Human Rights
Canadian Prisoner Rights
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Key Terms
Prisoner: On an international level, a globally accepted definition for a prisoner is one who is, “a person deprived of liberty and kept under involuntary restraint, confinement, or custody;” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
However, prisoners are generally individuals who are facing in incarceration due to a violation of Local Domestic or International Law.
Becoming a prisoner causes the individual to be sent to a prison for a predetermined amount of time as punishment
Prison: The facility where prisoners are kept for incarceration.
Context and Concepts
Prisoner’s Rights
Despite being restricted and incarcerated, all prisoners are still classified as humans and, therefore, must
…show more content…
This means the financial burden on the government would be significantly decreased. While privatized companies also have certain restrictions and responsibilities, there have been multiple cases outside of Canada where private prisons are centers for mass abuse of prisoners.
In November 2006, to Canadian government committed to take back the last privately owned prison in Canada after multiple cases of reported rights violation.
Critical Violation Case Study
Reported by Ontario Human Rights Commission:
Eastern Canadian prisons still use Solitary Confinement despite numerous studies suggesting that mental health issues will arise from the punishment in the forms of anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression, and depression (Crime and Delinquency, 2003).
Statistics: April - August 2015:
Central-East Correctional Center (Lindsay, Ontario) placed 1,100 people into solitary confinement.
Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (Ottawa, Ontario) placed 550 people into solitary confinement.
With the effects of solitary confinement being released to the public, it is the fault
The use of solitary confinement in the United States prisons systems is higher than that of any
Solitary confinement is commonly used throughout prisons in the United States. It is used among correctional facilities, which vary from state to state. The use of solitary confinement is to isolate the inmate from any human encounters, usually based on a form of punishment. The conditions of solitary confinement according to the American Friends Service Committee (2015) include:
Solitary confinement is the most used form of punishment for those who are not stable enough to be housed with general population. With this knowledge, it is best to keep using solitary confinement as a form of punishment in the criminal justice system rather than abolishing it. Solitary confinement is one of the most common debates currently in the system. Many people believe that this form of punishment is harmful and does not rehabilitate offenders. Numerous individuals also believe that this is the best form of punishment for those who cannot be with general population because it is a necessity and provides protection for the inmate and correctional officers. It has not been empirically proven whether this form of punishment is effective, but
The United States practices solitary confinement. “It is commonly thought that solitary confinement is reserved for incorrigibly violent, dangerous people—the worst of the worst.” (Cloud, Drucker, Browne, & Parsons, 2015) However, in researching solitary confinement, whether or not the inmate was dangerous has not always been the reason that inmates end up in solitary confinement. In some cases the inmates who are placed in solitary confinement are not at risk of causing harm to guards, prisoners or anyone else. According to the Penal Reform International website states, “Excessive use of solitary confinement in prisons around the world is becoming an increasing concern. (Penal Reform International, 2015)
The dictionary defines prison as a place of confinement. One of the main goals of prisons are to provide rehabilitation. In other words, to help prisoners rejoin society. However, jails in the United States have problems such as incorrect care of inmates, (specifically ill ones). This is intolerable because a person in jail who is sick, should have access to medical care.
People in solitary confinement face negative mental and emotional effects from being secluded. People in solitary confinement are more likely to face depression, anxiety and self-harm. “Solitary confinement breaks people. It breaks their spirit and breaks their mind, it does so predictably, and by design, it dehumanizes them, as well as their captors” (Lueders 34). In New York, suicide rates are five times higher among prisoners in solitary confinement than in general population. 60% of
Over the last 51 years prisoners have been placed at the nucleus of criminal justice system research. There has been an abundance of research exploring the impact of imprisonment spanning across a multiplicity of disciplines including psychology, sociology, law, social work and social policy (XXXXXXXXXX). Unfortunately, the research can be seen to have a reductionist tendency to focus on the person imprisoned as a single entity (Light and Campbell, 2006,.......). This is also the typical position adopted by the media, who often focus on drawing attention to towards the individual who committed the crime, the victim and the punishment they received (Chadee, 2001). What isn't
Prison punishments are not always the answer. A prisoner’s life can be simply depicted and directly related to the
Although solitary confinement is quite common in the U.S prison systems, reports have shown that it can lead to negative health effects. (Grassian and Friedman 1986) stated that lack of fresh air and sunlight along with long periods of inactivity can lead to physiological and psychological consequences. While there might be a few in prisoners that might be resilient to the health effects of solitary confinement, majority of prisoners will at one point report some form of disturbance during there time in solitary confinement.
The justification of solitary confinement is helping to keep inmates with mental illness away from other prisoners for their safety.The high-security is designed to enforce the prisoners with mental illness are held away from the inmates that don't have a mental illness.These restrictions isolate the inmates with their disorders until they can regain the health state they were previously in when they entered prison.These inmates are treated differently than the others they receive their meals through door slots and they rarely can get visitors to come see them since they're locked up for their safety.The solitary confinements will continue to grow day by day because of the prisoners that get released tend to come back within few months because
First and foremost, Mears puts forward many standards in his article “Supermax Prisons. Criminology & Public Policy”. He uses these standards to determine whether solitary confinement is truly beneficial or not. He looks at cost efficiency, public support, ethical considerations and other options. According to Mears, problems with being able to successfully manage high numbers of prisoners in institutions with only a small number of staff are inevitable. The use of solitary confinement originally came into being due to incidents of violence and/or riots in prisons that sometimes resulted in death (Mears
It may be easy to find it unnecessary to address the needs of reforming the use of solitary confinement, but in the end this reform may reduce the amount of detainees suffering any psychological or physiological damage from the use of confinement. Prison was originally developed to punish and rehabilitate inmates so they can later be a productive member of society. Once rehabilitate has stop being the ultimate goal of the department of justice the care of the inmate changed and along with that the growth of recidivism. A society that locks away its people, then entrenches them into prison and within that prison they secure them into a smaller cell for 23 out of 24 hours a day for an extended period of time is complicit in the violation of the
There are many different views among scholars regarding this term. This is due to the sheer complexity of the situation, that people under this ‘umbrella’ fit into. There isn’t any universal definition for what a political prisoner is. However, a political prisoner is normally grouped as an individual who is/has been imprisoned for his or her political activities. The refers especially to ones who criticize or simply oppose the government of their select countries.
This creates the core notion that, regardless of the severity of the crime, a person who is sentenced to prison does not cease to be a human being, which is heralded by the principle that offenders are sent to prison as punishment rather than for punishment.
” This term suggest that inmates are being degraded and humiliated by all traces of his or her identity. They are strip searched, heads shaved, and they are issued an ID number. Once they receive the number, they have officially separated their former selves to their new institutional selves.3 All prisoners across the globe have to go through this process on entering this new society. Haney clearly states prisonization is the incorporation of the norms of prison life into one’s habits of thinking, feeling, and acting. Inmates have to resort to these natural and normal adaptations due to the unnatural and abnormal conditions of prison life. Penal institutions have reserved the right to strip you of your general freedom which includes, speech, decision making and freedom. This is one of the hardest adjustments to make as a prisoner.