Treat the presumed innocent as innocent

Good story in the Post today. The conditions in Toronto's Don Jail are appalling. And this failing has been well known for 40 years!

Remember the people in the Don Jail on remand are not convicted; they are presumed innocent and some of them, in fact, are.

Such people, seeing as they are presumed innocent, ought to be held in conditions appropriate to ordinary Canadians unable to go home for some other, non justice related, reason. The conditions ought to approximate, say, those in a hospital (absent the medical support) -- luxury no, but decent accommodation.

Regardless, even if everyone held was guilty in fact there is no reason for them to be held in humiliating conditions such as exist at the Don. As William Buckley noted "sometimes it is necessary to execute a man but it is never necessary to insult him"; regardless of the death penalty comment Buckley has a good point on humiliating people.

Treating prisoners as beasts does nothing for society and merely makes people who have criminal tendencies worse.

Debate rages about the fairness of Canada's sentencing provisions
Shannon Kari, National Post
Published: Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Peter Redman/National Post

The court testimony was graphic last month as Thomas Bogiatzis described the conditions he faced in Toronto's Don Jail while awaiting trial on charges of selling one kilogram of cocaine to a former biker turned police agent.

"It is like living in some Third-World country," testified Bogiatzis, 42, who weighs nearly 400 pounds and suffers from diabetes. "There is a stink throughout the whole jail."

It is common at the infamous facility for three men to be housed in a two-by-three-metre cell originally built for one inmate.

One man must sleep on a mattress next to the open toilet, which cannot be flushed at night.

The jail is frequently locked down because of staffing shortages. Yard time is restricted to a handful of days a month, admitted a jail official who testified.

Bogiatzis, who was convicted of trafficking cocaine, was testifying in an attempt to receive enhanced credit for his 15 months in pretrial custody when he is sentenced this Friday.

The allegations about the Don Jail are nothing new. It was first singled out for criticism for its "primitive" living conditions in a 1968 Royal Commission report.

The long-standing problems have also had an impact on sentencing for many years --not only in Toronto but, arguably, across the country.
The standard credit for pretrial custody at the time of sentencing in Canada is two for one -- six months in jail ends up being 12 months toward the sentence. Overcrowding at the Don Jail and other facilities led some judges in the Toronto area to grant three-for-one or even a four-for-one credit.

While the two-for-one standard evolved in the 1970s as a result of changes to the Criminal Code, in recent years critics have called for a review of the practice. They also argue that the conditions in Toronto jails have effectively set a standard that has been incorrectly applied in other parts of the country.