Wholly At Fault

Canadian prison authorities should be facing some pretty tough questioning. Correctional Service Canada seems, on the evidence of several high-profile, truly shameful cases, to have been less than diligent in ensuring safety and security of the inmates whom they are responsible for.

There is the shocking and dreadful case of Ashley Smith, a young woman who was incarcerated when what she really needed was a psychiatric evaluation and urgent help, not isolation and despair causing her to take her own life, while prison guards looked on through a video hook-up.

And there is the case of the serial killer Michael Wayne McGray, whom prison authorities in their deep wisdom decided to take out of maximum security and place in a medium security facility, despite that the psychopath himself resisted being moved, and stated his own preference for remaining in a high-security, single-cell facility.

The man boasted about his hair-trigger temper, his lack of compassion, the high he would experience while committing murder. He informed a news reporter that despite being in prison he would have no trouble killing someone, even in incarceration. Which was precisely what he did. Another prisoner, a drug-addict and petty criminal was placed in a double cell with McGray.

Jeremy Phillips, like all the other inmates at Mountain Institution, where McGray had been transferred from the maximum security Kent Institution, knew of the formidable reputation of the killer. They feared him, and they ensured they kept out of his way. Jeremy Phillips, who was forced to share a cell with McGray couldn't very well keep out of his way.

The two men loathed one another; but it was only Phillips who felt fear. He pleaded with prison authorities to move him elsewhere. McGray insisted that he needed his own cell, that he wasn't comfortable sharing a cell with anyone. With his callously brutal reputation and the palpable fear of Jeremy Phillips, it would seem sensible enough that the two be separated.

The prison fraternity knew of Jeremy Phillips' well-entrenched fears, and they knew too that McGray was capable of murdering Phillips. He did just that, strangling him to death, and confessed to the murder without any compunction. An RCMP investigation took six months to come to the conclusion that a murder had taken place, despite the evidence.

The situation is a dreadful blot on the reputation of Correctional Service Canada, the Government of Canada, and the prison authorities at Kent Institution and Mountain Institution next door to it.