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| Catherine Latimer |
Crimes involving sexual abuse against women or children make those convicted of them vulnerable among other prisoners. Correctional Service Canada (CSC) has a duty to protect the safety of all prisoners, no matter how horrific their crimes may have been. Media reports indicate that Pickton was being housed on a secure range, showing that CSC was aware of his susceptibility to being victimized by other prisoners. No criminal charges have been laid against the prisoner who killed Pickton. Little is known about him, but media reports suggest he has been convicted of threatening offences while in two different federal prisons. It would be good to know why he was placed in proximity to Pickton.
The fatal injury occurred while medicines were being distributed. This is not the first time that prisoners’ exposure to violence during the distribution of medications has been brought to the public’s attention. Sofyan Boalag, who was also convicted of crimes involving sexual abuse against women and children, is suing the federal government for an injury he suffered at Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick in 2023. He was allegedly stabbed in the back multiple times by another prisoner while obtaining his medications. The BOI was not directed to address heightened risks associated with the distribution of medicines.
Further, maximum-security prison guards should be well trained to intervene and stop assaults before a prisoner is fatally injured. The BOI report claims the correctional officers were able to stop the assault on Pickton, but two minutes later, the same perpetrator fatally stabbed him with a broken broomstick. The initial actions by correctional officers were not enough to prevent Pickton’s death. Federal prisoners advise that immediately separating combatants is the protocol. Why the perpetrator continued to have access to his victim after the correctional officers became involved raises serious questions. Again, the BOI does not seem to have delved into this key issue.
The BOI made three recommendations: 1) Develop an action plan to reduce accessibility to items that could be used as weapons (broom handles); 2) Ensure that correctional officers have the tools needed to assess inmates’ progress; and 3) Assess the current notification-of-kin process. These recommendations seem tangential to the more serious issues — adequate protection of vulnerable prisoners, heightened risk to prisoners when accessing medicines, and adequacy of the correctional officers’ intervention to prevent the fatal injury. It would be surprising if the minister of public safety was satisfied that this internal investigation by CSC was an adequate answer to the very real concerns about the death of a prisoner.
Justice Donna Groves’s thorough fatality inquiry report released in January 2025 into the killing of a prisoner by another prisoner at Edmonton Institution provides important insights into the review processes. In that case, she could not find the evidentiary basis for the BOI’s conclusion that releasing rival gang members together was based on a “sound evaluation” and questioned where the BOI acquired the inaccurate information that the victim and the perpetrator had grown up together. In the end, Justice Groves called for a public inquiry to include the Alberta prosecutor’s discretion not to proceed with three charges of murder against correctional officers implicated in the death.
Current oversight into serious issues and abusive practices in federal prisons is not adequate. CSC’s internal investigations are too easily dismissed as a “whitewash,” leaving prisoners vulnerable and undermining core correctional principles and respect for the rule of law. Until there is a public inquiry into federal corrections, there will continue to be concerns about how state wards are being seriously injured or killed in our federal prisons.
Catherine Latimer is the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.
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