GN to build prison in Rankin Inlet

JOHN THOMPSON

The Government of Nunavut is gearing up to build a new 36- to 48-bed territorial correctional centre in Rankin Inlet, six years after being warned that such a facility is badly needed.

The new prison will hold about 60 inmates, Justice Minister Paul Okalik told the legislature last week. The jail will be built by 2011 at a total cost of about $37 million, according to the 2007-08 capital budget.

At the same time, the GN has postponed for three or four years the construction of a $2.4 million men’s correctional healing facility in the Kivalliq region.

Okalik said the new prison would save the government money that it now spends transferring territorial inmates outside Nunavut, to prisons in the Northwest Territories or Ontario.

As well, the new facility would free up the Baffin Correctional Centre for use as a centre for holding remand prisoners, Okalik said. “Remand” prisoners are accused persons held in custody while waiting for the courts to deal with their charges.

All this follows advice given to the government in a report that appears to have gathered dust for years, called “Planning for Nunavut Corrections,” which was tabled in the autumn of 1999 by Jack Anawak, then Nunavut’s justice minister.

The report warned that Iqaluit’s Baffin Correctional Centre was badly overcrowded and offered “unacceptable” conditions.

“Given the overcrowding at BCC and the transfer back of Nunavut inmates from the NWT and the south, there is no option but to build additional facilities,” the report states.

In 1999, the territory needed a facility to hold another 100 inmates, the report said.

But since the report was written, Nunavut’s population has grown, crime rates have increased, and reports from BCC describe conditions that continue to grow more overcrowded and strained, with prisoners sleeping on floor-mats inside crowded dormitories, or sleeping in shifts.

Despite all this, until now the government’s solution to the prison overcrowding has been to build a small prison in Kugluktuk, and a new $16 million justice building in Iqaluit, known to local wags as the “justice palace.”

Okalik said the new Rankin facility would contain 36 to 48 beds, with a “modular” design that would allow more sections to be added in later years.

The best solution to the territory’s prison woes, the 1999 corrections report said, would be to build a joint federal-territorial prison, which could hold 230 adult males, whether they are serving territorial or federal time.

The report recommended this facility be built by 2006. But with the end of the year in sight, there’s no sign of this project moving forward.

Okalik said he’s still lobbying the federal government to support this idea.

A federal penitentiary in Nunavut would offer several spin-offs, besides saving money on flying prisoners outside the territory.

“Many Nunavut offenders have difficulty coping with life among the relatively criminally sophisticated and predatory inmates of southern penitentiaries, and they may return more criminalized or more damaged than when they left,” the report states.

The report also notes that a joint facility could bring better programming for inmates to Nunavut – a point that Okalik picked up on two weeks ago, when he said he signed a petition that calls for a child rapist to leave Iqaluit as a means of lobbying for a federal prison here.

In the legislature last week, Steve Mapsalak, the MLA for Akulliq, called for the new prison to be built in one of Nunavut’s smaller, decentralized communities.

But Okalik replied that a sizable RCMP force needs to be at hand, “should an emergency arise.”

“If anything happens we would be liable and I don’t want to get into that situation while I am the minister. We would like to make sure that the people are safeguarded,” Okalik said.

Other recommendations in the report include building a facility for women inmates. Right now, there is none.

In one case this summer, one woman was held over the July 1 long weekend inside Iqaluit’s RCMP lock-up, a small cell that has no shower. Defence lawyers have argued in the past that to keep a prisoner there for more than a few days amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Charter of Rights.

Since then, GN corrections officials have been using a trailer next to BCC for female inmates.
Okalik said the government plans to spend $1.5 million next year to select a site in Rankin Inlet, followed by preparing the building’s foundation.