Plague of prison violence

Photo: The Canadian Press

It's 26 seconds of brutality — and lays bare the emerging reality of a growing number of beatings in Canada's jails.

Inmate Dwayne Wright, watching television with his feet up, is suddenly sucker-punched from behind by another inmate. A video of the attack shows him falling to the floor, his shoes flying off, as he tries to cover his face from a series of head shots.

His attacker, Charles Wallace, finishes with six soccer kicks to the 34-year-old Wright's head, and calmly resumes pacing and chatting with another inmate.

The video shows the other inmates at Halifax's Central Nova Scotia Correctional facility take little notice, while guards never enter the room.

Some prison advocates and lawyers say such violence is the new normal: Prisons that installed video technology in hopes it would decrease violence find they now instead often serve to document a disturbing long-term rise in beatings that can cause fatalities, brain injuries and life-long trauma.

The last decade has seen a steady surge in prison beatings, with annual inmate-on-inmate assault in federal prisons growing 93 per cent from 301 a year in 2006-7 to 581 in 2014-15, according to Ivan Zinger, director of the federal Correctional Investigator's office, using Correctional Services Canada data.

"An environment where prisoners are at higher risk of being assaulted ...should not be part of the sentence," he says in an academic article published earlier this year that argues conditions in prisons have worsened over the past decade.

Provinces, who are responsible for prisoners sentenced to less than two years in jail, report similar sudden rises.

In British Columbia, the Solicitor General's office says assaults and attempted assaults have gone from about 880 in 2011, to about 1,200 last year, up by about a third — with a spike in the first six months of this year.

"It is a reflection of higher inmate counts, the criminal histories of those in custody, and the growing number of inmates with addiction and mental health issues," writes spokeswoman Kate Trotter in an email.

In Ontario last year there were 2,762 inmate-on-inmate assaults, up 13 per cent from the number of assaults a decade earlier — though the figures were even higher between 2011 and 2013.

Tonia Grace, a Abbotsford lawyer who frequently represents inmates in British Columbia, says the potential cost to the governments for legal liability across Canada runs into "the millions" of dollars for the most serious cases, as courts have established prisons bear a responsibility for ensuring inmates' safety.

Grace currently has "at least 15 open files" of prison beatings where inmates are suing the province.

Grace, who represents other clients who have facial fractures, broken bones, and have lost mobility in jail violence, says "the prison authorities have to take incompatibility more seriously."