Why are people dying in jail while waiting for a trial?

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We are all familiar with innocent until proven guilty. Yeah? We also understand that here in Canada there’s going to be a little wait between when you’re arrested and charged and when you actually get that chance to prove yourself innocent or even just to plead guilty if you’d prefer. And by a little wait, I mean that depending on the charge, it can take a couple of days, a couple weeks, a couple months, or anywhere up to a couple of years. In the meantime, if you can’t afford bail or don’t have anyone to act as your surety in vouch for you with a judge, you’re in jail. Sorry, you’re on remand. Technically not in jail, but doesn’t matter. You’re in a correctional facility and then you’re outta luck. Then anything can happen. In some provinces. There are far more people in jail on remand awaiting trial than in jail doing actual time for crimes they’ve been found guilty of, and sometimes through illness or violence or suicide, the worst occurs and those people die in a cell awaiting trial. How did things get to this point? Why are so many people not yet convicted sitting behind bars for so long? Isn’t there a better way to do this?

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Geena Mortfield is a court and crime reporter for the Brandon Son. This story, an in-depth look into deaths on remand, was written for The Walrus. Hey Geena.

Geena Mortfield Hi.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why don’t you start by telling us about TJ McConnell? Who was he?

Geena Mortfield So TJ was, I would say, your regular Canadian kid. He grew up small town Alberta, liked sports, played a lot of hockey. His mom told me that he really cared about how he looked. He was always concerned about how his hair looked. He was just a nice kid. He always wanted to help, his mom tells me. His girlfriend told me that, they met in their early teens on a beach in Hawaii when both of their families were on trips there. And when he was happy, he do this dance where he’d kinda shake his butt. And she once, asked TJ why he did that. And he told her because it makes you smile. So just, you know, a kid with a lot of potential and you know, his family just describes him as a really, really nice kid and someone who wanted nice life and family and a home. Just a place to call home.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And we’re talking about him in the past tense, obviously. So what happened to him?

Geena Mortfield So, TJ suffered three concussions as a kid and his doctor told him to stop playing sports. His mom told me that this was really hard for him, and in 2015 he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well as depression with manic episodes. From there, he struggled with opioid use at times. He was sleeping rough. You know, his mom had told me that he started stealing and eventually that stealing left him, he was arrested and he ended up in the remand center in the fall of 2020.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What does it mean to be in a remand center? What is it? What’s it like inside?

Geena Mortfield So a remand centre is basically where people are held, waiting for the court to deal with their charges. They could be there because they’re unable to get bail while they wait for a trial, or eventually they may plead guilty. They could also be in a remand center because they’re waiting to get transferred to another correctional facility or perhaps, you know, a judge has granted them bail. You know, but they’re waiting to meet, a release conditions such as maybe having a bed at an addictions treatment center or something like that. And, and so while people on remand can also be held in provincial jails, but a remand center in particular is a facility dedicated exclusively to the remand population.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And what happened to TJ in there?

Geena Mortfield TJ was sent to the remand center in September of 2020, and about four months later on January 11th, 2021. He was found in his cell and a medical examiner determined that his manner of death was suicide.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Do we know anything about his time in there that that led up to his suicide? Do we know what he was struggling with? I mean, you mentioned he’s bipolar, but how was he doing inside there?

Geena Mortfield You know, correctional facilities in this country are notoriously hard to get information from, but what we do have is basically medical request forms that TJ had submitted in the jail, if you need something you need to to fill piece paper asking, you know, the jail of the remand center for, for this service. And so a staff of TJ’s requests show that he had been, while he was in there for, four months, he was repeatedly asking the remand center for various things, including, you know, treatment for anxiety, depression. Multiple times he was asking for suboxone, which is a drug that treats opioid use disorder. And he had previously been on, like he been on that drug before in a previous attempt where he was in the remand centre to try to get clean. He multiple times indicated that he didn’t wanna use drugs anymore. He wanted to turn his life around. He was, he expressed a lot of fear about when he, he would leave the remand center, or when he was released, he was worried about going back out on the streets and being surrounded by people, you know, who were using drugs and the drugs scene and he really expressed a desire to get clean, but unfortunately. He wasn’t able to get this Suboxone treatment. He wasn’t able to get adequate treatment from a psychiatrist, to deal with the mental health issues he was expressing, and ultimately he took his own life.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How common is TJ’s situation in general? Four months in a remand center waiting for trial, trying to get help. I mean, he’s not in there on spectacularly bad criminal charges, I guess I would say.

Geena Mortfield Yeah, that’s fair. He, you know, remand stays typically are supposed to be a week or a month, but increasingly, court delays have been contributing to a problem of people staying on remand longer. TJ was in the center, the remand center at you know, in 2020 and we know there was a lot of backlog cause of the pandemic. So while his stay was perhaps a little longer than the average, it’s definitely not uncommon for people to spend time waiting for their charges to work their way through the court system or get a trial date. You know, essentially sitting there, you know, innocent until proven guilty. TJ when he died has not been convicted or found guilty of the charges that he was in there on. So what is common, however, is access to healthcare. That has been a common complaint. Remand centers, provincial jails, federal prisons across this country for years, decades. You know, the access to Suboxone treatment, or sorry, opioid use disorder treatment has been increasingly an issue. You know, a lot of prison advocacy groups are speaking out more about, this treatment as a charter right. And jails prison are supposed to provide healthcare treatment. They’re supposed to take care of the people that they house in their facilities. That is their responsibility, and so they do have to provide treatment. Unfortunately, a lack of resources, many case or just apathy on the of remand centres and jails contributes to the lack of access.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When we talk about people and people on remand waiting for their charges to work their way through the system, how many people overall are we talking about here? What’s the scale of this and how is it trending? Now that the pandemic restrictions have loosened up,

Geena Mortfield For sure. So last year there was about 14, 414 people on remand, so that’s outta the total population of people in provincial custody. And you know, that number may not seem terribly high but when you look at the number for the same year of the total number of people who are serving sentences in correctional facilities, in provincially run correctional facilities. That number was 5,798. So we’re looking at, you know, the population of people who are sitting in provincially run remand centers and jails, essentially in custody numbers of those people legally innocent is more than double the number of people who are, who are actually found guilty and serving time in those facilities.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How does that breakdown happen? Where’s the disconnect here that I mean, you know, listen, we can talk all day about the lack of resources and prisons and jails, and we will talk about that, but there’s more innocent people than convicted people in those facilities right now. How does that happen? What’s broken?

Geena Mortfield It’s probably a number of factors. We know that since average number of adults in the remand population in provincial correctional facilities has been greater than the adult sentence custody population. So, you know, this is, this has been a trend that has been happening for quite some time now, and it does pose an incredible contradiction. You know, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is the foundational principle to our justice system in this country. And to have more people doing time in jail, having not been convicted, than people who are actually convicted spending time in jail. That is, that is quite an issue and I think court delays certainly have to contribute to that course. It’s, there’s a lot of conversation, now about bail reform, but I think these statistics show, you know, a lot of people aren’t getting bail. They’re still sitting in those remand centers and, and so when we look at you know, I think TJ’s story is quite in instructive of someone who is not able to get bail. It’s very difficult for people to get bail who are unhoused. I mean, one of the conditions, you know, to get bail judges like to see someone who has a stable place to go to the security people who can, you know, be their surety. They wanna see some money put up for someone’s release. And those things are very difficult to do for people who come into the remand center because other social services like addictions treatment or mental health care, have failed them and they’ve had to resort to stealing or getting in trouble with the law, which is of course not a good choice. And of course they need to be held accountable. But you know, unfortunately, it’s a symptom of more and more people coming into, to these facilities who are falling through the cracks of social services.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What’s supposed to happen to somebody like TJ in an ideal world, and where are the missing resources?

Geena Mortfield I mean, ideally we wouldn’t have a justice system where we have, you know, more people sitting in jails, unconvicted than we do have people sitting in jails, convicted. And I think with TJ in particular, you know, he had tried to get a bed, just the summer before he tried to get a bed in an addictions treatment center. He was unable to, to get that bed and you know, things just sort of spiraled for him. He also had in addition to the addictions issues he was struggling with, he also, you know, had these mental health issues, which it’s difficult to find facility help him with both. At the time, his mom told that the pandemic was contributing to the lack of bed availability, and I think that experts and advocates have been telling me that, you know, of course jails and remand centers need resources to help the people that come into these facilities. But what really needs to be funded is the services and facilities that exist outside of the remand center. So you know, treatment facilities, access to mental health support, employment services, community supports, all of those things can help catch someone like TJ and perhaps you know, even prevent him from being in the remand center in the first place. Or at least being able to enter the remand center without, you know, being in this state where he’s experiencing withdrawal symptoms from his drug use and just thrown into this facility, which ultimately its main goal is to detain people. Its goal is not healthcare. It’s to detain people. And so, you know, he wasn’t able to to get that help on, on the outside and unfortunately wasn’t able to get it on the inside either.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Obviously, the system should just work faster for everybody charged with a crime. But how often does it end like this? Do we know how many more TJ’s are out there in the system?

Geena Mortfield Well, I mean, it’s difficult to quantify because even you know, even fortunately, Alberta does, publish a document, which, after every death in a public institution, there’s a public, what’s called a public fatality inquiry. And which is essentially a public hearing about the death you know, it’s a, a justice of the peace. We’ll look at all the evidence and circumstances surrounding someone’s death and determine, you know, if there was wrongdoing or any, if there’s any recommendations for how to prevent a similar death. Unfortunately, that system in Alberta has been backed up, there’s now a four year wait time for a hearing. So it’s difficult to tell. And, and of course, jails are not the most forthcoming with when there is a death and releasing a medical examiner’s report on the circumstances of that death. So it becomes very, very difficult to to quantify. But on that public fatality inquiry list, it will, it’ll have a name, you know, TJ’s name is there. It has where he died in Edmonton remand center and the way in which he died. And there are about 10 other names on that list, dating back to far back as 2017 up until this year or last year that have, you know, names of people who died in the Edmonton Remand Center and their manner of death is, is listed as similar to TJ’s. So, so he’s definitely not alone, unfortunately. And there are many…

Jordan Heath Rawlings And that’s just one reman center…

Geena Mortfield That’s just one remand center. It is the largest by capacity in Canada. But it’s certainly not the largest correctional facility in this country by any means.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You mentioned that advocates are pushing for more resources outside of these remand centers, so people like TJ can get help before they get in there. That’s good. That’s progress, but my question is, what would it take to actually speed up the system? Because ultimately people are gonna be charged with crimes and they need a fair trial at some point, preferably quickly. Is there any political will to do that? What do people say it would take to make the system work as intended?

Geena Mortfield So I, I think it’s, it’s always difficult for there to be political will when it comes to spending money on people who are called criminals. I think a lot of people do think that the people who are in remand centers or jails are like Paul Bernardo, but you know, I’ve talked to dozens of people in every level of correctional facility from provincial to federal prisons, and that’s just not the case. I think there are a lot of resourcing and staffing issues in the court system. But I do think that in terms of having more of a social security net that fewer and fewer people fall through, that means that fewer and fewer people end up in the remand center. You know, because like TJ, he not necessarily stealing for profit, he was stealing out of necessity and he was an addict and he did want to change. He, he did want other things in life. So there was certainly potential for him to, you know, if he was able to access treatment, he perhaps would have stuck with that. But that is what a lot of advocates are saying is, you know, we’ve let these correctional facilities become places where people end up when social services fail them. And you know, that isn’t the point of what these institutions were designed to do. So they’re scrambling to figure out, you know, that they do need to provide healthcare, but the populations in these facilities have grown to such an extent that it’s difficult to, to get the kind of resources they need when a politician is certainly not going to get much public support for spending more money on a quote unquote criminals.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Geena, thank you so much for walking us through this problem.

Geena Mortfield My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Geena Mortfield writing for The Walrus. That was The Big Story. If you want more Big Stories, we got literally more than a thousand of them at TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can always suggest more to us by finding us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFpn by writing us an email and sending it to Hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca or by using an old-fashioned phone, an old-fashioned flip phone if you have one, because those are super cool. And leave us a voicemail. The phone number is (416)-935-5935. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.