MLAs ignore house of horrors

If you happen to have a son, or a brother, or an uncle serving time at the Baffin Correctional Centre, you ought to know their future got a lot darker this past Dec. 1.

That was when regular MLAs, in an act of childish petulance, voted to cut $300,000 from the Department of Justice’s 2010-11 capital budget.

The department proposed spending this money on a study. This study would have gathered information on either upgrading or replacing the BCC, which has degenerated into a dilapidated, unsafe embarrassment.

“I heard all of the horror stories to the point where my constituents didn’t want to come to the Baffin Correctional Centre; they would prefer to be sent to the North Slave Correctional Centre,” Justice Minister Keith Peterson told MLAs on the day of the vote.

This opinion doesn’t come from the big, bad media. This opinion comes from the guy who runs the joint.

These horror stories aren’t new: “Unfortunately, effective programming cannot begin until overcrowding is reduced and more resources are available to hire and train treatment staff. In the meantime, BCC cannot handle all the inmates it has, except under the current unacceptable conditions.”

This was written in 1999, within a big report produced by a group called the Nunavut Corrections Planning Committee, which began its work before the Nunavut territory was even created.

The committee found that even 11 years ago, the BCC could not meet the basic needs of its inmates. Then, as now, the centre could not run many essential programs due to lack of space. Then, as now, the centre posed grave dangers to inmates and staff alike, including the threat of violence and the threat of communicable diseases that always flourish in overcrowded places.

They also found that, even then, Nunavut likely needed at least 200 correctional centre spaces, just to house males doing territorial time. To fix that, they proposed the construction of a 230-bed federal-territorial jail that would be big enough to accommodate the healing and education programs for offenders that politicians always claim to support.

In response, the Government of Nunavut mostly ignored the corrections committee’s recommendations. They even ignored the report’s basic findings of fact, which revealed the violent nature of Nunavut’s rapidly growing criminal population.

Don’t forget: because of the territory’s appalling rate of violence crime and the serious criminal histories owned by many convicted offenders, BCC’s inmate population has for many years resembled that of a hard-core maximum-security federal prison.

Many of these inmates are badly-damaged people who grew up within community cultures where violence, abuse and compulsive drug use and drinking are deemed normal.

Many suffer from severe learning disabilities, addictions and psychological disorders. Many suffer from incurable conditions like fetal alcohol syndrome, which means permanent brain damage and a lifelong propensity for impulsive violence. Many are hopelessly unemployable.

These days, about three-quarters of BCC inmates are accused persons on remand. This means they’ve been charged but not convicted of serious violent crimes and the courts have found them too risky to be allowed to go free while they’re awaiting trial.

This includes people accused of murder, manslaughter, aggravated sexual assaults and serious firearms offences. They likely include the guy who tried to shoot up your community with a firearm last year, the guy who nearly beat his girlfriend to death with a crowbar or the guy who’s just been caught molesting a long list of vulnerable children.

But Nunavut’s regular MLAs believe it’s acceptable to crowd these people inside an aging, unsanitary hell-hole with failing fire suppression equipment and locks that sometimes don’t work. They believe it’s acceptable to let these people seethe with rage when they’re not watching television or getting stoned on contraband drugs.

Even if you don’t care about the welfare of prisoners and even if you believed that convicted offenders deserve all the suffering the state is capable of inflicting upon them, there’s another issue that you should care about: workplace safety. BCC’s correctional staff face the same dangers that prisoners face. The MLAs don’t seem to care much about that either.

In defence of their position, regular MLAs responded with the usual uninformed mumbo-jumbo about “healing” and “land programs.”

Nanulik MLA James Arvaluk said, for example, that the justice department should be aggressively promoting an “on the land program.” BCC has, in fact, run a land program since the 1970s. Despite this, recidivism has climbed steadily.

Besides, if you suffer an incurable condition like FAS, or a severe mental disorder, a fun camping trip will not help you. You need lots of expensive, professional help. BCC staff rarely have the space or time to offer that kind of help.

Akulliq MLA John Ningark suggested people who are “not violent offenders” be exposed to “the land.”

This merely reveals his ignorance of the issue. Most non-violent offenders are already diverted from jail and have been for many years. Most of BCC’s inmate population consists of people convicted or accused of violent offences. And some simple Grade 3 arithmetic will tell you that when the GN’s new correctional centre opens, BCC will still suffer from unacceptable overcrowding.

Iqaluit West MLA Paul Okalik, who moved that the $300,000 be deleted from the GN’s budget, said the money would be better spent on housing and other “pressing needs.” Again, simple Grade 3 arithmetic reveals that $300,000 is enough to build one and a half social housing units.

One of the Nunavut Legislative Assembly’s dirty little secrets is that MLAs rarely know what they’re talking about when they “debate” issues. Their numbers includes some of the most ignorant and uniformed people in the territory.

Most of the time, the tiny number of competent people who still work for the GN are able to steer their way around this, and little harm is done.

This time, however, they voted to maintain an unbroken record of negligence on correctional issues that stretches back before the creation of the territory.

This time, MLAs did real damage to the Nunavut they claim to care about. To observe the evidence, just visit your son, brother or uncle at BCC next week. JB