O C T O B E R 2 0 1 9 WILL YOU ACCEPT THE CHARGES? The Case for the Government of Ontario to Move Away from the Prohibitive, Predatory, and Outdated Telephone System in its Provincial Jails CPEP and Towards Accessible, Free Calling That Promotes Connections Essential to Community Well-being and Safety P R E P A R E D B Y : Souheil Benslimane Justin Piché Sarah Speight Lydia Dobson Aaron Doyle LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Acknowledgement of Traditional Territory The land upon which we conduct our advocacy work is traditional unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Territory. In acknowledging this, we are obligated to document and problematize how Canadian carceral institutions shape and are shaped by colonial policies and practices that must be challenged if we are to address pressing legacies, and the continued existence, of colonialism on Algonquin Territory and elsewhere on Turtle Island, including the mass incarceration of Indigenous, Black, racialized, poor, homeless and other marginalized people C P E P 2 0 1 9 F S O T E L B N L I S T O F A C R O N Y M S A T 1 E V O I C E S F R O M T H E I N S I D E 2 T A B O U T T H E J A I L H O T L I N E 3 N I N T R O D U C T I O N 4 O O T M S : P R E D A T O R Y P R A C T I C E S , 5 C O U N T E R P R O D U C T I V E R E S U L T S C O T M S I S T H E P R O B L E M : 9 N O T T H E S O L U T I O N T H E S O L U T I O N : C O S T - F R E E 19 T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S E R V I C E S F O R I N C A R C E R A T E D P E O P L E 20 C O N C L U S I O N 21 R E F E R E N C E S 24 A P P E N D I C E S C P E P 2 0 1 9 LIST OF ACRONYMS CPEP –Criminalization and Punishment Education Project JAIL – Jail Accountability & Information Line MCSCS – Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services MSG – Ministry of the Solicitor General OCDC – Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre OTMS – Offender Telephone Management System C P E P 2 0 1 9 P A G E 0 1 VOICES FROM THE INSIDE You are the first person I’ve spoken to on the phone in the last 2 years other than my lawyer. Can you ask my mom to set up a Bell phone? Her budget is tight until the end of the month, but tell her that I will pay for it. I have a hard time in this jail. I’ve put in five request forms asking for a phone call, but no one is giving me one. I’m trying to arrange for bail. I could’ve been out a month and a half ago if I was able to make bail arrangements with my surety. I have kids to take care of. The JAIL hotline is a lifesaver. We need free direct phone calls. Contacting people is a right. Without you guys giving me the number to Recovery Ottawa, I wouldn’t have known who to call. I’d like to apply for treatment over the phone. They won’t let me. The lawyer isn’t picking up my calls. I don’t know what to do anymore. Hello, I feel rejected by your firm right now…No one at your firm is taking my calls. The interns told me that no one is supposed to be taking my calls. I want to know if I should be talking to another lawyer. I need to call my doctor and pharmacist to prepare for my release by making arrangements for my medication. It helps me stay away from using drugs. I’m going to get cut loose from jail and I’m not going to have a prescription for my medication and methadone. I tried to do it through the jail, but it takes so much time. They’re horrible at providing phone services. C P E P 2 0 1 9 P A G E 0 2 ABOUT THE JAIL HOTLINE In its 2019 budget, the Government of Ontario committed to new jail infrastructure that expands its future capacity to cage people [1], including many who will be pushed further to the margins in the years ahead by cuts to essential services that actually contribute to community well-being and safety [2]. Especially in times when state repression deepens, it is in the public interest to demand transparency and accountability for the exclusionary laws, policies, and practices that are enacted to limit the damage they cause. The Jail Accountability & Information Line (JAIL) is a hotline operated by community volunteers working in solidarity with people who are incarcerated at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (OCDC) and their loved ones. The JAIL hotline has two purposes: 1) Accountability (holding the provincial government, Ministry of the Solicitor General [MSG], as well as OCDC management and staff, accountable for the treatment of incarcerated individuals through tracking and resolving human rights violations within the jail); and 2) Information (providing information to people who are incarcerated at OCDC about their rights and community resources available to them upon re-entry into the community). The JAIL hotline was founded by the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP) in response to long- standing issues regarding the use and conditions of confinement at OCDC. A provincial jail located in a suburb of Ottawa, OCDC has an official capacity of 585 beds, including about 60 beds for incarcerated women in a separate unit. Roughly two-thirds of those incarcerated at OCDC on any given day are not there to serve sentences, but are awaiting their day in court [3]. The JAIL hotline launched on 10 December 2018 and has taken calls on weekdays from 1:00pm to 4:00pm since that time. These hours of operation were chosen with the input of people who have experienced incarceration at OCDC. Currently, we have one phone line – 613-567-JAIL (5245) – that is staffed by up to three volunteers at a time. During its first ten months, the hotline received 2,677 calls. P A G E 0 3 C P E P 2 0 1 9 INTRODUCTION Communication with the outside world is crucial for incarcerated persons to maintain contact with their families and loved ones [4], coordinate and arrange re-entry plans [5], and access important services in the community such as legal counsel, healthcare, mental health support, and the like [6]. At the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (OCDC) and other Ontario provincial sites of human caging, the only ways for prisoners to communicate with the outside world is through written correspondence, personal visits behind a glass wall, and through collect calls, paid for by the person on the receiving end. The Ministry of the Solicitor General (MSG) recognizes “that communication between [prisoners] and members of the community is important for rehabilitation and successful reintegration into society” and that “the telephone is the primary method by which [prisoners] maintain contact with others”[7]. In order to abide by their policy, the MSG established the Offender Telephone Management System (OTMS) to provide prisoners with telephone communications. In 2013, the service was contracted-out to Bell Canada who took over managing the OTMS from TELUS, the previous jail telephone provider [8]. The OTMS only allows outgoing collect calls and direct calls to MSG pre- approved numbers, and caps the calls at 20 minutes [9]. At a time when the cost of a landline phone call is nearing zero, Ontario prisoners are forced to pay astronomical rates to call their loved ones and lawyers. Call recipients must have a landline or a cellphone number set up through a private company that accepts collect calls, and they must accept the fees for each collect phone call. Through the Jail Accountability & Information Line (JAIL) we have observed that the OTMS harms people despite the MSG’s policies. It exposes them to injustices resulting from a lack of access to necessary communication with vital post-release services and further isolates them by preventing contact with loved ones. In this report, we expose some of the problems associated with the OTMS by (1) discussing the ways the MSG-established OTMS prioritizes profits extracted from the families and loved ones of incarcerated persons, and (2) using information shared by JAIL hotline callers and other sources to analyze the ways in which the predatory, prohibitive and restrictive OTMS harms, limits, and further isolates confined peoples at OCDC. We also (3) demonstrate that the only effective solution to the aforementioned issues is for MSG to provide cost-free telecommunication services for incarcerated persons that allow them to call both landlines and cell phones. C P E P 2 0 1 9 P A G E 0 4 OTMS: PREDATORY PRACTICES, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE RESULTS Prisoners and their loved ones experience incarceration as an adverse and distressing chain of events [10].