Who killed Soleiman Faqiri?
Julian Roy, counsel for the coroner’s inquest into Faqiri’s death, knows the answer: “We killed Soleiman Faqiri,” offered Roy in his closing remarks. “As a society, we have known for decades that we have been housing people in acute mental health crises in our prisons.”
We have also known that prison makes such crises worse. And sometimes, as in Faqiri’s case, much worse.
After spending 11 days in an acute psychiatric crisis in Lindsay’s Central East Correctional Centre in December 2016, Faqiri was shackled, twice pepper sprayed, placed in a “spit” hood and left in restraints on a cell floor. Minutes later, he was dead.
Last week, the inquest jury deemed Faqiri’s death a homicide. It also issued 57 recommendations, the very first of which advises the province to issue a statement “recognizing that correctional facilities are not an appropriate environment for persons in custody experiencing significant mental health issues.”
For Faqiri's family, it's been a long road to get answers and justice. "There is no longer any doubt left that my brother was killed by correctional officers at the Central East Correctional Centre,” Yusuf Faqiri told the Star.
Indeed, the egregious mistreatment of Faqiri began long before correctional officers left him to die in a cell. Days before his death, the jail’s senior health care official learned that he had been “rolling in his own feces for four days,” but didn’t think she had the authority to send him to hospital because, in her estimation, he wasn’t in physical danger.
The official was wrong on both counts: Aside from being utterly oblivious to the fact that being covered in feces presents a physical danger, she had the power to send him to hospital even if it didn't. That she didn't know these things reveals that jails are no place for people in acute mental health crises.
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More than that, it reveals that health care, whether mental or physical, was sorely lacking in the Central East Correctional Centre. And that’s not an isolated problem: While inmates in Ontario prisons suffer from high rates of both physical and mental illnesses, numerous studies have demonstrated that they receive care inferior to that offered in the community.
Aside from violating prisoners’ moral right to health care, the lack of adequate care harms the community, since most inmates will one day be released. Inmates with infectious diseases risk spreading their illnesses to others, and conditions left un- or undertreated place a substantial burden on the community health care system.
For these reasons, the principle of “equivalence” maintains that prisons ought to offer health care equal to that available in the community. The principle is now enshrined in many international documents, including the United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules for the treatment of prisoners.
In an effort to achieve equivalence, several international and domestic jurisdictions, including British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia, have transferred responsibility for health care from the prison system to their ministries of health.
According to the John Howard Society, this has “improved the health and well-being of the correctional population, reduced health care costs and reduced the rates of recidivism.” It could also ensure that those in crisis are treated in hospital rather than prison, and it promises to improve the continuity of health care when inmates are returned to the community.
Evidently aware of this evidence, the jury recommended that the province establish a new agency within the Ministry of Health “to directly deliver and oversee health care services in correctional facilities.”
As for oversight of the prisons themselves, the jury recommended the creation of an Independent Provincial Correctional Inspectorate.
Similar to the federal Correctional Investigator, which has been operating for the past 50 years, the inspectorate would have the authority to investigate individual and systemic complaints and to initiate its own investigations. This could help to usher in significant reforms in the treatment of prisoners, much as it has in the federal system.
Although the province has not yet responded to the jury’s recommendations, it’s imperative that it accept them in full. Because we know who killed Soleiman Faqiri. And because we now know how to avoid killing anyone else.
