At the end of the tracking meeting, the warden announced that, in order to implement the strategy, he would be meeting further with the unit managers. At 3:30 p.m., that meeting was convened in the warden's office. Unit Manager Irv Hammond observed that the final list of eleven men had emerged very late in the meeting and did not bear much relationship to the original list of ten prisoners selected by the IPSOs. The final list included two prisoners from the francophone group, two from the Lifers, two from the white supremacists, and two from the Native Brotherhood, and he said "off the top" that there were at least three men on the list for whom the institution had no file material to justify either segregation or transfer. Mr. Csoka did not see this as a problem, since the point of the exercise was to identify who was causing problems. From his perspective, the list had correctly identified the most influential individuals in the main groups. He strongly disagreed that the list should be changed in any way, because the staff who had participated in the tracking meeting expected that those prisoners would be taken out of the population. The warden replied that he was not concerned about changing the final composition of the list and believed the staff would understand if it was explained to them that, after further consideration, some prisoners were not included. The meeting concluded with a discussion on the timing of the removal of the men from the population. A consensus emerged among the unit managers that the best time to do the removal would be at lunch the next day, when the prisoners were back in their cells.

I found the afternoon's events remarkable; had I not been there and seen how the decision to segregate the eleven prisoners was made, I would not have believed it. The process was as far removed from principled decision-making as one could conceive. What I saw that afternoon were collective and generalized gut reactions forming the basis for making major decisions affecting prisoners' lives. Yet this strategy was designed and approved by a progressive and thoughtful warden who clearly accepted the duty to act fairly as a general principle and sought to encourage his staff to act in accordance with it. Based on my conversations with him, I knew the warden saw the afternoon's decisions as consistent with that principle, because prisoners would be told the basis upon which they had been segregated or were being recommended for transfer. The bottom line, however, was that the decision to segregate was not based on a careful assessment of the evidence available, not properly corroborated from reliable sources, and not evaluated against the criteria of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. The segregation decision was the product of a group consciousness, the "volt-geist" of the particular group of staff assembled in the Officers' Trailer. As the tracking meeting progressed, I had had the uneasy feeling I was witnessing a military operation that violated almost every principle of fundamental fairness. Once these eleven men were segregated, the duty to act fairly would be deployed to sanitize decisions based upon the afternoon's exchange of information; further documentation and file information, far from being the basis for the decision, would be the ex post facto rationalization. In other words, the law and the fundamental principles of fairness, instead of channelling decisions, were to be used as screens to legitimize decisions made upon entirely different grounds and through an entirely different process than that envisaged by the legislation.

The extent of my unease had become manifest when, between the tracking meeting and the meeting in the warden's office, I went back to the case management building to pick up my briefcase. Along the walkway I passed four of the men whose names were among those to be segregated the next day. I knew that they were going to be segregated; I also felt that the process by which the decision had been made was fundamentally flawed. However, my position as researcher and my undertaking that any information I heard in the course of the meeting would not be shared with individual prisoners prevented me from telling them that by this time the next day they would be in the hole. In the notes I dictated later that evening, I observed that even recalling the moment when I passed the four prisoners was painful. Conducting my research and temporarily withdrawing from my normal role as an advocate for prisoners required that I make difficult compromises. I reflected that this particular compromise would ultimately be justified by the publication of what had happened that day, and that such publication might protect other prisoners from the same arbitrary imprisonment.

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