A fatal riot at Saskatchewan Penitentiary last year was likely sparked by unresolved disputes over food and complaints on the treatment of inmate kitchen workers, a report from Canada’s correctional ombudsman shows.
The Dec. 14, 2016, riot is detailed in correctional investigator Ivan Zinger’s annual report, released Tuesday, examining the state of Canada’s prisons.
Zinger states the “immediate triggering events” of the riot — which occurred in the prison’s medium-security unit — seem to be related to inmates’ dissatisfaction with food quality, portion sizes and a lack of protein, as well as the “perceived mistreatment of inmate kitchen workers” by Correctional Service of Canada staff.
“Current research suggests that a lot must go wrong, and for quite some time, before a prison erupts in violence,” Zinger writes. “Such a perspective implies that prison administrators have opportunity and warning to address precipitating factors and thereby prevent a full-fledged riot from occurring in the first place. In other words, prison riots are not random or inevitable events.”
Nearly 200 of the medium-security unit’s 377 inmates were involved in the riot, which began when several inmates refused to attend work and other programs.
One inmate was murdered and eight others were hospitalized with injuries caused either by assault, smoke or pepper spray inhalation, or shotgun pellets, according to the report. Windows were smashed. Walls were damaged. Inmates set fires and blocked doors with fridges, washers and dryers.
“The ensuing rampage and destruction of government property rendered many of the living units ‘uninhabitable,’ ” Zinger states in his report, which also makes note of the size of Saskatchewan Penitentiary’s cells.
“In search of some other plausible explanation for the incomprehensible violence and mayhem beyond bad or inadequate food, I noted that some of the cells in that forbidding and antiquated facility housed two inmates even though there is barely adequate space for one. Standing in the middle of another cell, I could reach out and touch the sides of both walls.”
He writes the facility, alongside the Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba, is not properly equipped for humane conditions or to serve the prison’s majority population of Indigenous people.
“The antiquated conditions of confinement that prevail in these two institutions are not conducive to modern and humane correctional practice, nor responsive to the unique needs of Indigenous prisoners,” Zinger writes.
He calls for an external audit of Corrections food services as well as for the reinstatement of a dispute resolution pilot program in his report. He also recommends findings from the National Board of Investigation review into the riot be circulated within the Correctional Service of Canada and be released as a public document.
