Solitary confinement.

Posted By: Juliana Ho

On July 17, 2015, Globe and Mail reporter Sean Fine wrote an article about Christopher Brazeau, a 34-year-old prisoner at Edmonton Institution, who is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence. Brazeau became the focus of media attention this past summer for being at the centre of a class-action lawsuit that "alleges Canada's use of solitary confinement and lack of timely access to prescription drugs violate the rights of the mentally ill." According to Brazeau, he has been held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, going significant portions of time without needed prescription medications. According to the article, he has been subjected to such conditions for upwards of a year at a time.

Unfortunately, this is not the first court case brought forward against the use of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons. Some scholars such as Lisa Kerr have written extensively on the use of the Management Protocol. She discusses the Protocol in her article "The Origins of Unlawful Prison Policies" published in the Canadian Journal of Human Rights in 2015. The Protocol is a penal program that allows prisons to lock inmates who administrators consider threats to safety in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, for a minimum of six months at a time. Kerr notes that prior to the emergence of the Protocol, substantive restrictions that governed the use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment were set out in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA) and the Correctional and Conditional Release Regulations. These instruments were very clear on the procedural protections that apply to involuntary placements into solitary confinement, such as the right to "regular, periodic reviews" designed to assess whether solitary confinement was still required to maintain prisoner safety. The instruments called for "least restrictive measures" and indicated that "necessary and proportionate" punishment should be used. This greatly enhanced fair treatment towards inmates, because it seemed that solitary confinement could only be ordered in cases where there were no reasonable alternatives.

According to Kerr, the emergence of the Protocol introduced "a new method for managing 'high risk' women" in Canada and hugely expanded previous limits on the use of solitary confinement. Rather than regular reviews that allowed inmates to move out of solitary confinement as soon as the practice was no longer needed, the Protocol imposed...