Solitary Confinement: 'Abandon Every Hope, Ye who Enter'.

• Author: Jansen, Stephanie

In 2003, an artist named Jackie Sumell created a project that rebuilt an Angola inmate's tiny 6x9 foot cell where he spent 41 years in solitary confinement. The cell toured the United States for the sole purpose of raising awareness about solitary confinement. Herman's case became an example of a not-so-unusual practice in American prisons; inmates were spending reprehensible amounts of time in solitary confinement. An immediate and somewhat stereotypical reaction is to suggest that this is a predictable punishment characteristic of the United States, and naturally, Canada would never permit such inhumane conditions for our prisoners.

Think again.

Canada's record is becoming increasingly tarnished, and if we care at all about human rights, our collective focus ought to shift to face this concern. Just as the death penalty became untenable in Canada, solitary confinement is becoming an issue of deep moral and ethical concern.

To support this, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which is an international commission responsible for confirming compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture, has unequivocally singled out and condemned Canada's use of solitary confinement. It specifically instructed Canada to limit the use of solitary confinement and abolish the use of solitary confinement for persons with serious or acute mental illness. Considering that the United Nations has declared solitary confinement to be an actual method of torture, we ought to all be sitting up in attention and considering how and why it is used in our prisons.

The use of solitary confinement and the lack of regulatory oversight is a primary concern for many Canadian prison advocates. They recognize it as the most severe and depriving form of incarceration that the state can legally administer in Canada. They warn that it is significantly overused, primarily to manage mentally ill, suicidal and self-injurious inmates. More often than ever, solitary confinement is being used to handle prisoners with mental health problems, and the number of inmates experiencing this is growing at a very concerning rate. Additionally, Aboriginal prisoners are placed in segregation at a rate that is unbalanced to the general prison population. In women's prisons, most of the women who experience long periods of segregation are Aboriginal.

The use of segregation in Canada is multi-faceted, but can be reduced to two primary methods:

Disciplinary Segregation, which is used as...