Lawyers criticize government after 43 contracting COVID in latest outbreak at Edmonton Remand Center

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Dozens of inmates at the Edmonton Detention Center have fallen ill with COVID-19 as Alberta’s health care system struggles under a crushing fourth wave.

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Forty-three inmates at Edmonton’s Northwest Jail are currently sick with COVID, Alberta Health Services spokesperson Kerry Williamson said in an email on Friday. The health authority declared an outbreak at the facility on September 8.

“It’s a combination of community-acquired and facility-acquired cases,” Williamson said Friday morning. “Everyone is experiencing mild symptoms.”

Deborah Hatch, an Edmonton attorney with clients in jail, said the news of the outbreak is concerning to both inmates and the community at large. Since the beginning of the pandemic, inmate advocates have warned that outbreaks at correctional facilities could overwhelm community hospitals, which in Alberta are approaching breaking point.

“There just isn’t room in the system right now for more sick people,” he said.

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In Canada, the provinces are responsible for incarcerating remand prisoners who are denied bail, as well as those serving short sentences.

Alberta’s inmate population fell by 35 percent at the start of the pandemic, amid concerns about potentially disastrous outbreaks in prisons and pretrial detention centers. Alberta fixes were largely unscathed during the first wave. Prisons and jails in the United States, on the other hand, were home to some of the worst outbreaks of the early pandemic.

Alberta’s system made it through September 2020 without an outbreak. By year’s end, a total of 830 inmates and staff had tested positive, with outbreaks in six of Alberta’s eight jails. A correctional officer at Fort Saskatchewan died of the illness.

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As of September 2, 2021, the system had seen 1,372 cases of transmission at the facility (as opposed to community-acquired cases identified during the intake process).

Inmates don’t get new masks: lawyer

Hatch has heard from several inmates at the remand center who say the facility’s rules prevent them from following public health guidelines. He said some have been forced to buy their own soap, “which is shocking, because obviously some can afford and others just can’t.”

“We have clients who have been without soap for a week or more than a week since they were admitted.”

Inmates have also told him that they often have to reuse their disposable masks for up to a week.

“There’s just no way you can justify not giving people soap, not giving them a little disinfectant, and not giving them a new mask every day,” he said.

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Amanda Hart-Dowhun, president of the Alberta Prison Justice Society, has heard the same concerns from her clients. He said it appears that the only solution the government has taken to curb COVID in corrections is to lock inmates in their cells every minute except for a few minutes a day, without any additional enrichment opportunities, such as televisions or access to Internet.

“The government as a whole seems to have no qualms about putting my clients in circumstances that widely regarded as torture, and they’re not doing anything about it, and it’s been a year and a half. “

He acknowledged that the pretrial detention administration and staff have a “difficult balancing act” between keeping people safe from COVID and minimizing the use of de facto solitary confinement.

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“But since a year and a half has passed, I think they have had more than enough time to find other solutions besides locking my clients in their cells, especially when other policies and procedures to prevent the spread of COVID clearly do not exist. t being followed “.

Hatch said the latest outbreak is particularly concerning given the state of Alberta’s hospital system, should COVID patients in the detention center require outside medical care. The Canadian Armed Forces are preparing to deploy medical personnel and air transports to the province, while the Alberta Medical Association’s chief of emergency medicine says parts of Alberta’s triage protocol are already being implemented.

“(The COVID outbreaks in prisons) have implications for society,” he said. “It’s not just that we can lock people up and forget about them.”

Because the population changes frequently, AHS does not track COVID vaccination rates in the corrections system. As of September 2, health personnel in provincial jails had administered 2,441 first doses of the vaccine and 764 follow-up injections.

—With Canadian Press files

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