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In December 2016, Soleiman Faqiri, a younger brother of one of the co-authors of this commentary, died after a beating by jail guards at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont. A 2023 coroner’s inquest deemed his death a homicide.
He was sent to the jail after an incident with a neighbour during a mental health crisis associated with his schizoaffective disorder because there were no psychiatric hospital spaces available – a common occurrence with tragic consequences for people living with mental health conditions.
One of many preventable deaths
Soli’s case is one example of the many preventable and tragic deaths in Ontario’s jails. Most of the victims died while legally innocent in pre-trial detention, according to a 2022 expert panel report commissioned by Ontario’s chief coroner. This is indicative of incarceration as a catch-all for unmet needs in the community and for governments that fail to properly fund needed support for the people who need it.
Rather than building sufficient capacity for mental health care and other vital, evidence-based community support, Ontario Premier Doug Ford offers slogans such as “jail, not bail” that rhyme but offer little to suggest his government is guided by, or committed to, legal principles and empirical evidence.
Instead, his government plans to build more jail cells at a time when more than 80 per cent of people imprisoned in Ontario’s jails are legally innocent and awaiting their trials. The majority are accused of non-violent offences and thousands of them will return to the community without ever being convicted of any wrongdoing.
Since 2018, the Ford government has announced plans to (a) construct three new provincial jails, (b) expand six existing ones, (c) reopen and retrofit two centres they previously closed and (d) convert a youth detention centre they plan to close into a jail for women. These projects, if all built, will increase Ontario’s capacity by 1,626 beds at a cost of approximately $2.7 billion for construction and an estimated $211.9 million per year for operating costs.
That’s on top of the more than $1.4 billion that taxpayers spent to run the province’s jail system in 2023-2024 when it cost an average of $357 per day, $10,859 per month or $130,305 per year to imprison just one person.
We can do better than dungeons
Amid crowding and deteriorating conditions in Ontario jails, provincial government officials have even mused about reopening previously shuttered pre-Confederation facilities. We can do better than (re-)opening historical and modern-day dungeons to make us safer.
The Coalition Against Proposed Prisons, of which Justice for Soli is a signatory, is calling on Ford and his government to abandon their expensive and ineffective jail expansion plans. Instead, we want it to invest in supports, such as intensive case management, which provides tailored support services for people with complex needs, as well as connections to other community-based resources.
The cost for this, which has been proven to make communities safer by protecting the most vulnerable people while saving taxpayer dollars, is approximately $25,000 per year for one person.
A young man’s death and the wider systemic problems with jail and bail
The inquest into Soli’s death demonstrated that personnel at the Lindsay jail were untrained and woefully incapable of caring for a man suffering from schizophrenia. Repeated individual and systemic errors in a system that fosters violence led to his death. The coroner’s inquest made 57 recommendations which have been met with silent indifference by the provincial government.
Since Soli’s preventable death, other individuals suffering from mental health conditions in Ontario’s provincial jails have also died, including Ibrahim Ali and Euplio Cusano.
Building more jails to warehouse people isn’t the answer. The best way to prevent harm is through expanded care in the community, delivered by people and organizations with the necessary tools and resources to support people, especially those who are most vulnerable. There are well-established approaches for improving public safety, rather than imprisoning people pushed to the margins.
We can, and must, do better than “jail, not bail.”
