‘They were God, we were nothing’: Struggles with solitary confinement in Canada
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Stacey Swampy once spent five months in solitary confinement in an Alberta prison.
“You ever see those commercials with those people that have those caged animals? How beaten down, broken, starved the looked. Well, picture that, but put a human inside,” he said.
The 44-year-old former inmate shared his experience at a public forum on solitary confinement at the University of Saskatchewan on Monday night. The forum combined professionals with former inmates to paint a picture of the devastating effects of solitary including impaired memory, confusion, depression, phobias, personality changes, suicidal thoughts, anger and aggravated mental illnesses.
“We see people’s mental health both develop in prison and become exacerbated in prison,” Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Society’s Kim Pate said.
Swampy was, at one point, one of more than 850 inmates nation-wide who are in solitary confinement at any given moment.
Two weeks ago the Canadian Medical Association Journal release an editorial that said the number of inmates in solitary has climbed 6.4 per cent over the past five years making the practice a “cruel and usual punishment” in Canada’s prisons.
Pate said the deaths of Ashley Smith and Kinew James revealed the added barriers of mental illness and the harmful effects of solitary.
Correctional Investigator of Canada Howard Sapers previously said as many as a third of the women serving federal sentences have mental health issues and up to 20 per cent of men. Correctional Services Canada said as many as 90 per cent of inmates have mental health issues.
Pate said inmates with mental illnesses are more likely to end up in isolation because prison staff often don’t know how to identify bad behaviour as mental illness or live in a culture where “security trumps therapy.”
“In a prison it’s seen as symptomatic of bad behaviour because you’re dealing with people who also carry a criminal label, even though the primary issue may be mental health,” Pate said.
Swampy said he felt he was treated like a lesser being and described punishments of no food for a day or two or no shower for up to two weeks for looking at a guard the wrong way.
“They were God. We were nothing to them,” he said, adding those who bottle up their emotions to survive often end up releasing the pain on others. “They want us to be animals and lots of us in turn start to act like animals.”
