Ashley Smith’s family demands accountability after damning report

It is hard to imagine prison guards and their supervisors letting Ashley Smith die in front of their eyes. Yet this is what the official report has concluded.

With CP and CBC stories

While no doubt hardened by their jobs, it doesn’t take much human compassion to get psychiatric assistance for someone who is suicidal.

I don’t know many people who can watch a dog or cat die let alone another person. Perhaps Corrections Canada should profile its employees and weed out any psychopaths who are guarding prisoners or those in management with the same profile.

Prisoners are humans and have rights under the Charter and should not expect this kind of abuse. According to the Globe and Mail, her crimes amounted to nothing, almost the quintessential “stealing a loaf of bread”.

Ms. Smith was a Moncton teen convicted of minor crimes – public disturbance, throwing apples at a postal worker, stealing a CD – who spent most of her last four years in maximum security segregation because of her unruly jailhouse behaviour. Globe and Mail

From CBC
The 2007 death of a troubled 19-year-old Moncton, N.B. woman in an Ontario prison was the “entirely preventable” result of a series of systemic failures, says a report released Tuesday by Canada’s correctional investigator.

Authored by Howard Sapers, the report says Ashley Smith’s death followed “the inability of federal and provincial health-care and correctional systems to provide her with the care, treatment and support she desperately needed.”

“None of the systems, programs and professionals that Canadians would reasonably expect to have been made available to help this young woman were there to adequately respond,” says the report, which was released during a news conference in Ottawa.

“Her death, we believe, if not for a series of significant failures, was entirely preventable.” Smith died on Oct. 19, 2007, after being found unconscious in her segregation cell at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener. She was taken to hospital, where she died of what police have described as “self-initiated asphyxiation.” Despite spending years in the youth correctional system and having an established history of violence and self-harm, Smith never received a comprehensive psychological assessment while in federal custody, said the report.

She had been serving a six-year, one-month sentence for offences committed as a young offender, including assault with a weapon and assaulting a peace officer, and would have been eligible for release in November 2007.

March 4, 2009 – 11:24 am THE CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA – The mother of a young woman who committed suicide while her prison guards refused to intervene is demanding the officers who watched her die – and the “faceless bureaucrats” whose orders they followed – be held accountable for her death.

A tearful Coralee Smith held a news conference today to demand the federal government allow the correctional investigator to finish what he started and name those responsible for her daughter Ashley’s death. Criminal charges against four correctional officers were withdrawn in December.

Now Smith’s mother and her lawyer have written Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan telling him there is no longer any excuse to withhold blame in the case.

The 19-year-old Moncton, N.B., native strangled herself at Grand Valley Institution for Women in October 2007 while seven guards stood back because they had been instructed not to intervene if she was still breathing. Correctional investigator Howard Sapers reported Tuesday that Smith did not receive the care, treatment and protection she required. Sapers said the incident continued a “disturbing and well-documented pattern of deaths in custody.” A “heartbroken” Coralee Smith says she feels her daughter died because “no one in Canada really cared.”