Prisoners being held in administrative segregation and prisoners sentenced to punitive segregation are all confined in H unit. There are few significant differences between the two regimes. A prisoner doing punitive time is deprived of his mattress during the day and has no radio, TV, or reading lamp, and has none of the limited canteen and reading privileges extended to prisoners in administrative segregation. However, I have interviewed a number of prisoners who, although in H unit on administrative segregation, were placed in punitive-segregation cells. These men were allowed to keep their mattresses, but had neither radio nor reading lamp and were not permitted canteen privileges or any books that they had in their personal effects for periods of up to one week. The French- Canadian prisoner described earlier, who had taken taped English- language correspondence courses in order to hasten this release from the SHU, was not allowed to have the tapes or the tape-recorder when he was placed in H unit, despite the fact that these had been permitted in the tighter security of the SHU. When the prisoner raised this issue at his review, the security officer in charge of H unit stated that these items were not permitted because H unit was a combination of punitive and administrative segregation, and discriminating between the two was not feasible given the limited staff available. This confusion of administrative and punitive cases was specifically condemned by the Vantour study group. Cases such as this reinforce the conviction of prisoners that not- withstanding the ‘administrative’ rhetoric, the purpose of their confinement under section 2.30(I)(a) is punitive.

The similarity of the solitary confinement regime at Kent to that at the British Columbia Penitentiary is compelling, despite the architectural changes. The twenty-three-hour lock-up, the absence of any programs or work, the skin-frisks, the sense of the separateness of the unit from the rest of the institution (reinforced by the inability of the members of the Inmate Committee to visit) and the extent to which the unit is seen by the custody officers as their preserve were all features of the British Columbia Penitentiary. For a prisoner in H unit who has previously experienced the penthouse, the presence of exactly the same ‘furniture’ reinforces the overwhelming conviction that he has been there before.

The Study Group on Dissociation recommended that the segregation review process be restructured to ensure that the decision to place a prisoner in segregation or continue his confinement there was not made arbitrarily. They proposed the establishment of a segregation review board whose function it would be to review the case of a segregated prisoner within five days of the director’s decision to segregate and at least every two weeks thereafter. The board would also be charged with developing a plan to reintegrate the prisoner into the population as soon as possible, and would monitor that plan during subsequent reviews. The principal shortcomings of these recommendations are the study group’s failure to recommend the adoption of more precise criteria for segregating prisoners, and the fact that the review process they proposed remained an internal administrative matter rather than coming under the jurisdiction of the independent chairperson whom the study group had recommended preside over disciplinary hearings.

Following the study group report, amendments were made to the com- missioner’s directives affecting segregation. These provided that every prisoner placed in segregation was to be notified in writing of the reason before the end of the next working day. However, despite the study group’s recommendation, no change was made to the existing thirty-day review process. 136 Commissioner’s directive 174 set out the function of the review board: ‘The Board shall be responsible for determining if there is just cause for continued segregation, and may recommend that the inmate be returned to association with other inmates, recommend that segregation be continued in the present facility, or refer the case to the Regional Transfer Authority with a written recommendation for transfer to the SHU.’137

Commissioner’s directive 274, which came into effect on 1 December 1980, further provided that the case of each prisoner in administrative segregation for sixty days was to be reviewed by a regional review commit- tee, and, where segregation exceeded ninety days, by a national review committee. Most recently, commissioner’s directive 277, which came into effect on 1 November 1982, has sought to elaborate further the administrative-segregation process ‘in accordance with principles of fair treat- ment.’138 Written reasons for segregation must be given within twenty- four hours, and confirmed by the warden on the working day following segregation; a hearing before a segregation review board (chaired by the assistant warden / socialization, with two other staff members) must take place within three days of a prisoner’s placement in segregation; there must be a weekly review by the board for the first two months of segregation and a monthly review thereafter. In addition, there must be monthly reviews by regional headquarters for prisoners segregated more than sixty days and by national headquarters for prisoners segregated more than ninety days. The prisoner is given the right to be heard by the review board once every month; and after spending thirty days in segregation he is, sub ject to his co-operation, to be given a psychological assessment. 139 Although these new internal rules governing segregation provide a hierarchy of review processes, they leave the segregation decision as unlimited in terms of substantive criteria and devoid of independent scrutiny as it was when described in the McCann case.

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