Mamakwa inquest produces 22 recommendations for prison system
Warning: This story makes references to suicide.
The verdict is out on the inquest into the death of Kevin Mamakwa, a member of the Kingfisher Lake First nation who died at 27-years-old while in the custody of the century-old Thunder Bay District Jail in 2020.
The inquest, run by the provincial Office of the Chief Coroner, assembled a five-person jury to come to a determination about Mamakwa’s cause of death and make recommendations to the Ministry of the Solicitor General, which runs Ontario’s prisons.
The jury officially deemed Mamakwa’s death a suicide, and offered 22 recommendations for the ministry, many of which directly concern the old Thunder Bay jail.
Most notably, the jury has recommended that the ministry come up with a plan for shutting down the Thunder Bay District Jail within five years of the opening of the under-construction Thunder Bay Correctional Complex, which is set to open in 2027.
The new correctional complex was initially envisioned as a way to replace the aging Thunder Bay District Jail and Thunder Bay Correctional Centre, but earlier this year the province determined that Thunder Bay’s old jails would continue operating alongside the new facility due to high demand for jail space.
Other jury recommendations for the ministry include consultation with Indigenous communities, formerly incarcerated individuals and a bevy of experts in making the old District Jail more liveable, mandatory Indigenous cultural training for prison staff, 24/7 availability of nursing care, and the assurance that every incarcerated individual spend five hours per day at minimum outside of their cells.
Meaghan Daniel, the lawyer for Kevin’s parents Jonathan and Judy Mamakwa, says the inquest revealed just how inadequate the old District Jail is for housing the region’s prison population.
She says witnesses in the inquest described the building as “fairly nightmarish.”
But beyond being an old building, Daniel says the old jail just wasn’t built for the needs of a 21st-century prison population: “it simply didn’t have the space available to deliver the kinds of programming and supports that we now know we need. When the people that we’re housing have mental health issues, addiction issues, health issues generally, we need a place if we’re going to incarcerate this population rather than treat them that has those kinds of supports available.”
The Thunder Bay District Jail has a single multi-purpose room that is meant to handle everything from visitors to programming to serving as the prison’s virtual courtroom for prisoners connecting via zoom.
“They were having sometimes 200 inmates there with a multi-purpose room that fits somewhere between 6 and 12 people… It was ludicrous to think that amount of poorly-designed space was going to do the job that our prisons are supposed to do — rehabilitation,” Daniel explains.
At the inquest, prison staff testified that the District Jail was in need of an overhaul.
“They said things like, ‘you would have to gut it. We would need to blow a hole in the wall,'” says Daniel. “It was so far from being adequate that it felt really upsetting to have that conversation.”
One of the takeaways from the inquest was the need for a distinction between the physical space available in a jail, and a jail’s true capacity.
Among the jury’s recommendations is a call for the ministry to determine a “functional capacity” for prisons, which extends beyond how many individuals can physically be crammed into a space, and instead looks at the prison’s ability to provide supervision, mental and physical healthcare, cultural programming, exercise, and other services for its inmates.
To close or not to close?
The question of whether or not to close the Thunder Bay District Jail has become the centrepiece of the discussion around the inquest.
Though the new Thunder Bay Correctional Complex was intended to replace the District Jail and the Correctional Centre, the new jail is not offering many more spaces than the old ones did, which is why the Ontario government decided in January to keep the old facilities running.
But Daniel finds the government’s argument unconvincing.
“I have little sympathy for the fact that they built the institution too small to do the job they were supposed to do in replacing the outdated facility that had been condemned for 10 years prior… At the end of the day they bear the responsibility for predicting what the prison population is going to be, and doing whatever they can.”
Among the recommendations of the inquest is a suggestion that the ministry publish a report every five years focused on efforts to reduce the prison population by bringing down recidivism rates (the rate at which released prisoners end up back in the carceral system), and the effectiveness of those efforts.
Daniel believes the public should be paying attention to the discussion around recidivism rates.
“I would really encourage people to look strongly at why we have this exploding prison population,” she says, pointing out that the population of sentenced prisoners is decreasing, while the population of remanded prisoners is increasing.
“Our prisons are populated with people who are simply awaiting trial, and that was Kevin too. We don’t need to be housing people awaiting trial in dangerous facilities,” she adds.
Daniel says Mamakwa’s parents are “depleted and exhausted,” with the six-year process they’ve been through since their child’s death, but are also relieved at the results of the inquest, “because to make meaning from this loss, they have to make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody else.”
She hopes that the public’s takeaways from the inquest focus on the right questions: “We’re just trying to house people, and we’re not asking, ‘are we housing them safely? And are we housing them in buildings that do what they’re supposed to do, rehabilitate? Are we making society any safer?'”
The results of the inquest will soon be publicly available on the website of the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario.
