A group of Carleton students are trying to change inmates’ living conditions at a local detention centre.
Six undergraduate students are petitioning for better sanitation, programming and food services at the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre, which they say is chronically overcrowded.
Melanie MacDonald, a fourth-year psychology student, said the group is trying to fight for better living conditions for inmates.
MacDonald said many inmates at the jail deal with small, overcrowded cells and have to share basic hygiene products such as nail clippers, which spread skin infections, rashes, and flesh-eating disease.
She also said access to recreation and rehabilitation programming at the facility has been severely restricted.
“Right now the conditions that they are living in there are really inhumane,” she said.
The petition to change conditions at the detention centre is part of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, a group of Carleton and University of Ottawa professors and students devoted to research and advocate on issues in the penal system.
Aaron Doyle, a Carleton sociology professor who helped start the project in 2012, said he has spoken to dozens of current and former Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre inmates and their families in the past year.
Doyle said the detention centre has been over-crowded – mostly by people on remand who haven’t even been convicted – since it opened in the mid-70s.
“The majority of people there, about 70 to 75 per cent of people there, are not people who are serving sentences for crimes but just people who are kind of hung up waiting for their day in court,” Doyle said.
Doyle said many inmates live in “terrible conditions,” often occupying eight-by-10-foot cells that are so full some sleep with their heads up against toilet bowls.
Although the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services said in a statement, “All food delivery to inmates is monitored by correctional staff,” Doyle said in certain group cells, while food is delivered to the units by correctional staff, it is left for inmates to divvy up among themselves.
He said that means many smaller, weaker inmates can go hungry.
“People we’ve spoken to have spent time in some of the toughest institutions in the country, and they’ll say that OCDC is the worst place that they’ve ever been,” he said.
The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services said in a statement it is hiring 11 new correctional officers at the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre and adding 380 beds at new detention centres in Toronto and Windsor to combat overcrowding.
“We are continually working to improve conditions at institutions across the province and we are making progress,” said ministry press secretary Lauren Callighen. “Every inmate has a right to safe, secure, and clean living conditions while in our custody and the Ministry has policies and procedures in place to ensure that is the case.”
But Laura McKendy, a PhD student in sociology who is also working on the project, said inmates still deal with flooded cells, ants and bedding that is only washed once every six months.
McKendy said the petition pushes for simple, no-cost changes the jail can implement to improve living conditions, such as sterilizing nail clippers and supervising meal distribution.
“People don’t expect jails to be good places, but I don’t think they expect it to be this bad – especially when 75 per cent of people haven’t even been found guilty of anything,” she said.
Doyle said the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project is planning to release a report on living conditions at the jail on April 15, which will include many of the recommendations cited in the petition.
