s studies.” While many of Grand Valley’s once-big ambitions have shrunk, it still offers post-secondary correspondence courses through Laurentian University, as well as the Inside-Out program. Facilitated by Wilfrid Laurier University in the case of Grand Valley, the program trains professors from across Canada to go into institutions to teach a class that is a mixture of students from the university and students from the prison.

Inside-Out started in the U.S. in 1997 and runs in 25 states. It started in Grand Valley in 2011 with 10 “outside” students and seven “inside” students. The program offers courses through the faculty of social work and the faculty of arts at Wilfrid Laurier and receives funding from the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation, which gives grants to support education and children’s initiatives in the Waterloo region. Wilfrid Laurier University provides texts and bursaries for incarcerated students. For Ava, it was intimidating, especially her first day of class. “On our end,” she says, “we’re like ‘Oh my God these are university students, they are going to think we’re dumb.’”

She also worried the students would notice she only had blue, stained institute T-shirts to wear. What about her pants? Would these students judge her for wearing the same ones every week? “Sometimes it sounds really vain, my worries in there,” she says. “It makes you feel like you stand out and all you want to do is just blend in.” Her worries didn’t turn into reality. She began to look forward to her Inside-Out classes every week. Inmate students didn’t want class to end and for the outside students to leave. “It was really over and above anything we had hoped for,” she says. And between those classes and her correspondence courses, she managed to finish her degree and graduate on June 8, 2013. “It felt absolutely amazing,” she says. “I am the only woman in the history of GVI to have completed a degree while being there.”

AVA WAS RELEASED from Grand Valley on May 22, 2013. She went into prison with few chances for a successful future—and doesn’t downplay her degree. “Unless you’re released from prison and learn something new, you’re exactly where you started,” she says. “The fact that I was able to work on my degree, get involved in Inside-Out, I’m now in college full-time— that’s given me all the direction I needed to try and change. If none of that happened, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. I really don’t know.” That might make it seem like Creating Choices is still alive. Not quite.

“The GVI that opened in 1997 is not the GVI we have today,” says O’Mahony. Ava points to one, big roadblock on the way to education: If women at Grand Valley want to take university correspondence courses, they have to find a way to finance them— something that’s incredibly difficult to do on a salary of less than $7 a day. At one point, inmates could get an Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) bursary called Ontario Special Bursaries which awarded a student up to $2,500. Those were last offered for the 2010- 2011 year though before they were cut from the Ontario budget. Before the bursaries were cancelled, says Ava, 30 women were studying post-secondary inside Grand Valley via correspondence. The next year, that number dropped to two. Ava paid for school through scholarships, a $500 grant from the Elizabeth Fry Association (a group that helps incarcerated women) and a different grant from OSAP.

Outside of Grand Valley, Ava says she’s lonely, that she has no friends, and has only been to the movies once. She’s not allowed to talk to anyone from prison because
she’s on parole. She feels displaced. Prices have changed. Muffins used to be $1, now they are $2. She took a trip to Shoppers Drug Mart recently, but left. The tattoo underneath her sleeve is a reminder to stay on course. She talks about these things and about her life of abuse and drugs and her women’s studies degree that she had to fight so hard for inside a penitentiary that has become hardened and strict. Somewhere on a bridge above the Don Valley River on our way to her boxing class, she stops and says “I like walking across bridges.”

Before we walk through the gym’s doors, she stops again and tells me she’s wearing two pairs of pants. She says quickly, her tone hushed: “It’s a habit from prison,” where the cells were cold and an extra pair of pants meant an extra layer of protection between her skin and filth. Months later, she tells me she’s always worried that something will send her back to Grand Valley—that everything she’s worked for is all hanging together by a string and that it could snap so easily. Sometimes in the city, she comes face-to-face with women from her prison days, still stuck in the cycle.

The other boxers don’t know about Grand Valley yet (although, tired of living a double life, she will later tell them).During the workout she’s smiling, making wisecracks. “It looks easier than it is,” she says, even though she jumps at the chance to use the weighted ball. With every exercise she adds a twist making it more challenging. The gym blasts OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and has a brown-haired, freckle-faced coach who says that every woman needs a heavy bag to punch. “Better out than in,” she says. Throughout the gym the sound of gloves hitting and bouncing off punching bags echo. Here, at least, Ava moves with ease.

 *name changed to protect privacy

Syrus Marcus Ware. Production still by Joshua Allen from "Ten," directed by Sarah Sharkey Pearce.

For the last two years, anyone weary of the increasingly commercialized and blissfully apoliticized nature of Pride in Toronto has made a beeline for the back-to-the-future experience that is the Trans March. It’s small, friendly, community-based, unendorsed by any corporate interest. It’s also politicized, giddy, and endearingly disorganized, the way many of us remember Prides of yore. It’s not just nostalgia that draws a bigger crowd each year, though — it’s the sense that trans activism has taken up the social-change banner from a gay movement that dropped it the moment the right to marry became the dominant political cause.

Syrus Marcus Ware, a baby-faced, 35-year-old trans guy, was happily agitating for a trans presence at Pride even before the march got organized. In 2008, he and a buddy “pushed and pushed and convinced” the organizers to start a trans stage (now a regular feature of Pride celebrations), but he’d been kick-starting trans, black, and prison-related causes long before that. Like many trans people, he came out first as gay, became an activist in high school (“I wanted to change attitudes at school and in my family,” he says, “and had a strong belief that the world could, and should, be different”), finally coming out as trans in 2000 after grappling with his feelings for at least a decade. Since then, he’s more than made up for lost time.

He’s an artist (painting, performance, and video) whose work often blurs into activism and whose activism can have the exhilaration of art (a program co-ordinator for youth and young adults at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he’s not wary of blending politics with art appreciation—his take on the recent Maharaja blockbuster show stressed the impact of British imperialism as much as it did the exhibit’s splendour). He’s a host of CIUT 89.5 FM’s Resistance on the Sound Dial. He helped create the publication Primed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them. He’s involved with Gay/Bi/Queer Transmen Working Group, with a mandate to provide sexual health information to trans guys who have sex with men. He helped develop TransFathers 2B, a pilot course for trans men considering parenting (he recently got pregnant and is in a relationship with another trans guy). He works for prison abolition, both culturally, through the Prison Justice Film Festival, and politically, through the Prisoners’ Justice Action Committee, a group building abolition strategies within the black, indigenous, and trans communities.

If the gay movement opened the door to sexual diversity, the trans movement seems to be kicking it off its hinges, encouraging exploration well beyond gay, straight, and bi, creating a happily dizzy-making world where guys get pregnant, where that bearded dude with the great pecs turns out to have a vagina, where that gorgeous babe intends to keep her penis because she no longer has to comply with cultural expectations of gender. And the rest of us? We get a gender playground, open to all. “There are so many human variations outside the cookie-cutter paradigm of human desire,” says Ware. “We have to stop pathologizing them.” He’s working on it.

The winner of the "Miss Talavera Bruce" women's prison pageant.

Rio de Janeiro has a murder rate as high as a war zone—millions of impoverished people here resort to crime for survival. A kid from the favelas of Rio has limited career options: kidnapper, cocaine trafficker, gang leader, robber, or hit man. For many, prison is safer than the streets, and comes with more reliable food and shelter.

Carnaval is one of the hardest times of year for imprisoned Brazilians, as their fellow free citizens pour into the streets in a sea of colourful celebration. In February 2009, I traveled to the notorious Bangu Prison Complex in Rio to photograph the women who live there. I wanted to see how prisoners celebrate such an important national holiday behind bars.

When I entered the prison for the first time, I was shocked to see bright pink, blue, and yellow paint on the main corridors of the jail. I felt I was shopping for candy, not walking inside a building containing some of the city’s most dangerous criminals. Prisoners walked freely in the courtyard and garden, picking up leaves, changing garbage bags, working. Everyone was smiling. It all felt a little too happy—considering that the women I met were imprisoned for smuggling, armed robbery, even murder.

I made a friend inside, Michelle, from Amsterdam, caught at the Rio airport smuggling cocaine. She had learned Portuguese during her difficult first incarcerated year, and became my translator and guide to the inner workings of Bangu. Outwardly, the women I talked to and photographed were cheerful, smiling, glad to have the small luxuries I snuck in for them—chocolate, phone cards for their illicit cell phones, or the plastic Carnaval crowns that people wear during the five-day holiday. But the stories they told while I took their portraits betrayed their sadness and loneliness inside the massive prison.

The prisoners I met are young women who were never given the chance to grow, or who grew up too old, too quickly. Born into poverty and with few options, they had fallen into desperate circumstances. One inmate, Sylvia, told me she especially misses giving Carnaval party tours to tourists, now that she’s in jail for armed robbery. When she was young, she got a phone call from her father who said he was going to beat up her mother. When she was in her teens, her father tried to kill her mother. From that point on, she decided she would never again rely on a man for support. That is what led her to armed robbery. After spending months in jail she, like many other prisoners, has turned to the comfort of God and religion for guidance and understanding. But, like many others, when she is released, the chances are high that she will be back within a matter of months.

Gallery

Inside Yellowknife’s courthouse, behind the plastic shield of the prisoner’s docket, Tommy is plucking his fingers: one, two, three, four, from pointer to pinky and back again. It’s October 14, 2009. His AC/ DC t-shirt is split down the side from armpit to bellybutton, but Tommy doesn’t seem to notice. He’s wearing his usual expression, mouth open in a lazy O, coffee-brown eyes staring at his hands’ worried fidgeting. This is his 21st court appearance. The 21-year-old aboriginal man was charged with sexual assault in February 2009. At this point, he’s been in custody for 230 days, and it’s been 120 days since the court ordered a mental health assessment so doctors can determine whether he’s even fit to stand trial.

It’s not supposed to take this long. By all accounts, Tommy’s first lawyer failed him. After a judge signed an order for a psychiatric assessment on June 16, defence lawyer Garrett O’Brien did, apparently, nothing. When Tommy’s follow-up date came on July 28, O’Brien wasn’t sure if his client had actually undergone the assessment. Later that afternoon, he told the court Tommy had never even left the jail. When local media asked him what went wrong, O’Brien responded he didn’t want to talk about a file that was no longer his: “Tomorrow is my last day here and Sunday I leave Yellowknife and I’ll never be back.”

Tommy’s second lawyer, a man named Abdul Khan who is prone to wearing ill-fitted suits the colour of over-ripe olives, says he’s tried to do better. He’s had little luck. As he tells Judge Bernadette Schmaltz, a stern woman who exudes capability and practicality in every detail, right down to her simple wire glasses and short hair, Tommy won’t talk to him. He’ll stare blankly, sometimes he’ll nod at odd places, or shake his head, but Khan has no idea how Tommy wants to proceed—or if he even knows why he’s in jail.

It’s a thought that seems to distress Schmaltz. “I have never in my experience in the North,” she says, “seen [an assessment] take that long.” With some difficulty—and a whole lot of prodding—she gets Tommy to respond in a way that few in the Northwest Territories courtroom have seen.

Eventually: “Have you spoken to a lawyer?” Pause. “A long time ago.” “Do you want to speak to Mr. Khan?” A shake of the head. No. “What do you want to do?” “Get out.” “Yes, I expect you would want to.” At this point, it seems possible. Crown prosecutor Terri

Nguyen has said Tommy’s already been in custody longer than she’s seeking sentencing for—if he were even found guilty, which he hasn’t been. Schmaltz has even suggested a judicial stay of proceedings (an indefinite suspension) might be appropriate. Likely, but it’s not to be. In the end, Tommy isn’t released from custody until January 2010. By then, he’ll have made 30 court appearances and have spent nearly a year warehoused in his cell inside Pod D, the smallest of four “pods” that comprise the NWT’s North Slave Correctional Centre.

Inside NSCC, Pod D has become the de facto ward for special-needs inmates: those who are mentally ill, or those who haven’t been diagnosed with anything, but aren’t quite all there, either. Wardens and guards alike openly call it the “special needs” pod. Some inmates, like Tommy, who is suspected to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), are officially undiagnosed. Others have been confirmed as having FAS or being schizophrenic or bi-polar. Diagnosed or not, they share one thing in common: they shouldn’t be there.

Thanks to a nationwide closure of mental health hospitals in the ’90s and a subsequent failure to put savings into community-level programming, the problem is not unique to the NWT. In 2009, Canadian federal corrections investigator Howard Sapers pinpointed mental health care and delivery as the most serious and pressing issue facing Corrections Canada today. “Criminalizing and then warehousing the mentally ill burdens our justice system and does nothing to improve public safety,” he wrote in his 2008/09 annual report. “The demands in this area of corrections are increasing dramatically; the unmet needs are immediate and troubling.” Sapers points to two recent in-custody deaths for emphasis: the high-profile case of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old New Brunswick woman who committed suicide inside an Ontario jail, and that of a First Nations man who, as Sapers details in his report A Failure to Respond, slashed his left arm in his cell. Help came, but it was too little, too late. The man was left alone in his cell for half an hour before the ambulance arrived and staff, reported Sapers, “failed to respond in a manner that might have preserved his life.”

These core issues are not unique north of 60. But in the absence of any competent response, they become grotesquely inflated. Sapers’ office only investigates complaints from inmates in federal institutions; in the territories, there are no federal institutions. Inmates in provincially run facilities can bring issues forward to their provincial ombudsman’s office; the NWT doesn’t have an ombudsman.

At 475 offenses per 1,000 people in 2007, the NWT’s crime rate is more than six times the national average. There are 8.9 times as many assaults, 7.6 times as many sexual assaults, and 3.8 times as many cases of impaired driving. A large proportion of inmates are aboriginal and many struggle with substance abuse. Mental health support is limited. Court-ordered psychiatric assessments must be completed in Alberta—and there is only one psychiatrist servicing the entire territory. Indeed, many here believe were it not for the de facto mental health ward being run out of Pod D at NSCC, many more of the territory’s mentally ill would simply be on the street. With the North’s long months of 40-below weather and increasingly easy access to cheap crack-cocaine, it would be the Canadian equivalent of a death sentence.

The North Slave Correctional Centre is the NWT’s biggest, newest jail. The $44.1-million facility opened in 2004, replacing the original 38-year-old detention centre. Able to house about 180 inmates, the combined minimumand medium-security facility is designed to function as a federal penitentiary without actually being one, so that inmates serving sentences won’t have to be shipped south.

If anything, it doesn’t look like a penitentiary. The idea was to make a facility that, while not exactly comfortable, is at least “non-intimidating,” says Guy LeBlanc, the now-retired deputy warden and long-time staff member at NSCC. There are no bars, for instance. The walls are a soothing colour of washedout Pepto-Bismol. The visiting area is decorated with inmate artwork, swooping aboriginal murals unique to each artist’s home region. At Christmas time—a few weeks from our meeting—this area will be used to host a feast for the inmates, and a tree is decorated.

The differences continue outside the jail, too. Standing in the parking lot you can see three out-of-place log cabin–like structures, one of which is the newly built aboriginal fire ceremony building. Come summer, elders will come and inmates will gather in tipis and a new sweat lodge, meeting the spiritual and counselling needs for the jail’s largely aboriginal population.

It’s not all in the architecture, either. NSCC’s elected inmate advisory council, made up of eight inmates, has a semblance of power—and respect. “Everything they do,” says LeBlanc of the present council, “they do for the good and the benefit of the population.” LeBlanc meets regularly with the IAC, fairly beaming when he talks about the current contest to design an IAC logo—even more when he talks about the model bridge he and a team of inmates designed and entered in a local engineering contest.

And that’s another thing. The staff (for the most part) are, well, nice. If LeBlanc isn’t enough to convince you every prison movie you’ve seen is wrong, meet Gwen, Pod D’s guard, a short woman whose genuine—and seemingly permanent— smile is framed by her blonde bob. Because of Gwen, there are tiny dog-print patterns in the snow covering the “bullpen,” a tiny, fenced outdoor enclosure attached to the pod. For months the inmates pestered her to bring in her dog and a few days ago she relented. “We spoil them,” she says. “We really do.”

As if scripted to prove her point, just a few minutes later, the pod’s inmates get a visit from another staff member’s dog. Someone rolls up a wad of socks, making an impromptu ball, and a group of inmates play fetch in the pod’s common area. LeBlanc laughs, watching the scene: “Only in Yellowknife, eh?”

For an outsider, it’s almost easy to forget NSCC is a prison. As Gwen and Guy talk, Tommy bounds over, gripping a handmade card. The inmates are thanking the warden for bringing in Sno-Cones. “Hello, my lovely lady,” Tommy says, proudly flipping over the flimsy computer paper to show Gwen his name, printed out in careful block letters two inches tall, a child’s writing.

“We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained to work with people with mental health issues.”

Gwen doesn’t know what special-needs label Tommy might have, but a few weeks ago, she caught Tommy in the bullpen with a pilfered lighter trying to sniff the gas inside. Out of all of Pod D’s special needs inmates, she says, Tommy needs the most support. To help him deal with day-to-day chores, Gwen’s designed a task sheet. There are eight simple tasks—brush your teeth, make your bed, shower—and if Tommy gets them all done he gets a treat at the end of the day. It could be an orange, or it could be an hour of Dragon Ball Z on the TV. “It sounds sad to say,” says LeBlanc, “but the longer he’s in here, the longer he stays alive.”

And that’s when you feel it: the undercurrent of wrongness. For all the staff’s genuine care and support, Pod D is just plain weird. “We’ve replaced mental health institutions with correctional institutions where the staff aren’t even trained … in working with people with mental health issues,” says Lydia Bardak of the NWT’s John Howard Society. “They’re trained in security or guard work.”

“There must be a better way,” adds Glenn Flett, a selfdescribed “lifer” and founder of activist group Long-term Inmates Now in the Community (LINC). “We need to recognize those people are deserving of help and it’s to the advantage in the long run—and it’s a lot cheaper—to have somebody maintained out here.” Like many prison activists, Flett and Bardak would like to see some of the massive cash pumped into keeping inmates housed diverted into developing social and mental health programs outside of jail.

It’s not that idealistic. In the 2008–09 operating year it cost the territorial government more than $13 million, or $258.17 per prisoner per day, to run NSCC. And that’s only one jail. Together, the territory’s four adult facilities cost $23.3 million to run. That’s an awful lot of money questionably spent, says Bardak. “If we’re using [the correctional system] to address our social problems then we’re getting poor results,” she says. And that’s bad for the whole community: “Poor results means more victims in the future.” Bardak believes by treating inmates badly, the system is not curbing crime, merely turning out angry people.

Neither she nor Flett—who says, somewhat jokingly, that many criminals (including his past self) are “greedy bastards”—advocate an end to jails. “Society needs protection from dangerous people and we’ll always have a need for correctional facilities,” says Bardak. “But for the people who are alcoholic, mentally ill, homeless—[jails are] not meant to solve social problems because they’re not effective and they’re not qualified.” Spending cash on programs sorely lacking in the NWT is comparatively minimal, and, both believe, money better spent. Especially, says Flett, considering “what the social and economic consequences may be if we don’t deal with the problem” of incarcerating the mentally ill population.

There’s one sticking point: It’s hard to determine just how many special-needs inmates are in the correctional system. “My biggest, number-one complaint,” says Flett, “is the whole justice system fails to do competent testing on people to see if they have mental health issues. They just designate them as criminals and treat them all the same.” That can’t fairly be said of all NSCC’s Pod D inmates, but what of the jail’s other prisoners? There aren’t any stats kept and many inmates, fearful of the “crazy” stigma, do a remarkably good job of hiding any issues. “People need to be identified quickly,” stresses Flett.

“Once they’re identified, it would be pretty blatantly obvious that it’s not enough. That [the correctional system] has a bigger problem than they think they do.”

The territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help.

Nationally, it’s estimated 11 percent of federal offenders have a significant mental health diagnosis. Over 20 percent are taking a prescribed medication for a psychiatric condition and just over six percent were receiving outpatient services prior to admission. Sapers, too, suspects many are entering the correctional system without the benefit of a diagnosis. “If [inmates] are assessed at all,” he writes in his annual report, “their issues are often portrayed as a behavioural problem, not a mental health disorder.” He’s also worried about the fate of many lowto medium-level special needs inmates.

Like elsewhere in the country, the NWT’s extremely mentally ill offenders are not housed in regular jails—even Pod Ds—but instead vastly smaller regional treatment centres. It’s not enough, says Sapers. “The vast majority of offenders with mental disorders do not generally meet the acute criteria that would allow them to benefit from services provided,” he notes. “Less than 10 percent of offenders are ever admitted or treated.” Instead, those offenders stay in the general prison population. In the best of cases, they end up in makeshift wards like Pod D. In the worst of cases, they end up in segregation (often exacerbating their issues) or, as Flett puts it, are made “targets” and brutalized by inmates and staff alike.

In sum, the territory’s correctional system either fails even to identify prisoners with mental health problems; recognizes them but does nothing; or is simply ineffective when it does try to help. The offenders keep their heads down, their medical, mental, or addiction needs unmet, and wait for their release. So the question is: what happens when they get out?

Yellowknife’s answer to that question is Bardak. While not the only inmate advocate in the capital city, Bardak is likely the most well-known and well-liked, not to mention the loudest. She’ll never forget what prompted her to get involved in the John Howard Society. It was Oct. 28, 1996, James’ 40th birthday. Bardak had met James, who was from Cape Dorset (now a part of Nunavut), while she was in Inuvik working for CNIB. James was blind and in 1996, housed at the Yellowknife jail, thousands of kilometres from his home.

“For months I’d been asking him and the staff, ‘What’s going to happen when he gets out? He’s from Baffin Island,’” recalls Bardak. “Where’s he going to go? Where’s he going to live? What’s he going to do? And nothing, nothing, nothing.” Bardak found out at 9 a.m. on James’ release date. “I got a phone call from the correctional centre saying, ‘James is ready.’ I said, ‘For what?’ and they said, ‘Well aren’t you going to pick him up?’”

It was 25 degrees below zero that day and James was released from custody in his prison sweats, with no winter coat, no boots, and no money. “There had already been ice, so while I was driving him around town trying to get things figured out, someone slid into my car. And James said, ‘We’ve been in a car accident; that’s my first car accident,’” she says, laughing. “That brings me to where I am now.”

At this particular moment, “now” is sitting inside her office at the brand new Yellowknife day shelter, which opened in late November. It’s a simple space, housed inside the Western Arctic’s Conservative candidate’s old campaign office. The rectangular one-room common area is filled with dozens of the city’s homeless, many of whom have spent time inside NSCC. They lounge on the room’s couches, chatting, reading the paper, or playing cards at the tables lining the walls. Joan Osbourne’s ’90s hit “What if God Was One of Us” plays on the radio and a few heads bob along.

Although it was made possible by many people in Yellowknife, the centre is undeniably Bardak’s baby. It’s part of her answer to questions like: “How do we invest in community support so we don’t have to rely on cops, courts and jail?” Before the centre opened, the city’s homeless had limited options for shelter during the day when Yellowknife’s night shelters are closed and often loitered in the city’s malls or its library—also often getting into trouble with the law. Many, Bardak believes, have mental health issues. “Mental illness is the leading cause of homelessness and homelessness is the leading cause of mental illness,” she says. “You can’t be homeless and stay sane.”

If anyone can accurately gauge the relationship between homelessness, mental health, and crime, it’s Bardak. It’s not a stretch to say she knows most of the city’s homeless population. If she’s not at the day shelter or the Society’s offices or inside NSCC, it’s a likely bet you’ll find Bardak at the NWT Territorial courthouse. “There’s continually somebody there who’s got mental health issues,” she says. And they’re usually homeless. Today, one stands out in Bardak’s mind.

“He was walking through the streets…a lot of people were stopping me scared and worried for this young man because he was talking about collecting souls for the devil,” says Bardak. Because of his substance abuse, he believed he was living inside a video game. Facing charges, he was remanded into custody where he waited six months for a mental health assessment. Like others, he would eventually be released with time served. Also, like so many others, it’s likely he’ll be in and out of jail again. “The catch-andrelease program hasn’t really benefited anybody very much,” says Bardak, who, when then asked about the benefits of programming inside the jail, retorts: “What programs?” Admittedly, like elsewhere in the NWT, resources are scarce inside NSCC—the prison only got a new counsellor in November after being without one for months. (When asked in August about the flack she was getting for being without one, and how challenging it was to run NSCC without one, the jail’s warden responded it wasn’t a challenge at all.) High priority or not, however Adrienne Fillatre is a welcome addition and is working to become a registered psychologist so the jail can finally do in-house assessments. “People,” she says, “have as much right to mental health wherever they are.”

And there are programs, though they’re not necessarily geared toward people like Tommy. Currently, NSCC program manager Terry Wallis has embarked on a new four-month, five-day-a-week sex offender program—a treatment and counselling program for offenders convicted of sex-related offenses—that will run twice a year, enrolling 12 inmates per session. “It’s pretty intense,” says Wallis, who interviews inmates to see who best suits the program and is interested in seeing “how well they manage coming in every day.”

There’s also a family violence program, which also runs twice a year and accommodates the same number of inmates per session; it’s six weeks long. The substance abuse program runs five times a year and takes in the same number of inmates. Wallis and Fillatre are also quick to point out the jail’s chaplain, its resident aboriginal elder, and its visits by members of the Healing Drum Society, an aboriginal program designed to help people deal with the trauma of residential schooling.

It’s not that Bardak doesn’t know about these programs; it’s that she simply doesn’t think they’re enough. She’d like to see sessions that address inmates who aren’t serving long enough sentences to be eligible for such programs—the NWT is notorious for short sentences, even for seriously violent crimes. She wants additional help for those, like Tommy, who are in the indefinite limbo of remand custody, unconvicted and awaiting trial. More inmates also need to be enrolled in work-placement programs to get them used to contributing to society in a positive way, she says. She hired a team of inmates to paint the day centre, for instance.

Federally, Corrections Canada only spends two percent of its annual budget on inmate programming—$37 million worth of a $2.2-billion budget. More is spent on paying staff overtime. What’s more, with such sparse programming, says Flett, and without proper supports outside of jail, any counselling or benefits from programming an inmate gets in jail are likely easily forgotten. “In that routine structured environment it’s easy for them to follow what they’ve learned,” says Flett. But outside, it falls apart. “You’re teaching in an artificial environment that’s structured, that hasn’t got anything close to real, real, real life,” says Flett. “The only thing that’s close to real life is everybody is breathing air.”

Tommy is sentenced to one day in jail—a red flag on his criminal record—on January 6, 2010, after changing his plea to guilty. By this time, Tommy has changed lawyers yet again. He was forgotten by the RCMP and left at the jail for several of his scheduled court dates. After three signed court orders, he has, at least, had his mental health assessment, becoming one of the five accused individuals per year the NWT courts send south. On average, each of those assessments costs the territorial government more than $20,000.

While not a tool for diagnosis, the assessment—Tommy’s third—provides some insight, but largely serves only to confirm Tommy is both fit enough to stand trial (now a moot point following his guilty plea) and likely to reoffend. He has borderline intelligence, shows disregard for the welfare and safety of

others, and has a temper, often appearing uncooperative. His newest lawyer, Caroline Wawzonek, describes him as “an individual who certainly needs assistance but has fallen through the cracks.” Tommy, she says, has difficulty caring for himself.

His lengthy pre-trial custody has caused the NWT government to launch an investigation into the services provided by Alberta Health and the territory’s inability to follow up on assessment orders. It’s unclear whether it will result in any changes. Roger Shepard, legal counsel for the government of NWT, says while it is not right that Tommy had to wait so long for his assessment, he believes the case was an isolated one. The territorial government does not keep track of wait times, he admits, but he says he canvassed the Crown attorneys thoroughly and none could recall an assessment wait dragging on so long.

If this appears to be a less than failsafe method, it doesn’t seem to bother the territorial government’s own health department. When I asked him about the adequacy of the current system of assessing offenders, Dana Heide, the territory’s assistant deputy minister for Health and Social Services, said “We are very pleased with the services Alberta Health provides.” He declined to go into details about the contract the department holds with Alberta Health to provide assessments, saying only: “It does not stipulate any policy expectations other than a recognition that when necessary, we will transfer patients to the Alberta Health System.”

In Alberta, the answer was much the same. “The agreement encompasses all aspects of health in a general sense,” says Melissa Lovatt, a communications person in the addiction and mental health division of Alberta Health. Lovatt adds clients, regardless of location—NWT or Alberta—are prioritized by need, and wait times at the 12-bed facility are usually two weeks. Individuals who are in urgent need of health care and those with earlier court dates are given priority.

In a way, it doesn’t even matter. Until all the other pieces fall into place—diagnosis, in-custody programming, community support, addiction counselling, affordable housing— people like Tommy don’t stand a chance. Free for less than 24 hours, he broke the terms of his probation and was charged with assaulting a police officer. The night after his release, Tommy returned home—to Pod D.

Prisoner in Butuo, Liberia. Photo credit: Myles Estey

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor’s band of rebels stormed the small border village of Butuo, Liberia, taking over the police station and sparking a civil war. Chief Inspector Morris Gonylee waves dismissively at the state of ruin the station now lies in, a common sight in a nation struggling to rebuild from this 14-year conflict. A tethered bull stomps and paws the dirt as we walk toward the wood hut now serving as a prison. One young man sits inside, filthy and morose. No electricity, toilet, chair, or bed: the small hole in the mud brick wall lets in a single shaft of light. A piece of an old engine block is the only furnishing on the concrete floor, upon which he sits awkwardly, handcuffed to the hunk of rusted metal.

I came here to report on the story of a jailed man who had fled across the border from Ivory Coast after nearly killing his wife. But this quiet young man wasn’t him. So I offered him the two bags of peanuts I had in my camera bag and asked if we could talk anyway.

Through our broken French and English, a picture of his plight took shape. Someone saw him near a store in Ivory Coast with a “piece of merchandise” and accused him of theft. Fearing mob violence—unsettlingly common there, a product of a weak judicial system and usually fatal, guilty or not—he fled, swam the border, and got caught here.

Two failed escapes and an official deportation request (by a concerned uncle) later, his legal fate was unclear. “I just want to go to court, to show that I have innocence,” he told me forlornly. Perhaps he realized how slim this prospect is: almost 90 percent of Liberian prisoners sit awaiting pretrial. The court closest to Butuo takes several hours by motorbike, down bridgeless, unpaved roads. The Butuo police—like most of Liberia’s rural police—have no money for gas, even if they did have a car or motorbike.

The midday sun stings after I leave the musty jail. I ask Gonylee what became of the alleged wife-killer, and receive a grunted response, which makes me fear the worst. We amble back up the hill, and stop in the shade of a mango tree where a man with a large cut on his face stands in front of several women cooking. We exchange smiles and handshakes, but no words.

“This is him,” Gonylee says casually, gesturing with his left hand.

“What…Who?” I ask, confused.

“The man, the man you are asking about.”

I clarify: “The man who killed his wife?”

Not exactly, I learn: he stabbed her repeatedly with a machete, but she’ll live.

“But why is this man not in the jail!?” I manage to stammer.

Gonylee laughs loudly. “But where would he go? The community is aware of him. He cannot leave!”

Everyone joins in his guffaws, finding obvious amusement in my confusion. The man with the cut on his face flashes me a broad, genuine smile, looking relaxed in the hot shade.