Federal prison watchdog leaving post early over ‘frustrations’ with lack of prison reform | CBC News

A watchdog that investigates the fair and humane treatment of federal prisoners is leaving his post two years early after becoming exasperated with what he says is the government’s unwillingness to address systemic human rights issues. 

“I leave with a fair amount of frustrations,” Dr. Ivan Zinger, the correctional investigator of Canada, said as he presented an annual report focused on mental health on Wednesday. 

“If I would have been in a situation where the agency subject to my oversight would have been more responsive, maybe I would have stuck around for another two years,” he said. 

Zinger says both the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), the federal agency responsible for prisons, and its political masters won’t be able to improve mental health services for prisoners unless they change their approach. 

“I wish that there would be more willingness from the minister of public safety to acknowledge that there is a problem,” Zinger said Wednesday. 

“I wish there was more openness on the part of the commissioner of corrections to openly accept that there are some problems and that there needs to be some steps taken concretely to address those problems.” 

Zinger said continuing to “dismiss and disregard” his office’s recommendations will only result in the issues raised coming back to bite the federal government through the courts. 

Failing to reform and deliver

In what will be his last annual report before stepping down in January, Zinger’s office used the 162-page document to detail the results of the six investigations it undertook over the past year into the quality of mental health care available in federal prisons. 

While the investigations revealed shortcomings in specific areas of mental health services delivery specifically for women and the aged, they also shone a light on some common issues across the federal prison system. Those issues include:

• Poor and outdated policies, or the lack of any policy, hindering treatment.
• Insufficient training for staff working with prisoners that have mental health issues.
• A lack of effective mental health screening for prisoners.
• Inconsistent or unavailable programs to help people once they leave prison.
• Prioritizing security measures like the use of force over therapeutic interventions. 

The report also looked at five of the regional treatment centres (RTCS), or psychiatric hospitals for federal inmates that are operated by the federal government, and found they were not fit for purpose.

“Our latest findings underscore that RTCs can be best described as intermediate and geriatric care facilities, with limited emergency mental health capacity for acute cases,” the report said. 

Rejecting recommendations

Zinger’s report recommends that people with long-term psychiatric needs should be moved to a hospital outside the prison system where specialists can provide proper treatment. 

That recommendation is the first of 21 such calls to action included in the report, but it was roundly rejected by the Correctional Service of Canada.

In a response included in the report, the CSC says it is against transferring patients to a community-based hospital because those facilities are often unable to “admit federal inmates with complex mental health and security needs.”

The agency also says that in order to provide “essential health services to inmates,” it must “maintain a critical capacity to provide in-patient psychiatric care in RTCs” by keeping them open and operating.

The prison’s investigator disagrees. 

“It is abundantly clear that CSC is fundamentally ill-equipped to provide long-term mental health care to individuals with serious mental illness — those experiencing acute psychiatric distress, suicidal ideation and chronic self-injury,” the report says. 

Zinger’s report also asked the federal government to abandon its plans to spend $1.3 billion to build a new hospital for inmates in New Brunswick, calling the initiative “a profound misallocation of resources.”

The report says that rather than investing in another “in-house facility,” the CSC should have used that money to fund partnerships with local hospitals by paying for extra beds and staff. 

“The $1.3 billion allocated could cover the costs of such a model for decades to come,” Zinger said in the report. “I urge the government to reconsider its plans.”

Public Safety Canada’s response was to reject this recommendation as well, saying the modern bilingual purpose-built hospital will address mental health treatment concerns while setting a new standard for mental health services delivery in federal corrections. 

Courts must deliver reforms, Zinger says

Public Safety also said that in 2024, the CSC reached out to 11 external hospitals looking for partnerships like the one Zinger recommends, and that only one hospital was willing to talk the issue over. 

Zinger said Wednesday in Ottawa that the reasons the partnerships have been so elusive is because CSC is approaching hospitals with pitches containing “conditions that make the partnership impossible to happen.”

Most of the remaining 19 recommendations are accepted in whole or in part by the CSC, but that acknowledgement did little to convince Zinger things will change. 

In his opening statement to the report, he says many of his offices’ recommendations for reform over the years have “too often been disregarded or dismissed” and “successive ministers” have also been reluctant to press CSC to act. 

Despite his frustration over the inability to get the federal government to undertake meaningful prison reforms, Zinger said he is leaving his position with no regrets. 

“I’m satisfied with what I’ve accomplished,” he said. “Lawyers and litigators around the country are picking up our reports and using those reports in individual cases, litigation but also class-action law-suits, and eventually are getting the service to comply when there is a blatant human rights violation.” 

Holding up his final report, Zinger said he suspects it will “unfortunately” result in legal actions that end up compelling the federal government to meet its legal mandate to federal inmates.