After Canada stopped using solitary confinement, it made an exception for these prisoners

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In 2021, a Nova Scotia court deemed dry cells “a unique form of solitary confinement” after a woman spent more than 15 days in one, based on suspicions that she was smuggling contraband in her vagina. As a result of that ruling, the use of dry cells federally has been narrowed.

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“(Dry cells) are only used as a last resort when there are reasonable grounds to believe that an inmate has ingested or is carrying contraband in either their digestive system or in their rectum, and not in an inmate’s vagina,” Côté said.

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Since 2019-20, the CSC said, it has seized weapons or drugs more than 400 times following a dry cell placement.

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The proliferation of unofficial forms of isolation, such as observation and dry cells, could be the result of a correctional mindset that seeks to deal with immediate security risks in the simplest way possible, Sapers said. Or, “it could very well be that it’s a system response to being overworked, overburdened, overcrowded, under-resourced.”

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Catherine Latimer, head of the John Howard Society, a non-profit focused on humane responses to crime, wants to prohibit these kinds of isolation for people with serious mental illness.

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Dedicating sections of prison to vulnerable people could be an alternative to putting them in isolation, Latimer said. But this could take additional staff and reserved space.

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“It’s easier just to lock people in, lock them down.”

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Kenny Allen remembers his first time in an observation cell, in December 2007.

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He was 18 and had just arrived in Saskatchewan Penitentiary on an armed robbery conviction. He’d spent the previous 14 years in and out of foster homes and juvenile institutions.

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He didn’t feel safe — he had just left a gang — and said he was suicidal, hoping to be placed somewhere out of harm’s way.

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Instead, he got a bare cell, people watching him pee, and no soap to wash his hands. He lost his clothes in exchange for a sleeveless smock.

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“Degrading” is the word he uses, repeatedly, to describe the experience, which took place several times over the course of 15 years in federal prisons. The IJB has reviewed multiple videos of Allen’s placements, including one during which he is strapped to a stretcher before being rolled into a cell where he appears to sleep on and off, periodically struggling against his restraints and attempting to hurt himself. “It’s dehumanizing,” he said.

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Joey Toutsaint, while in an observation cell in a Canadian federal prison, picks at a suture on his neck. Seconds later, he will be pepper-sprayed by guards who rush in to his cell. (Still photo from video taken by the fish-eye camera in his cell.)

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In late May 2018, Joey Toutsaint returned to prison following nine days in hospital after trying to sever his jugular vein.

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Standing in the observation cell, he picked at a suture on his neck. The guards pepper-sprayed him. Fish-eye surveillance video shows the orange-red spray filling the cell; according to his lawyer, in a human rights complaint filed three years later, he “felt like he couldn’t breathe.”

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Guards then led Toutsaint to a shower, put a spit hood over his head to stop him from spitting or biting and tied him down to a stretcher that was itself tied down in another observation cell.

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Years after that event, Toutsaint spoke with the IJB from a video visit room at Kent Institution, about 60 kilometres northwest of Agassiz, B.C. His last observation cell placement was October of last year, after he swallowed razor blades.

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On camera, he showed the self-inflicted white scars worming their way up his tattooed left arm. His memories of his times in observation cells are uncomfortably vivid: no clothes, no bedding, no sound, no communication with the outside world.