This decision may seem absurd but perhaps it makes sense. Prisons should be safe -- and they are not. Assault is widespread and such "inside" crime makes rehabilitation even less likely. If prisons are "fined" for assault maybe they will take steps to stop it?
Inmate's $12K reward for buttocks injury upheld
Natalie Alcoba, National Post
A former inmate who claimed he suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after a fellow prisoner stabbed him in the buttock with a plastic weapon should receive the $12,000 he was awarded in damages, a federal judge has ruled.
Crown lawyers had appealed a decision made late last year by Federal Court prothonotary Martha Milczynski, who found Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) had "inadequate" security measures that contributed to a "breach of the duty of care" of Barry Carr, a 38-year-old who was attacked in 2005 by an unidentified prisoner in Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ont.
She said corrections officers did not heed the signs of a possible violent confrontation, and ordered the federal government to pay Mr. Carr's court costs, plus the damages.
A Federal Court Justice has upheld her ruling.
In his judgment of June 2, Justice James Russell acknowledged that while it is possible to take issue with the findings, he "cannot find that Prothonotary Milczynski committed a palpable and overriding error."
The judge dismissed the appeal, and in doing so set a precedent for future cases involving CSC's liability of inmate safety, said John Hill, who represented Mr. Carr in the lawsuit against the federal government.
His client claimed that CSC was negligent because it failed to monitor the movements and actions of inmates, failed to notice signs of the impending assault, and did not act quickly enough to suppress it.
"Now, instead of saying it's up to the inmate to report damage that may occur to him, what they're saying is you have procedures in place to prevent this, if you don't use them properly and harm befalls the inmate, you're going to pay," Mr. Hill said in an interview yesterday.
5 comments:
You posit "prisons should be safe -- and they are not" as the basis of an argument that prisoners injured by assaults should have a claim against the government for negligence - a premise and argument which would apply a fortiori to communities at large. Communities should be safe - and they are not; so should we expect full-throated approval of negligence claims against the government, the judiciary, the police services and the correctional system each time someone is assaulted?
Further, the notion that "if prisons are 'fined' for assault maybe they will take steps to stop it" is counterintuitive in the context of how government works: if the fine was being paid out of the pocket of the prison guards or administrators, you might have a point; but the fine is simply paid out of the budget, so no individual is incentivized to increase security (cf tort claims against private corporations which can simply pass along increased costs to consumers - except that at least private corporations are subject to market dynamics of pricing and reputations, unlike government actors likes prisons). The inexorable dynamic of bureaucracies is to constantly require more funding as a measure of importance and prestige - so adding fines to the budget will not necessarily result in more security, but will simply be added as a new line item in the next annual review.
BT,
You may well have a point. My interest is not in raising costs but trying to make prisons effective as reformatories.
Communities should be safe
Your arguments are facile.
In Communities steps are taken to ensure safety, resources are directed towards neighbourhoods that need them more.
Prisons are barbaric zoos where most of your human rights are taken away.
The goal should be rehabilitation but when you turn them into primitive societies there is little chance of that.
As a society, we send people to jail - they become our responsibility. Do you prefer that prisons become criminal factories?
For some reason, I imagine that "law and order" types would like that Canada send all prisoners to some type of exile island as a punishment...
If Canada really wanted prisons to be effective reformatories, we would scrap the current correctional system and overhaul the criminal code. We just want to have all of our Untouchables somewhere out of the way so we can pretend that they don't exist.
I've thought about this a lot but never reached a satisfactory answer.
On the one hand, the routine brutality and rape that occurs in prisons is intolerable.
These are not part of their sentence (for otherwise we are using brutality and rape as a state-sanctioned form of punishment).
So prisoners should be protected.
But, there seems to be no way to protect prisoners except to isolate them from each other. A system of fines and penalties will be of limited effectiveness.
But this removes them from any sort of social contact, which is in its own way as harmful as the brutality. And providing them with alternative social contact is simply too expensive.
In the long run, I think we will need to isolate prisoners from each other. We want not only to protect them from harm, we want to minimize the negative influence.
We need to find a way to do this that is reasonably inexpensive and safe for the prisoners. Where their only contact is with prison staff and experts, not convicts and rapists.
That said, I'm open to ideas.
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