Ashley Smith v. Canada

Ashley Smith did not survive her solitary confinement which lasted (at the federal level) 11.5 months – the end result of a troubled youth in New Brunswick, where she began solitary confinement in facilities for a year at the age of 15.  On October 25, 2007, at the age of 19, she strangled herself to death in an Ontario prison while on suicide watch, as 3 guards looked on, apparently under orders not to interfere.  Any charges of criminal negligence have been dropped, heightening the lack of responsibility. While as an adult at the federal level she had been transferred 17 times through 8 different facilities which kept her from an automatic review every six weeks of confinement, required by law.  Who is the criminal here?

Approximately one third of Canada’s 15,000-plus inmates have some form of mental illness or an addiction issue. Our now over-crowded facilities are certainly a cauldron for mental illness, a problem also, in Ashley’s case, likely exacerbated by isolation.  Are there sufficient mental health facilities and training of personnel in our prisons?  Is there enough funding for this? And how many qualified people want to work in this setting in the first place?  Will ‘mental health’ in prisons always be left to the unqualified, as Ashley’s case in part suggests?

Confidentiality prevents us from ever having the complete story, but was it really too much to intervene and care for a teenage life, or were guards too busy following orders?   Do not the mentally ill – especially when they are still minors - have some right to state-protection, assuming they can be protected from the state?  Is individual helplessness an ideal stage for reintegration, or was Ashley (borrowing from Rousseau) ‘forced to be free’? How could the misuse of prison power persist for so long, or do we already have an answer for that? Who needs Guantanamo when we have the Correctional Service of Canada?[1]

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[1] See ”Ashley Smith Videos: The Madness of our Neglect”, Editorial. Globe and Mail, Friday November 2, 2012, p. A14.  Or listen: Anna Maria Tremonti CBC Radio, The Current – “Ashley Smith Case & Mental Health in Canadian Prisons,” Monday November 12, 2012.