Burnaby, BC—Christopher
Roy hanged himself with a strip of bedsheet in a room measuring seven feet by 10 feet
in a prison in Abbotsford, B.C.
He’d just spent 60 days alone, in what we in Canada call “administrative
segregation” because we live in a liberal society and we don’t like the word “solitary.”
Chris’s father has another term for it. Slow death. Other people call it
torture.
We kill people like Chris Roy slowly. And call it suicide.
And then we hold inquests and ask ourselves how it happens.
Why do we keep a 37-year-old man in total isolation,
hermetically sealed, for two months—a father of two teen-aged girls who was
addicted to heroin and Sudoku, who never committed a violent crime in his life,
and who even turned himself in to police when he broke parole?
After weeks in solitary, Chris wrote that he’d “like
to get my mental health issues under control.” He asked to speak to a
psychologist, concerned about what he called the “stigma” of mental illness.
Eighteen days before his suicide, he stopped his almost
daily phone calls to family and friends. He went silent, often a sign of
depression.
Three days before his suicide, he barricaded himself inside
his cell, broke a broom handle, and threatened prison staff with it, through
the food slot on his cell door.
The actions of a disturbed man? One prison staffer who talked
to him described Chris as “wide-eyed,” “very distracted,” and “all over the
place.” He displayed the classic symptoms of paranoia—worried that fellow
inmates could get into his high-security cell and kill him.
But he never saw a psychologist. Or a psychiatrist. Matsqui
Institution, with a prison population of nearly 300, has a psychiatrist come in
for one afternoon a month.
I just spent three days in a coroner’s inquest in Burnaby, listening
to the story of Chris Roy’s life and death in June, 2015. Sitting there, I vividly
recalled the horrifying story of Ashley Smith, the woman who died of self-inflicted choking in solitary
in 2007 while prison guards watched.
Her death produced more than a hundred recommendations for
humanizing Canada’s prison system. Among them was a call for end to indefinite solitary--a prisoner never knowing when the isolation will end. Most of the jurors' recommendations have not been acted on.
The coroner’s jury in the Chris Roy suicide had just 25
recommendations but, because they have no force in law, they will also likely
go unheeded.
A coroner’s jury, unlike a courtroom jury, is not allowed to
assess blame. Jurors can’t point fingers, or hold anybody to account. There’s
no righteous outrage. No lawyer’s histrionics. Proceedings are very civil and
dignified.
But the Chris Roy story warrants some outrage.
A CCTV video of events in the segregation range on June 1,
2015—the day Chris hanged himself—contains some graphic irony. At the moment
that he slipped the makeshift noose around his neck, the hallway in the range is
quiet, virtually deserted. By contrast, in the minutes after his body is taken
down, the range is a scene of frenetic activity—nearly 20 guards, paramedics
and other prison staff focused on herculean efforts to revive him.
At the point of death, Chris was the center of attention. No
efforts were spared to restore a pulse. By contrast, in life, penned up in 70
sterile square feet, he was largely forgotten—with only his tangled thoughts to
keep him company.
In the last days of
his life, he was despondent, lonely and afraid. He was worried about a drug
deal inside prison that had gone bad. He was afraid that other inmates could
get into his cell and hurt him. From his cell, he’d heard somebody in the yard
yell: “We know where you are.” They
called him a “rat.” Worst of all, word was getting around that he was a sexual
offender—it was only a rumor, but it was the kind of thing that could get you
shanked in a prison culture that has its own hierarchy of “right” and “wrong”
offenses
To make things worse, a prison staffer-- I'll call her S.C.----had just delivered some bad news: Chris was being re-classified as “maximum
security” and would soon be transferred to Kent Institution, a maximum security
facility that holds a higher number of violent inmates
It was S.C.'s job
to tell him about the changes in his status.
So at 4:25pm on the afternoon of June 1, 2015, she passed him some
paperwork to this effect through the food slot of his cell in the segregation
range. In a CCTV prison video, we see S.C. opening the slot and passing Roy
the papers. Then we see his hands emerge as he signs the documents.
Later, Chris’s father Rob would call this transaction “the
triple knockout blow.”
It was Chris’s last communication with the outside world.
Weeks earlier, when he was first put into solitary, he’d spoken to his mother
Brenda on the phone, and he’d assured her, pointedly, that she shouldn’t worry,
“I would never kill myself, I just want to finish my time and get into a drug
program.”
But now, something snapped.
Later, under questioning, S.C. was asked if she had a
discussion with Chris about the implications of the transfer to Kent, how it
might affect him psychologically. “He
didn’t request (a discussion),” she said. “If he had refused to sign I would
have taken this to mean that he was unhappy.”
In fact, what we know now is that, talking to Chris though a
food slot measuring 17 inches by 6 inches, it was not possible for the parole
officer to assess just how truly unhappy he really was.
Chris was one of the 28 inmates in S.C.'s caseload. Normally, she sees her cases once a week, but she had just come back from leave so she wasn’t up to speed on his file.
“You didn’t have an opportunity to review the file?” she was asked.
“I don’t recall,” she said.
S.C. was then asked if, when an inmate is told he was
being transferred to a prison like Kent, “can this have a significant impact?”
She answered: “It could.”
It could. And it did.
Sometime in the next hour, Chris gave up on life.
First he covered the small plexiglass window of his cell
with a paper towel so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Then he tore a strip off a
bedsheet. Looking up at the ceiling of his cell, he found a convenient suspension
point that would support his weight: the metal casing around an overhead heat
detector.
Standing on a chair or his bed, he rolled the bedsheet strip
into a ligature, tied it around his neck, affixed it to the suspension point,
and jumped--cutting off the oxygen to his brain.
At 5:32pm, a corrections officer, J.G., came down
the range in the company of a male nurse doing his regular rounds with a cart
of pills. J.G. noticed that the window of cell #24, Chris Roy’s cell, was
covered by paper. “Mr. Roy,” she said, “Are you there? Health care is here if
you need anything.”
No response.
As precious seconds passed, she rushed back to the
“bubble”—a security post at the end of the segregation range—and requested that
a guard there try to raise Chris on an intercom system that connects with every
cell.
Again was no response, so J.G.called for guards to come and
open the food slot to cell #24. Holding a transparent plastic shield over the
food slot, a guard opened it and looked inside. (The shield is used in case an
inmate tries to spray the guards with urine or feces.)
“Mr Roy appeared to be standing at the door,” J.G. said. “All
we could see was his arms and torso . . . Soon we could see that he was
hanging.”
Finally, the cell door was opened and a guard cut Chris’
body free. He flopped to the floor, his fall partly cushioned by plastic
garbage bags full of clothes on the floor of the cell.
A guard started chest compressions, and J.G. made the call
that would bring paramedics to the scene. When the medics arrived, it took 15
minutes before they could get a pulse, and once they did, Chris was rushed to
Abbotsford Hospital.
He remained on life support for two days. A pair of armed
prison guards were on duty at his hospital door. At one point, Chris’s father asked the
attending doctor if there was any hope. Rob Roy remembers how the doctor framed his
prognosis: “The chances of Chris walking out of here,” he said, “are the same
as you winning the Power Ball (lottery) twice.”
There would be no medical miracle. Chris was pronounced dead
at 6:49pm on Wednesday, June 3, 2015. He was 37 years ago.
***************************************************************
At the inquest into Christopher Roy’s death,
an assistant warden of Matsqui Institution put it this way: “The response (to
the suicide) took too long and we have to get better at it.”
As an employee of Corrections Service of Canada, what he couldn’t say was what was on the minds of Roy’s parents attending the inquest, and on the minds of the five jurors: Why was this recovering heroin addict in a solitary cell in the first place? Why, given what we know about the psychological effects of solitary confinement, was he in there for 60 consecutive days? And why, after all that time, did nobody twig to the fact that he was suicidal?
Chris Roy was a non-violent criminal with a serious drug
habit—a one-time roughneck in Alberta’s oil patch who became a hardened addict
in his late 20s. It was an addiction that ruined his marriage, and alienated
him from his two daughters. “He would just do a disappearing act,” his father
Rob told me. “To his credit, he made sure his daughters never saw him when he
was high.”
When his money ran out, Chris began breaking into private
homes and stealing to raise money for his next fix. But he wasn’t very good at
B & E. In his last offense, he put his fist through a window, cut himself
and the blood allowed police to track him through his DNA.
He was sentenced to two years plus a day—a federal rap—from
which he got an early release. But he breached his parole and then, at his
mother’s urging, he gave himself up to police. That’s how Chris found himself
in Matsqui. For reasons that are not clear, he was placed in a solitary cell. To
await a transfer to another institution that never came.
In a sense, he fell between the cracks of the system.
Chris called his mother, and told him to send him as many
Sudoku puzzles as she could “so I can keep my sanity.”
He was joking. But as the days dragged into weeks, that
sanity would be pushed to the breaking point.
Ed McIsaac, a former member of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, a prisoner’s ombudsman group, was asked by the coroner if he had any views on the maximum amount of time any prisoner should be in solitary.
Ed McIsaac, a former member of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, a prisoner’s ombudsman group, was asked by the coroner if he had any views on the maximum amount of time any prisoner should be in solitary.
He answered: “Five days.”
But in fact, Chris Roy's sentence was life.
But in fact, Chris Roy's sentence was life.
About 70,000 people walk through the city centre of Leipzig on Oct. 9, 1989, during one of the so-called Monday demonstrations against the East German Communist regime. Former CBC correspondent Claude Adams and his cameraman, Philippe Billard, clandestinely filmed one such protest about a week before the Berlin Wall fell. They transported the footage back to the West by burying it amid video of Adams's son's birthday party. (Reuters)