Prison Riot Judgment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/11/2017 (2891 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ted Hughes’ last major assignment in his remarkable six-decade career was as the commissioner who reported on the tragic death of five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair. But that public inquiry, completed in 2013 when Hughes was 86, was not his first foray into Manitoba. The following abridged excerpt is from a new biography by former journalist Craig McInnes, The Mighty Hughes: From Prairie Lawyer to Western Canada’s Moral Compass, published by Heritage House.

 

The canteen officer operating the commissary at the Headingley Correctional Institution just west of Winnipeg noticed a strange trend on Thursday afternoon, April 25, 1996. Inmates from the basement unit were cleaning her out of dollar tokens by making small purchases with $5 tokens. She notified the duty officer, who told her to stop making any sales unless inmates had exact change. The duty officer knew from experience that when inmates started collecting tokens, it was usually for one of two purposes — either to buy drugs or to pay to have another inmate assaulted.

Before the night was out, during a routine drug search of the basement unit, guards found a badly beaten inmate. The guards were then attacked and overpowered and forced to flee for their safety. Several were injured. One guard required 150 stitches. Using keys they took from the guards, the inmates raged through the rest of the prison, freeing their friends, setting fires and assaulting their enemies. They dragged prisoners out of protective custody and beat them for hours. They hacked off fingers and tried to castrate one man.

Police took back control of the medium-security prison the following night after persuading all but eight of the 321 inmates to come out. The rest meekly surrendered when police stormed the prison. Forty prisoners and guards were taken to hospital for treatment of their injuries, and the 60-year-old prison was a smouldering, sodden mess. Damage was later estimated at $3.5 million. It would be months before it could again be used to house prisoners.

Even before police regained control, stories were emerging about lax security, rampant drug use and gangs operating inside. After the riot, the prisoners from Headingley had to be transferred to other institutions, creating a new set of problems. Within a week, up to 700 corrections staff, including guards, counsellors and teachers, began walking off the job at eight provincial facilities, claiming their working conditions were no longer safe. They were replaced temporarily by 200 RCMP officers at a cost of $50,000 a day.

Back in British Columbia, Ted Hughes was winding down his work as acting conflict commissioner — a role he had pioneered and in which he gained national attention for his report that persuaded William Vander Zalm to resign as premier. He was looking forward to new challenges. He signed on as a chief negotiator for the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office in Victoria. He also took a part-time job as conflict commissioner for Yukon’s legislative assembly and later took on the same role for the Northwest Territories. When he was reappointed as B.C.’s acting conflict commissioner, the position was set to end on June 30, 1996, but he agreed to stay on (without pay after July 1) until the end of March 1997. Yet he still found time to say yes when the Manitoba government called in early May 1996 and asked him to conduct an inquiry into the Headingley riot and all the allegations that had been flying since it erupted. A month later, he celebrated his 69th birthday.

Hughes’ inquiry was part of the deal to get correctional workers back on the job. The Manitoba Government Employees’ Union knew his reputation and viewed the inquiry as a chance for corrections officers to air their grievances without fear of intimidation or losing their jobs. If the union thought the report would fully support the guards, however, it was mistaken. Hughes told reporters at the time of his first tour of the ransacked jail that he would be going wherever he needed to go, from the inmates to the justice minister, to find the answers he needed.

What he found was an aging institution that was not designed for the role it now played, a place where staff morale was, in the words of one corrections officer, “lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.” Headingley was a place where corrections officers often hated their jobs, each other and the inmates; it had an incompetent superintendent, porous security that allowed for a free flow of drugs and gangs that terrorized other inmates, and it was ultimately overseen by a justice minister, Rosemary Vodrey, who was surprisingly ignorant of the miserable state of one of the major institutions in her portfolio.

Individual guards made serious and “grossly irresponsible” mistakes the night of the riot, starting with a failure to log the canteen incident, which meant that when the next shift decided to search the basement unit for drugs, they were unaware that they might be facing a heightened risk.

Their individual actions took place in the context of an institution that for almost two decades was known for terrible staff morale. A bad situation had been made worse in recent years by a policy directive that added aspects of social work to the traditional role of corrections officers, who previously had been responsible only for maintaining order and locking doors. Many of the guards were hired at a time when their size was more important than their intelligence, and they had little interest in or capacity to adapt to a new role in which they were required to take more of an interest in the inmates they were overseeing. And it was all exacerbated by a superintendent who had been promoted beyond his competence and who failed to recognize that his approach to running the prison had allowed gangs to thrive and to easily import drugs and violently force other inmates to join or help them.

Finally, while the situation at Headingley was common knowledge throughout the prison system in Manitoba and among some senior administrators in Winnipeg, Hughes was “confounded” by how ignorant senior government officials and the minister were about what was going on in their jurisdiction.

The Headingley assignment brought Hughes new challenges, but he also recognized familiar themes from earlier inquiries he had headed and from his previous work as a judge. He made specific recommendations for changes to procedures in the jail and to the organization of the Manitoba corrections system. He called for a new union-management committee with an outside facilitator to purge the “hatred, negativity, apathy and the couldn’t-care-less attitude that I have identified” and replace it with “trust, honour, decency and respect in the workplace.”

He also returned to the observation he had been making since urging his wife Helen to run for city council in Saskatoon 22 years earlier. Namely, that much of the criminal activity by Indigenous Canadians was rooted in social inequality. Hughes cited a survey that found that 70 per cent of the inmates at Headingley were Indigenous, as were 75 per cent of gang members in the province.

The only solution to the gang problem, Hughes said, was to put the resources needed into addressing the legacy issues raised by the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry chaired by Murray Sinclair and Alvin Hamilton five years earlier. “Would the pouring of millions of dollars into economic and social programs that would allow poverty-stricken people with no marketable skills, no job, and no job prospects to participate as law-abiding citizens in Canadian life be a justified and worthwhile expenditure of public funds? Someday the Canadian public has to accept that the answer to those questions is, yes,” he wrote in his report.

The issues rooted in Indigenous poverty, colonization and cultural loss would remain a theme in much of Hughes’ work for the next 20 years.