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Prison problems need addressing |
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Written by Lethbridge Herald
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Wednesday, November 18 2009, 8:53 PM |
Time travel might be an attractive dream for those who are into quantum physics or science fiction, but it’s not such a good approach for social issues.
That’s the view of the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC), which was one of the organizations which came out in support recently of the Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
Earlier this month, the MHCC applauded the strong stand of Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers, whose report stressed the need to address the “serious and pressing” issue of mental health within Canada’s prison population.
Sapers, the watchdog of the federal prison system, said in his report the risk that mentally ill inmates will die behind bars is still unacceptably high, pointing out there has been little real progress shown in the prison system’s response to at least 17 in-custody suicides that have occurred in the past two years. Those included the death almost two years ago of 19-year-old Ashley Smith, who choked herself to death with a strip of cloth at the Grand Valley prison for women in Kitchener, Ont.
Sapers took the correctional service to task for not providing the treatment and protection Smith desperately needed.
“Our prisons are housing the largest psychiatric population in the country,” MHCC chair Michael Kirby said in response to Sapers’ report. “If we don’t take steps to address this reality, we’re leaving out a significant segment of the population that is entitled to the same level of health care as the rest of us.”
Failure to deal with the problem would be akin to going backwards to the time when society didn’t discuss mental health issues, choosing instead to ignore the situation as if that would make it go away, Kirby said in a news release.
Louise Bradley, MHCC’s chief operating officer, said the suggestions in Sapers’ report are in line with WHO recommendations which call for comprehensive action to prevent prisons from becoming 21st-century asylums for the mentally ill.
“Many prisoners need treatment, but receive punishment instead,” Bradley said. “The ultimate benefit of treating those in the prison population who have mental health issues should be a reduction in the number of people ending up in the prison system in the first place.”
That would be a boon to a prison system that is already strained to the limit, as Sapers warned in early June, and in danger of becoming more so if the Harper government’s tough-on-crime approach means more criminals behind bars.
As Kirby said, it’s in everyone’s best interests to deal with mental health issues within the prison system, especially in view of the challenges in reintegrating offenders back into their communities. Unresolved mental health problems aren’t to going to go away by themselves no matter how much we try to pretend they don’t exist.
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