A legal-aid group is calling for reforms in the way prisoners are punished for transgressions committed inside B.C. Corrections facilities.

“Prisoners’ rights to procedural fairness are routinely violated, due in large part to the fact that the adjudicators are institutional staff who lack independence,” said Jennifer Metcalfe, executive director at West Coast Prison Justice Society (WCPJS). “B.C. should implement independent adjudication of prison disciplinary hearings to improve the procedural-fairness rights of prisoners in B.C.”

Metcalfe added that those concerns were conveyed to the province in a January meeting. The Ministry of Justice and Corrections B.C. did not make representatives available for interviews.

According to B.C. Corrections statistics supplied to WCPJS and reviewed by the Straight, there were 19,055 disciplinary hearings held in provincial facilities from the fiscal year 2009/10 to the third-quarter of 2013/14.

The most common violations of the Correction Act Regulation (CAR) were attempting to obtain or possess contraband, assaulting or threatening another person, and physically fighting with another person.

The penalties most-frequently imposed were administrative segregation (also known as solitary confinement), confinement in a cell, and loss of earned remission (time for good behavior).

Prisoners can appeal punishment decisions; this sends them to the B.C. Ministry of Justice’s Investigation and Standards Office (ISO) for review.

For this five-year period, the documents show that about 90 percent of inmates accused of CAR violations were found guilty, and only three percent of decisions were appealed. However, Metcalfe noted that about 50 percent of those prisoners’ appeals that went to the ISO were upheld.

A different package of documents released in response to a freedom-of-information request shows that for 2013, a majority of successful appeals were the result of an ISO inspector finding that a disciplinary hearing was “procedurally unfair” or “substantially flawed”.

Metcalfe said this suggests that a significant number of punishment decisions would be overturned or amended if more prisoners filed appeals. But, she explained, it’s her experience that prisoners have lost faith in the process.

“They might be fed up with the system because they haven’t experienced fairness through it,” she said.

Metcalfe also noted it’s common for an inmate to serve an alleged CAR violation sentence before an opportunity is given to challenge a decision, which can remove an inmate’s incentive to mount an appeal.

Grace Pastine is a lawyer with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association who worked on a landmark case concerning prisoners’ rights brought by a First Nations woman named BobbyLee Worm. She called attention to B.C. Corrections’ practice of using solitary confinement as a preferred means of punishment.

“International human-rights bodies have found it to constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” she said by telephone. “It has a devastating impact on prisoners and leaves them more damaged and less capable of living a law-abiding life when they leave prison.”

Pastine noted that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has called for a ban on solitary confinement longer than 15 days, and an outright prohibition of solitary against juveniles and individuals affected by a mental illness.

According to a Ministry of Justice spokesperson, Laurie Throness, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General, is working on a report about safety in B.C. Corrections facilities, which is expected to be completed by the end of June. An emailed statement attributed to spokesperson Cindy Rose describes administrative segregation as "standard practice", typically used against an inmate when a CAR offence involves violence.

Metcalfe said that a possible solution is for B.C. Corrections to adopt disciplinary procedures like those in the federal system or in Alberta, where punishment adjudication is handled by officers independent of correctional institutions.

“I think that there’s a systemic issue with fairness in the hearings,” she said. “If we do not treat prisoners fairly during their incarceration, how can we expect them to have a respect for the rule of law once released back to the community?”