Overcrowding is an issue at most provincial correctional centres I've known about - my personal experience has been with the Don Jail and the Metro West Detention Centre (no, not me, someone I knew), where they sleep three to a cell, which has two beds.This, however, sounds even worse than that:
quote:
About 20 inmates at Baffin Correctional Centre have spent recent nights crowded together on floor mats in the prison gym, beneath buzzing florescent lighting, says a legal aid lawyer. The overcrowded conditions are enough to make some inmates want to plead guilty so they can do federal time in a prison in the South, said Chris Debicki, director of Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik Society.
"It's the total lack of privacy... and people sleeping with the lights blazing," he said.
BCC inmates have come to refer to the gym as "the mud room," because its floors become covered with mud left from inmates tromping in and out of the room.
The BCC was designed to hold about 65 inmates. It's been over capacity by an additional 20 inmates for the past several months, Debicki said.
You know, it's bad enough that people in northern communities have all their needs ignored, they get next to nothing from governments, jobs are hard to come by, and then they're criminalized as a result of living such hard lives, instead of putting in place some sweeping restorative justice programs. But then, to not even build enough facilities for the problems created by this policy? What were we talking about in that other thread, chutzpah?
This is a good news site. I'm adding it to my newscrawling list.
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posted 29 May 2007 03:10 AM
