‘People were essentially being tortured’: Federal Court orders CSC to put air conditioning in Edmonton women’s prison
Senator and longtime prisoner rights advocate Kim Pate says it's "well past time" for Correctional Service Canada to install air conditioning in a notoriously hot section of an Alberta prison after the Federal Court made that order and heard evidence of "oven"-like conditions dating back more than a decade.
In the Federal Court decision issued on July 16, Justice Meaghan Conroy wrote the extremely hot temperatures in the Edmonton Institution for Women have caused inmates to suffer panic attacks, psychological distress, and sleep deprivation.
Proper heating and air conditioning is often required in homes for seniors, or homeless shelters, and “it behooves us to ensure that the same humane treatment occurs within prisons,” said Pate (Ontario), an Independent Senator who was executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies from 1992 until her appointment to the Upper Chamber in 2016.
Conroy noted the temperatures in the “Secure” or maximum-security section of the 167-person prison are “excessively high” at certain times of year, especially during nightly lockup, where there is no airflow for more than nine hours.
The court case was brought forward by the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the national organization that advocates for women and gender-diverse people in the carceral system.
“It is a long-standing problem: CSC has known of design problems with the temperature regulation equipment in Secure since as early as 2012,” Conroy writes.
She directed Correctional Service Canada to begin recording the temperature in the maximum-security area of the prison, and install air conditioning. CSC argued that officials routinely monitor temperatures in Secure, but “remarkably, it keeps no written records of its temperature readings,” Conroy writes.
Pate said Canadian prisons are often constructed to prevent air conditioning from entering the inmates’ living quarters, while allowing for the same comforts in areas where staff are working.
“Those serving their sentences talk about the inhumanity,” she said. “I’ve experienced it myself, being in units with windows that maybe open a crack, have very small [and] ineffective air vents, and staff trying to help with fans moving the air a bit,” she said, calling it “incredibly oppressive.”
Conroy directed CSC to begin recording the temperature in the maximum-security area of the prison, and install air conditioning. But nearly a month after the decision, CSC did not commit to following the court’s ruling.
CSC reviewing court decision
The Hill Times asked CSC if it plans to comply with the Federal Court's orders to keep a record of temperatures, and install air conditioning units in the Edmonton women’s prison, and if the court decision will change how CSC plans to manage high temperatures in other prisons across the country.
CSC spokesperson Kevin Antonucci told The Hill Times on Aug. 12 that the department was “aware” of the court’s decision, and was taking time to review it.
CSC has “implemented a number of strategies and best practices designed to address temperatures over the summer months,” he said via email, including “increased offender access to cold water, ice, and cool showers throughout the day,” as well as “cooldown zones” in communal spaces like gyms, mechanical ventilation at night to circulate cool air into the prisons, as well as dehumidifiers and portable fans.
Conroy’s decision, though, says while CSC has taken some steps to address hot temperatures through cold showers and purchasing fans, the department has not taken “all reasonable steps” to ensure “safe and healthy conditions of confinement in Secure.”
She writes, “inmate complaints and grievances about excessive heat have been ongoing and numerous, dating back to at least 2011 and yet there is still no durable solution.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.), her party’s public safety critic, said the court’s decision confirms what incarcerated women and advocates have known for years.
“Extreme heat in federal prisons is a serious health and safety issue, and CSC has a legal duty to take reasonable steps to protect people in its care,” Kwan told The Hill Times via email.
“The government must now ensure CSC complies fully with this order and establish clear, enforceable standards for safe and humane temperatures in federal correctional facilities across the country.”
Conroy's ruling comes as the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal will soon hear a human rights complaint about the lack of air conditioning and high temperatures in correctional facilities, a complaint brought forward by the John Howard Society of Canada.
Emilie Coyle, co-executive director Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, told The Hill Times that living conditions in Canadian prisons may seem shocking to people who aren’t familiar with the system, but because it occurs "in the confines of a prison, people don’t really know what happens.” She described the court ruling as a welcome surprise and a relief.
“When you're in a tiny cell, you don't have control over your life. You have a tiny fan circulating 40-degree air. You already have mental health challenges, or you're elderly, or you have anxiety. You may have pre-existing physical conditions, and then all of this is exacerbated by this horrendous heat,” Coyle said.
“People were essentially being tortured.”
Conroy’s decision says the court reviewed “numerous” written complaints and grievances spanning two decades, and evidence that suggests the high temperatures are due to the building equipment’s inability to cool down the space, “and yet CSC has thus far failed to implement an effective and durable solution to manage the heat.”
Conroy wrote that CSC has routinely interpreted its own policy as being “entirely prohibitive of installing air conditioning in the inmate-occupied areas of the penitentiary,” but described the interpretation as “unreasonable.”
Coyle said advocates with Elizabeth Fry have been alerting CSC to the extreme heat “for a very long time.”
She said while all women's prisons in Canada have issues with high temperatures, they decided to bring the case of the Edmonton prison before the court because CSC had known about it since 2012.
“They certainly were aware,” Coyle said of the prison’s local leadership, as well as CSC leadership in Ottawa. “We would be sending letters to the commissioner and the deputy commissioner for women after our visits. We would copy them on our visit letters, so they knew about it, and it was pretty shocking.”
Coyle said one incarcerated woman was particularly brave in leading the charge to bring the issue to light.
“She was suffering,” Coyle said. “One of the cells on one of the pods was nicknamed the microwave, or the oven, because it got so hot.”
Coyle said advocates have been “pleading” with CSC to fix it.
“They kept saying that they were fixing the issue or trying to fix the issue, but they just weren't.”
Affidavits from four inmates detail ‘intolerably hot’ conditions
The court received four sworn affidavits from four incarcerated women who had all been incarcerated in the maximum-security wing of the prison at one point. Each described “intolerably hot” living conditions in one particular section called the East Pod, which receives direct sunlight during the day.
“The corner cell in that pod has been nicknamed the “microwave,” or the “oven,” by inmates,” Conroy wrote, and one incarcerated woman stated that she witnessed the temperature reach over 40 degrees Celsius in August 2018.
The women detailed various strategies to attempt to stay cool, including placing frozen water bottles on their bodies, wetting their clothes and hair, splashing themselves and each other in cold water, standing in front of open fridges, taking ice baths, stripping down to their underwear, taking a frozen towel to bed, and limiting their physical movement.
One woman said she used the “panic button” in her cell some nights, as she would suffer panic attacks from the heat. Another woman wrote she would often have panic attacks “due to being trapped in my cell with no way to cool myself down,” and witnessed another woman who also had a panic attack due to the heat.
During the winter, when staff attempt to increase the temperature in common areas, the cells become “intolerably hot,” while turning off the heat mades both the common areas and cells "unbearably cold.”
Coyle credited the work of lawyer Kate Engel in gathering affidavits from the incarcerated women, and also collecting access-to-information requests for CSC’s internal communications of the issue in order to build a timeline of evidence.
Coyle said the court decision means the government will have to spend money to fix an institution that was inadequately built in the first place.
“Maybe people don’t care about people in prison all the time. But the government built a building … that was structurally inappropriate for the weather, which is a waste of public funds,” she said. “It should have been done years and years ago.”
The Hill Times