Jordan7hm posted:

Hello all. I mentioned the video I was involved in about the Ottawa jail / to some extent the Ontario provincial corrections system. We've finished the last of the editing and it's ready for public consumption. If you're interested, the video itself is about 7 minutes long. It is a student doc, not a professional production, just keep that in mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSyBuSsejNU

There's a ton that we weren't able to include, especially about Julie Bilotta's story, but suffice to say the conditions inside the OCDC are pretty dire. I think it's really hosed up that conditions are seemingly worse in what should be one of the "easiest" jails. For the most part when you're in the OCDC you're either serving a short sentence for minor crimes (including weekend sentences), or you're awaiting trial. That short term nature combined with severe overcrowding and understaffing means those prisoners just don't get the same level of attention as more "serious" prisoners serving sentences for violent crimes. The quote that really stuck with me from one of the former inmates, which we didn't include because it was really outside the scope of this doc, was "you go from the sally ann to the shepards to the mission to the jail and back to the sally ann". It's a real cycle for some people, and a big part of that is because they don't go out and serve serious time they never really get the help they need to rehabilitate.

e: One thing that really bothers me is that the Minister and presumably others within the government know drat well that the system is broken, and they say all the right things, but in terms of action nothing really gets better. A lot of people shift the blame back to Harris but we've been under a Liberal government in Ontario long enough that I think that's a piss excuse. Jason Gilbert's quote at the end is really spot on, and kind of depressing.