How prison ‘only made her worse'

PETER CHENEY

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

December 8, 2007 at 12:38 AM EST

MONCTON — When she was 15, someone told Ashley Smith the mailman liked to deliver the welfare cheques a few days late. Ms. Smith climbed a tree near her parents' house and picked some hard, green crabapples for ammunition. “I'll show him,” she told a friend.

When she was charged with assault, there were mixed feelings. “The postman had it coming,” one neighbour said. “Good for her.”

Others saw it differently. On the streets of east-end Moncton, Ms. Smith had a reputation as a bit of a tough character. “She hung out with guys who caused trouble,” a former schoolmate said. “She wasn't a girlie-girl, playing with Barbies.” Her family saw a softer side, a girl who liked to read, paint and paddle a kayak.

No matter what their take on Ms. Smith, no one who knew her was ready for the way her story ended: On Oct. 19, she killed herself in a concrete segregation cell at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution, more than 2,000 kilometres away from her parents' Moncton home.

At 19, Ms. Smith had spent nearly a quarter of her life in prison, much of it under suicide watch. She had been transferred through a series of federal institutions, accumulating a number of internal disciplinary charges that added to her sentence. She was by all accounts a troubled young woman, but was jail the answer?

“It only made her worse,” said a prison official who crossed paths with Ms. Smith. “This is a case that hurt everyone. Especially her.”

Her case has raised disturbing questions about the treatment of women in Canadian prisons. Four prison employees are now facing criminal charges connected with her death, and there are three pending official inquiries.

Critics contend that Ms. Smith's treatment created what amounts to an institutional suicide machine. She was shuffled between institutions across Canada, effectively cutting her off from her family. A guard was charged with assaulting her. She was strapped to a confinement chair. Her clothing was taken away. And she spent long stretches in segregation cells, cut off from other prisoners and forced to sleep on a concrete bunk.

“People should look at Ashley Smith and ask what's wrong with the system,” said Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. “Her human rights and her Charter rights were violated.”

Although Corrections Canada has declined comment on Ms. Smith's case due to the pending criminal charges, guards who met her shortly after she entered the penal system in 2003 described a young woman who was clearly in a state of crisis.

“She wore everyone down,” a former prison worker who asked to remain anonymous said. “She threatened to kill herself every day.”

The prison worker, who was employed at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, N.S., said that jail only compounded Ms. Smith's problems. “She was in rough shape when she came in. And she got worse.”

Nova is one of seven new federal women's institutions that have opened over the past 12 years to replace Kingston's notorious Prison For Women (known as P4W.)

Although the new prisons were designed as a kinder, gentler alternative, insiders and critics say they have regressed, creating a deadly atmosphere for troubled inmates like Ms. Smith.

“They have become hierarchical, male-dominated institutions,” said Ms. Pate, who saw Ms. Smith in Ontario's Grand Valley Institution just weeks before she died.

Ms. Pate, who visited the young inmate after concerns were raised about her well-being, was alarmed at what she saw: Ms. Smith was on suicide watch, confined to a concrete cell that had no mattress. Her clothing had been taken away, and she was dressed in a security gown, a quilted garment that reminded Ms. Pate of a horse blanket.

“These were conditions that would test any human being,” Ms. Pate said. “If you didn't have psychological problems going, in, you would certainly develop them.”

In 1996, Madam Justice Louise Arbour produced a groundbreaking report that examined P4W and recommended sweeping changes that would create a new era in female corrections.

The reality has not been quite so rosy. The prison worker's time at the Nova Institution, for example, provided a sobering lesson both on institutional dynamics and society's approach to women prisoners.

When he first arrived, there was no fence around the jail, the guards didn't wear uniforms, and there were no bars to be seen – his initial impression was of a modern high school furnished by Ikea.

But he watched the institution morph into something much closer to a traditional prison, with fences, uniformed guards and a hard-line approach to prisoners who didn't toe the line.

Although most of the women lived in shared housing units, the prison worker noted that an increasing number were confined to a maximum-security area that served as a prison within a prison. “It was a clear trend,” he said. “The number kept going up.”

In some respects, the institution resembled a men's prison. There was, for example, an active drug trade, largely in pharmaceuticals. The drugs were procured in two ways. Inmate dealers bought pills from other inmates who had prescriptions and faked taking their pills so they could sell them. Others were “hooped” – stuffed into a condom, then inserted into the anus of a prisoner returning from a day pass.

There were about 65 inmates, ranging in age from 19 to 76, doing time for crimes ranging from minor assault to murder. Many had children – most of them taken away by child welfare officials.

The prison worker noticed that the women received far fewer visitors than male prisoners typically do. When the jail held a family day, there were just a few arrivals.

Observers say that's typical. “Female prisoners are isolated,” Ms. Pate said. “They find themselves cut off from their families, and from society.”

This kind of isolation preys on the minds of prisoners like Ms. Smith, who was incarcerated in at least four different federal institutions (Corrections Canada would not release her record), including one in Saskatchewan.

Her extended stays in segregation raised alarms with those who knew. “It's a downward spiral,” said a B.C. woman who once spent more than eight months in solitary confinement, and now works as a prisoners' rights advocate. “It's easy to lose hope.”

In Ms. Smith's Moncton neighbourhood, where the apple tree she used to gather ammunition is still hung with fruit after a winter storm, her death has been received with a combination of alarm and resignation. “We all knew there would be trouble,” a childhood acquaintance said. “We just didn't know exactly what, or when it would happen.”

Michelle Maceachern, who lives across the street from Ms. Smith's family and watched her grow from a little girl to a trouble-plagued teenager, saw her as a spirited but misunderstood young woman who found herself in a losing battle with authority.

“She was just a kid,” Ms. Maceachern said. “She had growing up to do.”

Ms. Maceachern had a unique window into Ms. Smith's problems with the penal system – her fiancé spent time in a young-offenders institution with Ms. Smith when they were both in their early teens.

“Once people go into these institutions, they're lost forever,” Ms. Maceachern said. “They just keep coming up with ways to beat you down.”

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