Canada

At 9:33, three paramedics arrive. The cell Mr. Snowshoe has endured for 162 days proves too cramped for the personnel necessary to save his life; they drag him into the hallway. The guards continue their furious pumping of his chest. For all the faults that preceded this desperate moment, there is no questioning the guards’ resolve to save the young inmate that night. But after nearly an hour of life-saving efforts, they must pronounce Edward Christopher Snowshoe dead. He is 24 years old.

His was a death foretold. Over three years in prison, Mr. Snowshoe had morphed from a shy but hale young man into a chronically suicidal inmate suffering from a dangerous brew of mental-health issues. He died – on Aug. 13, 2010 – while locked in a 2.5-by-3.6-metre cell where the Correctional Service of Canada had determined he posed the least amount of harm to himself or others.

But as libraries of stats and scholarly articles can attest, solitary confinement is a counterproductive kind of harm prevention. Humans are social animals. We subsist on stimulus and response. To restrain us alone is to deny stimuli; correspondingly, our response mechanisms break down. In solitary, this can lead to a litany of health problems – including, but not limited to, hallucinations, anxiety, loss of impulse control, severe depression, heart palpitations and reduced brain function. In many cases, the damage is irreversible. It’s no wonder the suicide rate in federal prisons is seven times that in the public at large, with nearly half taking place in segregation.

In Canada, though, the use of solitary continues unabated. Officials have tinkered with solitary policies in the wake of several high-profile suicides, but the number of federal inmates in segregation here creeps ever upward – by more than 6 per cent over the last five years alone. One year ago, a coroner’s inquest into the death of Ashley Smith, the New Brunswick teen who took her life while in Correctional Service custody in 2007, recommended strict limits on solitary confinement: a maximum consecutive stay of 15 days, and a cap of 60 days in solitary for every calendar year. The Correctional Service has yet to respond.