To the Globe and Mail, 9 June 2017: “Ban Solitary Outright”

The Globe and Mail June 9 2017

Your editorial clearly sets out the inconsistencies, hypocrisy and injustices of solitary confinement. We agree with it also in its support for Howard Sapers’s recommendations for excluding the mentally ill and juveniles. However, his recommended cap on solitary (15 days at a time, 60 days total in a year) is based on a UN Report of 2011, which itself was a compromise. Evidence continues to mount that solitary causes harm even in shorter stays.

Independent oversight would be better than the current wide-open discretion accorded prison managers. You call for “getting those minimum standards right” and insist that legislation is needed – we concur. However, the “right” maximum stay, if we go by evidence of harm, which we should, would be under 48 hours. Better to look at other places which have made the move to virtual abolition.

Flogging, which society now finds abhorrent, was once acceptable, too. The time has come to ban solitary confinement.

Mary Boyce, lawyer
Paul Copeland, CM, LLB
Canon Phyllis Creighton, OOnt, MA, editor
Hon Norman Dyson, QC
Ronald Hinch, PhD, professor emeritus of criminology
Hon Keith Hoilett
Lynn McDonald, CM, PhD, LLD (hon) professor emerita