Nunavik inmate at Quebec-based federal prison ends hunger strike

William Fleming, original from Kuujjuaraapik, is incarcerated at the maximum security Port Cartier federal institution, on Quebec’s North Shore. (PHOTO COURTESY OF CSC)

A Nunavik woman says her brother staged a two-week hunger strike last month to draw attention to the lack of English-language and culturally-relevant services at the northern Quebec penitentiary where he is incarcerated.

William Fleming of Kuujjuaraapik was found guilty of sexual assault in 2001 and given an indeterminate sentence, handed out to convicted persons under Canada’s dangerous offenders legislation.

He’s serving that sentence at the maximum security Port-Cartier institution, run by Correctional Service Canada, and located at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river on Quebec’s North Shore in a predominately francophone region.

Fleming’s sister, Sarah Tuckatuck-Bennett, a translator with Nunavik’s travelling court, said she spoke to the prison’s assistant warden for interventions Sept. 30.

Tuckatuck said the prison official informed her that Fleming had eaten for the first time in two weeks that day.

“I had spoken to him the day before and he didn’t sound good,” Tuckatuck-Bennett, said.

“He ate, and I’m happy for that, but I’m still worried about his health,” she said. “I’ve been trying to help him in the last few years. My brother needs a lot of healing.”

Fleming’s hunger strike began two weeks earlier, when he was placed in segregation after an altercation with another inmate.

“My brother is really well-known and not liked by the employees there,” Tuckatuck-Bennett said. “He seems rude, but he’s just trying to get his point across.”

His point, Tuckatuck-Bennett, said, is to gain better access to rehabilitation programs that will help advance him in his sentence.

But even if those programs are available at Port-Cartier, it’s rare they are offered in English and few programs are geared towards the institution’s Inuit and other Aboriginal inmates, she said.

Tuckatuck said a parole board has indicated that Fleming should enroll in a sexual deviancy program and seek support for past drug and alcohol abuse.

Although federal penitentiaries are designed as bilingual institutions, Port-Cartier’s remote location and size make it difficult to offer English-language services or culturally-relevant programming for its Inuit inmates, who number roughly a dozen, Tuckatuck-Bennett said.

Fleming speaks both Inuktitut and English, but is not fluent in French, she added.

Correctional Service Canada did not provide a list of English-language programs and services available to inmates at Port-Cartier.

The agency would not confirm Fleming’s hunger strike either, only providing its policy on how federal prisons manage hunger striking inmates.

That includes efforts to resolve the issues identified by the inmate, without force-feeding them, as well as providing daily medical assessments of the inmate’s health from day seven of the hunger strike onwards.

“For the last 10 years, the parole board has been telling him he must take these programs, but he hasn’t been given a chance to take them,” Tuckatuck-Bennett said.

“I believe my brother wants to get well. I’ve seen a big change in him when I talk to him.”

Tuckatuck-Bennett, who is based in southern Ontario, speaks to her brother by phone a few times a week, she said; in-person visits are harder given the distance between them.

Jusipi Keleutak, an elder from Quaqtaq, is one of the few Inuit who get to see Fleming on a regular basis.

Employed by Makivik Corp., Keleutak and a group of other elders make the rounds of Quebec’s prisons, providing Inuktitut-language counselling and country food to inmates.

Although Keleutak was at Port-Cartier over the summer, the last time he spoke with Fleming was last winter.

He couldn’t comment on Fleming’s demands or current conditions at the prison, except to say the inmate focuses a lot of blame on the system.

But Keleutak says Inuit inmates at Port-Cartier have a hard time in general, because it’s a mostly French-speaking facility and they’re too far from Nunavik or Montreal to receive family visits.

“When they ask for services, or to be transferred to another prison, they are always refused,” Keleutak said.

But federal penitentiaries generally offer better services for Inuit then their provincial counterparts, he noted, because they tend to offer more and at least some of them are in English.

Tuckatuck-Bennett argues that the justice system should adhere to the principles set out in the Gladue report, which stemmed from a Canadian Supreme Court decision that recognized Aboriginal people face racism and systemic discrimination in and out of the criminal justice system.

The report instructs judges to consider the circumstances of the offender in sentencing.

In Fleming’s case, his mother drowned when he was nine months old, after which he spent his childhood in an abusive home, said Tuckatuck-Bennett.

She said that because she was 12 years older than her brother, she was able “to take care of myself” and avoid a similar fate.

By the time he hit his teens, Fleming was an alcoholic, and in and out of jail until the 2001 sexual assault conviction that deemed him a dangerous offender.

“We can’t do anything,” Tuckatuck-Bennett said. “It’s so frustrating when Inuit are not getting the support they need to go back to their communities. There is so much miscommunication.”

In Fleming’s case, Tuckatuck-Bennett said he has no intention to return to Kuujjuaraapik even if he ever got parole.

As a dangerous offender, if Fleming was ever released from prison, he would be on parole his entire life.

Nunatsiaq News was unable to reach Fleming’s lawyer for comment.