It’s Nov. 5, 2024. Over the course of half an hour, a hand-held digital camera follows Joey Toutsaint as jail guards forcibly take away him from a cell, then lead him via a corridor, throughout a yard and into one other constructing. The digital camera captures him pleading.
“I’m not going to the remark cell. No. You guys are making a mistake. Put me again in my cell.”
At one level, he weeps. “I received’t self-harm … I offer you my phrase. On my mom’s grave. On my daughter’s life…. I don’t wish to reside like this no extra.”
“I acknowledge you’ve gotten psychological well being points,” an officer says at one level.
The jail guards lead Toutsaint, wrapped in a blanket after a strip search, into the remark cell.
“As you’ll be able to see on digital camera,” one of many officers says to the individual filming earlier than the digital camera is turned off, “we had some challenges with Mr. Toutsaint and desirous to undergo going into the remark cell.”
Remark cells are naked rooms topic to 24/7 surveillance by which prisoners resembling Toutsaint are positioned, wearing a sleeveless, untearable smock and typically with out a blanket or mattress, after they have tried to hurt themselves or are suspected of intending to take action.
One other variant on these isolation cells is the “dry cell,” which is equally naked however lacks plumbing or operating water. It’s used when jail employees need somebody to excrete one thing they’re suspected of getting swallowed or hidden of their physique, resembling medicine.
Canada doesn’t name these cells solitary confinement.
However their use meets a definition of solitary below worldwide guidelines — to which Canada has agreed — that should reduce using such isolation.
What are often known as the “Mandela Guidelines” outline solitary confinement as 22 hours a day or extra with out significant human contact, and outline extended solitary confinement as a interval exceeding 15 consecutive days. The principles say solitary confinement ought to solely be used “in distinctive instances as a final resort” and must be “prohibited within the case of prisoners with psychological or bodily disabilities when their situations could be exacerbated by such measures.”
But using remark cells and dry cells has been rising, in accordance with knowledge obtained by the Investigative Journalism Bureau via access-to-information requests.
The variety of occasions Canadian prisons used remark cells rose from 859 in 2018 to 1,316 in 2024 — a 53 per cent enhance. In whole, remark cells have been used greater than 8,000 occasions between 2018 and November 2025, CSC knowledge present.
The variety of occasions Canadian prisons used dry cells rose from 160 in 2022 to 291 in 2024 — an 82 per cent enhance. Dry cells have been used virtually 700 occasions between 2022 and 2024.
Remark and dry cells can be utilized for indefinite intervals in Canada. The prisoner has no speedy technique of attraction.
“It doesn’t actually matter what the correctional service calls these cells or models or ranges,” former correctional investigator and present Canadian Civil Liberties Affiliation head Howard Sapers mentioned. “The very fact of the matter is that they function like segregation, the place individuals are locked down, locked of their cells, typically for twenty-four hours a day, typically for 23 or 22….
“The truth that we don’t have the phrases ‘solitary confinement’ in our legislation doesn’t imply that solitary confinement doesn’t, in reality, happen.”
In remark cells, and in different particular sections of prisons reserved for folks deemed unsafe within the common inhabitants, Sapers says, Canadian federal prisoners are “being dealt (with) in a manner that’s off the books, frankly.”
Correctional Service Canada says placements like Toutsaint’s “should be used appropriately, humanely, and with robust oversight” and solely “when much less restrictive interventions can not adequately handle an imminent danger of self-harm or suicide.” CSC spokesperson Laurence Côté mentioned prisons conduct well being staff assessments and case critiques of those placements, however the head of the jail makes the ultimate name.
Remark cells and dry cells are wanted to maintain prisons secure, says Frederick Lebeau, president of the federal correctional officers’ union.
“When an inmate is performing out and he’s attempting to commit suicide, typically we’ve acquired to guard them from themselves.”
Whereas dry cell use might be changed by instruments resembling physique scanners, he mentioned, remark cells will proceed to be essential “to avoid wasting lives.”
The IJB obtained 53 movies, about 5 hours’ price of footage, shot in and round remark cells — movies authorized help group Prisoners Authorized Companies obtained via federal Privateness Act requests.
The movies present how the cells are used and the pressure — tackling and handcuffing, pepper-spraying or tying down — employed to handle prisoners’ behaviour throughout transportation to and from these cells.
The IJB reviewed the Privateness Act request via which Prisoners Authorized Companies obtained the movies. Correctional Service Canada wouldn’t touch upon their veracity.
Simon Lafortune, a spokesperson for Canada’s public security minister, Gary Anandasangaree, didn’t reply to requests for an interview.
The IJB discovered that Indigenous prisoners like Toutsaint are extra doubtless than white folks to be put in an remark cell.
The variety of Indigenous males positioned in remark cells yearly greater than doubled between 2018 and 2024, to 674 from 284, a interval throughout which the variety of white males positioned in remark cells elevated by about 5.6 per cent, to 397 from 376.
“CSC frequently critiques tendencies in using remark measures, together with amongst Indigenous offenders, and continues to strengthen culturally responsive psychological well being providers and Indigenous-specific interventions,” mentioned Côté, the company’s spokesperson.
There are additionally vital disparities by establishment. The jail with the very best use of remark cells is one designed to fulfill the wants of mentally sick inmates: Saskatoon’s Regional Psychiatric Centre.
“Enhanced remark could also be used extra regularly on the Regional Psychiatric Centre as a result of it serves offenders with complicated psychological well being wants,” CSC’s Côté mentioned.
A federal coverage directive authorizes using “enhanced remark” in instances of suicidality, self-harm or extreme psychological sickness with a critical impairment. It is just for use as a final resort, in accordance with the federal directive and directions to officers the IJB reviewed.
In 2021, a Nova Scotia court docket deemed dry cells “a novel type of solitary confinement” after a lady spent greater than 15 days in a single, primarily based on suspicions that she was smuggling contraband in her vagina. Because of that ruling, using dry cells federally has been narrowed.
“(Dry cells) are solely used as a final resort when there are cheap grounds to imagine that an inmate has ingested or is carrying contraband in both their digestive system or of their rectum, and never in an inmate’s vagina,” Côté mentioned.
Since 2019-20, the CSC mentioned, it has seized weapons or medicine greater than 400 occasions following a dry cell placement.
The proliferation of unofficial types of isolation, resembling remark and dry cells, might be the results of a correctional mindset that seeks to take care of speedy safety dangers within the easiest method doable, Sapers mentioned. Or, “it might very nicely be that it’s a system response to being overworked, overburdened, overcrowded, under-resourced.”
Catherine Latimer, head of the John Howard Society, a non-profit targeted on humane responses to crime, needs to ban these sorts of isolation for folks with critical psychological sickness.
Dedicating sections of jail to weak folks might be an alternative choice to placing them in isolation, Latimer mentioned. However this might take further employees and reserved area.
“It’s simpler simply to lock folks in, lock them down.”
Kenny Allen remembers his first time in an remark cell, in December 2007.
He was 18 and had simply arrived in Saskatchewan Penitentiary on an armed theft conviction. He’d spent the earlier 14 years out and in of foster houses and juvenile establishments.
He didn’t really feel secure — he had simply left a gang — and mentioned he was suicidal, hoping to be positioned someplace out of hurt’s manner.
As an alternative, he acquired a naked cell, folks watching him pee, and no cleaning soap to clean his fingers. He misplaced his garments in alternate for a sleeveless smock.
“Degrading” is the phrase he makes use of, repeatedly, to explain the expertise, which came about a number of occasions over the course of 15 years in federal prisons. The IJB has reviewed a number of movies of Allen’s placements, together with one throughout which he’s strapped to a stretcher earlier than being rolled right into a cell the place he seems to sleep on and off, periodically struggling towards his restraints and making an attempt to harm himself. “It’s dehumanizing,” he mentioned.
In late Could 2018, Joey Toutsaint returned to jail following 9 days in hospital after attempting to sever his jugular vein.
Standing within the remark cell, he picked at a suture on his neck. The guards pepper-sprayed him. Fish-eye surveillance video exhibits the orange-red spray filling the cell; in accordance with his lawyer, in a human rights criticism filed three years later, he “felt like he couldn’t breathe.”
Guards then led Toutsaint to a bathe, put a spit hood over his head to cease him from spitting or biting and tied him right down to a stretcher that was itself tied down in one other remark cell.
Years after that occasion, Toutsaint spoke with the IJB from a video go to room at Kent Establishment, about 60 kilometres northwest of Agassiz, B.C. His final remark cell placement was October of final 12 months, after he swallowed razor blades.
On digital camera, he confirmed the self-inflicted white scars worming their manner up his tattooed left arm. His recollections of his occasions in remark cells are uncomfortably vivid: no garments, no bedding, no sound, no communication with the skin world.
“There’s no assist there,” he mentioned.
Toutsaint doesn’t suppose anybody must be held in these types of solitary.
“They need to shut it down. Completely.… It’s torture.”
The Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) on the College of Toronto’s Dalla Lana College of Public Well being is a collaborative investigative newsroom supported by Postmedia that companions with lecturers, researchers and journalists whereas coaching the subsequent era of investigative reporters.
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