Brutality Canada

A Tale of Harris Jails

The story below is by a Toronto tenant rep. He ended up in jail over a dispute with the Metro Federation of Tenants. Apparently he wanted to actually represent tenants, they didn't like that and a fight of sorts happened.

The disturbing parts of this tale have nothing to do with tenants. They have to do with what he calls Harris Jails.

Most of the people in them are in due to petty charges and petty police officers who lay the charges. They are in because parts of the system have broken down.

Conditions, especially in regards to court are terrible - psychiatric patients now fill the jails and dope is everywhere. The cost of canteen items is excessive and so on.

I think the entire system of Ontario Jails should be reviewed. Too many petty offenders are in them, learning to be bigger offenders.
Gary Morton
See also Citizens on the Web.

From: Tim Rourke

...asked me to write about my experience of being thrown in jail for five weeks, railroaded and given ridiculous bail conditions...

I visited my new jail buddy yesterday at the Don. Jerry is another one of these people who keep getting thrown in jail over and over on trivial charges, because he already has a criminal record and the police think they own his hide. They take a big piece out of it every time they arrest him. The poor guy is 52 years old, all his children have grown up and moved away from Toronto, and he has Hepatitis C. He is going to be homeless when he gets out and will have to fight to get his disability pension back.

He is one of an increasing number of people in jail who want to charge the police with assault when they get out. It would be great if all these people got together into a class action.

I was in for five weeks, myself. I was at East Detention in Scarborough, which is supposed to be like a hotel compared to the Don. It wasn't too bad after the first week. At first I was in with the general population, which was full of nasty drug dealer types who didn't seem to have anything to talk about except how to do somebody else in. It was hard to get through to anyone to arrange legal defense because these creeps monopolized the phones.

Even worse, the drug dealer's flunkies monopolized the toilet facilities as they tried to pull their bosses wares out of their asses. Cocaine incorporated is the crappiest employer in the world, pun intended. I doubt that the lower echelons are making much of a living at it. They need to complain to the labor standards board. Start a union!

My biggest problem while in there was that I broke my arm quite badly. I can't say too much about this because there will likely be some employment for lawyers out of all this. But it was a pure mishap. There was nobody else in the cell when I slipped getting down off the top bunk. When you weight 250 pounds and you fall six feet onto concrete, almost headfirst, something is probably going to give.

As I lay on the floor holding my suddenly realigned wrist and hand, the one guard said to the other, "well, I'm not sure now, but just off hand I'd say he's broken it." As they pushed me in a wheelchair down the corridor, every range was peering through the bars. They thought I had been attacked.

So I got my wrist set in a hospital and came back to the jail infirmary to recover. This was a good time to have been left alone but it was the worst day I spent in The East. I had to share a cell with some geek who decided that I should palm the Tylenol plus Codiene's the nurse gave me, and give them to him. He slapped me around a little bit and the guards were not too interested in doing anything about it at first. "I don't want to hear about it. Deal with it, you fucking loser."

Fortunately, this guy proved to be mostly bluff. But it was an unpleasant afternoon until the new guard shift came on and told him, "what are you doing down here? You don't need to be here." He went back to 'population' and I spent my most pleasant two days in The East; with a cell all to myself and an air conditioner unit I could turn up to drown out the ravings from the 'psych' patients down the corridor. I drifted on Tylenol and codeine euphoria as I healed my bones.

Then I went to court. I got locked in a holding cell with the same geek and he started denouncing me as a 'squealer.' It was then that one of the more sympathetic guards suggested I should ask to be put into 'PC', protected custody. This sounded like a good idea to me.

After that my stay The East went relatively well. I spent the remaining four weeks in the same range and mostly with the same cell mates, instead of being bounced all over. Most of the people in the range were other middle aged white guys. There were a few drug dealer types who seemed to have violated some internal regulations of Cocaine Incorporated and had no future with the firm, or back in 'population.' So they left other people alone.

The worst violence I saw when I was in 'PC' was when somebody got slapped around a little for bumming cigarettes too persistently. Tobacco caused more friction on this range than anything. Guys would shake half burnt tobacco out of the ash trays and roll them in newspaper.

As an example of how little violence there was, we had a 'bug' in there for two weeks and he never got 'swatted.' He walked around losing arguments with himself, and almost stepped on me several times as I lay on the floor floating on codeine, or trying to read or play solitaire. Seating was scarce with 36 people in a range designed for 24.

I had some trouble getting the medications I needed for my various infirmities. I never did get my nose sprays. So, when I got my canteen fund going I got some Vaseline to stuff up my nose. Buying Vaseline in jail is not looked on with the amusement you might think. One guy kept rubbing it in his eyes because he couldn't get his medications either.

This was a Harris jail. They try to make you pay for everything. I even had to buy soap. One does not want to be considered smelly in there, and it is hard to shower with a cast on your arm that cannot be gotten wet. The only thing you got for free were these tubes of blue glop, used as toothpaste, soap, laundry detergent, and glue. Also as writing instruments when public service announcements had to be posted such as "Clean this sink after you use it or I'll kick your fucking head in." It was also a spectacular cure for constipation.

They took a 'tax' out of the canteen fund if you were lucky enough to have some money on you when you were busted, or to have someone who could bring you some money. They also deducted a charge for using the telephones whether you used them or not. People with no money didn't pay the tax and still got to use the phones. That sounds a bit yuppie, doesn't it? We paid this phone tax even though we had to call collect through a long distance router to local numbers.

But people with canteen funds were the yuppies of this small world. You put in your canteen order on Wednesday and it would be delivered on Saturday. So every Wednesday you had people following you around, trying to wheedle you into buying them some cancer sticks. After I got some basic necessities bought, I pretended that I had run out of money. I did not flaunt my wealth. And I did not hide bags of caramel candies under my mattress, like my cell mate. I contented myself with the juice and cookies the guards fed us every night. ( I'm not kidding.)

The canteen prices were exorbitant. They charged you a dollar for a pencil and it turned out to be half of a pencil. They sawed the damned things in two and sold each half as one pencil. Then you had to wheedle the guard to get the pencil sharpener. At least you could use these pencils as laundry pegs.

The cocaine entrepreneurs found a way to get their products into the canteen packages. So, we spend a whole day locked down while the guards searched every package, even though all the users were upstairs. The crack people are big consumers of their own goods, they don't want to go cold turkey while incarcerated, and many of them have lots of money and friends on the outside. So, the demand for crack was fierce.

The food was okay although portions were small. Some people complained about it. But I considered myself to be a healthy eater so I gladly traded my greasy breakfast sausages for an extra bowl of all-bran.

It was crowded. I slept on the floor for four weeks with the toilet next to my head. They gave you a change of clothes once a week. So, I had to be over the sink in the cell with one arm cleaning my orange t-shirt with the blue glop.

There were not enough cleaning supplies. People ripped up towels to make cleaning rags. Some people used toilet paper like paper towels so that there was always a danger of running out of toilet paper.

Nonetheless, the range stayed very clean. The people were very good about doing their turn at cleaning. When it was cell #9's turn to clean the common areas I would be after the tables and benches with my one arm and rag while my two friends swept and mopped.

The building had problems with its plumbing. A couple of the cells kept flooding at night. This concerned floor sleepers like me.

There were some interesting characters on the range. Some stayed for a few days, some had been there for months, all waiting for trials or for bail. One guy was determined to stay in the place until they found him somewhere to live on the outside.

A Japanese businessman was in for a few days. He wasn't happy. When the guards pushed him into the cell and locked the door he hopped up and down to see out the window and yelled, "don't leave me in here" in Japanese. As it happened, someone else on the range spoke some Japanese and asked him how he came to be in there. He replied with Japanese understatement that "something very sad happened." Just like with the rest of us.

This guy was obviously of some wealth and influence, and definitely no criminal, but the Japanese embassy had to really apply the pressure for several days in order to get him released. This says something about how much the Toronto police are a power unto themselves.

Most of the people on that range were not criminals. Most were in there for trivial things for which the punishment far outweighed the crime. This was because the punks on the beat are able to bypass the courts and impose their own sentences. This is because the system of screening charges and granting release when there is no reason to hold someone for trial, has broken down. I don't know if it ever worked well.

Many of them were in there for essentially the same reason as me; they were in a dispute with somebody that should have been settled in the civil courts or by mediation, or by just letting them slug it out. There are few risks in trying to resolve a conflict to ones advantage by making false statements to police. There are too many punk police on the beat who are not interested in sorting anything out, they just want to arrest somebody. It is all about who gets to the police first or who they perceive as having the lower social status.

This used to be how the class system was maintained. But now they are stupid and arrogant enough to abuse the civil rights of people with some means. It seemed that the biggest reason why that range was treated so well by the guards was that, just before I arrived there, a guard made an unprovoked assault on someone who immediately contacted his lawyer and sued the guard and the jail. A large number of people on the range signed statements of evidence about it.

Before I finish I must mention the worst part of being in detention; the endless trips to court. Getting up hours before everyone else, eating breakfast on the tables in the common area, the trip downstairs to change into street clothes that are becoming ranker every time you wear them because there is no way to get them cleaned or to get a change of clothes. The trucks they use to transport people are ridiculous. They were divided into chambers so small that I had to sit with my knees under my chin. I would almost collapse every time I was finally let out of the things.

Then you sit in these extremely crowded cells within the bowels of the courthouse. Quite often it was literally standing room only, just to have your two minutes in front of the judge. The worst fighting that I saw among prisoners was in these court cells.

There is apparently no provision to feed people in these cells. The guards create a fund in order to buy coffee and the choice of cheese or tuna sandwich. They must have realized somehow that this makes their jobs a lot safer.

After sitting through six or eight hours of this you get back into the chicken cages for the long drive back to The East, with stops to pick up more passengers at 'High Court' and College Park. All the way you hope that the idiots haven't given your 'bed' away and that your humble possessions are not now someone else's.

But on one of these court trips they finally ran out of excuses to hold me and I didn't have to ride back. I signed on the line to habeus my corpus back, the guard unlocked the legirons, and I walked out of the court house. I went immediately to the nearest ATM machine.

Then I went home and threw out the putrid stew I had going on the stove when the cops knocked on my door five weeks before. I turned on my computer and found 550 e-mail messages in my inbox. I was free.

I am well aware that I was in the best part of the Toronto detention system. I have been in much worse jails, though only for a couple of days. I have never been convicted of anything, and won't be.

But I am getting a little tired of people such as Bob Besanson of the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations who think that they should be able to snap their fingers and have anyone arrested who is getting in their way. And I am very tired of scum like detective Van Andel who was willing to do their dirty work for them, probably for money under the table.

I won't rest until both of them see the inside of a jail.
 
Tim R.

Send your comments and stories of police brutality to: ruitsdawtah@Hotmail.com

This page created September 3, 2000