Ontario’s sickening mistreatment of Adam Capay

Adam Capay is brought into the Ontario Court of Justice on June 6, 2012. He has been held in solitary since then, and has never had a trial.
(Jeff Labine/tbnewswatch.com)

Globe editorial

   Learn the name of Adam Capay. He is the living symbol of everything that is wrong with Canada’s prisons, its justice system and its treatment of indigenous people.

   Mr. Capay, 23, has been held in solitary confinement in an Ontario provincial prison for four years. He is housed alone in a basement, at the end of a long corridor, in a cell sheathed in plexiglass. The lights are on 24 hours a day.

   Mr. Capay has no idea if it is day or night. When Renu Mandhane, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, visited him this month, she said he appeared to have memory and speech problems brought on by his prison conditions.

   The only thing Ontario prison officials haven’t done to this poor man is shackle him upside down on a dungeon wall. But they may as well have. Mr. Capay is arguably being tortured by the state. The sensory deprivation caused by constant light is an acknowledged torture technique, and the United Nations says that holding a person for more than 15 days in solitary is in itself a form of torture...http://www.theglobeandmail.com//opinion/editorials/ontarios-sickening-mistreatment-of-adam-capay/article32498319/?cmpid=rss1&click=sf_globe