Ashley Smith was arrested when she was 14 for throwing crab apples at a
mail carrier. In the five years Ms. Smith spent in the penal system as a
result of the one incident (which dominoed into a series of
‘institutional charges’) she was bounced from institution to
institution, suffered a range of abuses and potentially illegal
treatments, including forcible injection with medication against her
will, long periods of solitary confinement, being duct-taped, hooded,
tasered and pepper-sprayed. Howard Sapers, the national correctional
Investigator, concluded in his own inquiry into Ms. Smith’s case that
she was routinely denied adequate mental-health care.
Ms. Smith died on Oct. 19, 2007, after choking to death in her prison
cell. Amplifying this tragedy, several guards stationed outside the
door of her cell were under orders not to intervene.
Attempts to
investigate Ms. Smith’s death speak volumes about the ugly spirit of our
penal system. Instead of an honest admission that there are deep and
longstanding problems with the structures of punishment and an
accompanying resolve to actually address these problems, the wagons were
quickly circled.
The first inquiry was halted after allegations
that its terms and processes were anything but fair and transparent. A
second inquest that begun in 2012 resumed this week. This inquiry is
also mired in controversy. Lawyers for the Correctional Service of
Canada made repeated motions to have various pieces of evidence speaking
to Ms. Smith’s mistreatment blocked. Included in their bid was the
footage of Ms. Smith being duct-taped and hooded on a plane as well as
the video showing her held down on a gurney by several guards as a nurse
injects her with an unknown substance. In this video, Ms. Smith’s
protestations are clearly audible.
Read on...
The author of this Globe piece, Dawn Moore, is a graduate of the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies. Tom
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