At least 143 prisoners were mistakenly allowed to walk out of Ontario correctional facilities over the last eight years — and the provincial government will not say who these prisoners were, how many of them were dangerous, and whether any of them are still at large.

Sixteen months after the Star filed a freedom of information request for the “incident reports” corrections employees must produce after each mistaken release, 143 censored reports covering the period from January 2003 to March 2009 arrived in July. Because the government has long refused to describe how any mistaken release occurred, the reports provide the most complete explanations ever made public.

There is much, however, that the reports do not reveal. Among the important details removed from them were the names of the mistakenly released prisoners, the names of the institutions they were released from, and significant facts about why the releases happened.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services said the disclosure of prisoners’ names would have violated privacy laws. Other information was not divulged, the ministry said, because some of the 143 prisoners were young offenders.

But asked how many were young offenders, the ministry said, “This information is not readily available.” And asked how many, if any, of the 143 had been in jail on charges of murder, attempted murder, sexual assault, armed robbery, assault with a weapon and other serious offences, the ministry also said this information was not readily available.

It issued the same response when asked how many of the prisoners were at large for more than one month, more than six months, or never rearrested at all.

Eddy Almeida, chair of the corrections section of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, said he does not believe any mistakenly released prisoner has posed a major danger to the public. “Usually, anyone that has been released, they’ve been caught pretty fast,” he said.

Usually, perhaps, but not always. On Jan. 6, 2009, repeat offender Timothy Davidson, then 35, was mistakenly released from the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. He was captured in British Columbia more than six months later.

Davidson was convicted in late 2008 for an attack on a woman he was dating, Heather Dennie. He was released a day before he was to appear in court on charges that he called Dennie from jail and threatened to kill her.

“You have no idea what this feels like, to not even be able to go outside your apartment door without having someone with you,” Dennie, a 48-year-old with leukemia, told the Ottawa Citizen soon after the release. “He could be just around the corner, waiting for me.”

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Mistaken prisoner releases have generated outrage everywhere from Quebec, where there were 34 in 2009, to Britain, where there were about 200 between 2005 and 2009, to the U.S., where at least two people accused of murder were accidentally set free this year.

In Ontario, where almost all mistaken releases are handled quietly by corrections officials and police, the problem has been persistent. While the number of mistaken releases dropped significantly between 2003, when there were 37, and 2005, when there were 14, there were 25 in 2006, 24 in 2008, and 11 in the first three months of 2009.

“One improper release is one too many,” said ministry spokesman Tony Brown. But Brown also said it was important to put the issue “in context.” Given that Ontario’s 31 adult correctional facilities release about 70,000 people per year, he said, “the percentage is infinitesimal.”

Forty-nine of the 143 incident reports sent to the Star were either so thoroughly censored or so brief that they provided no information about why a release occurred. The other reports helped illustrate, to varying extents, what the ministry meant when it said mistaken releases have happened “as a result of human error, technical error or where an inmate manages to assume the identity of another.”

In at least seven cases, five in 2003 alone, a prisoner was mistakenly released instead of another prisoner who legitimately should have been set free. One such misidentification case involved two prisoners with the same last name.

At least five prisoners were released because corrections employees misread documents. At least five other prisoners were released because their weekend sentences were not converted into traditional “straight time” after they received new sentences for additional crimes. Another three were released on bail even though it had been denied, revoked, or not paid.

And in at least 15 cases, employees were not aware of a remand warrant that would have kept the prisoner in custody. In one of these cases, employees released a prisoner and then found a remand warrant “in the filing basket.”

The ministry said it conducts an investigation into every mistaken release. It also said employees involved in the releases “are held accountable for their actions,” sometimes via disciplinary measures such as suspension. But it would not say how many employees had indeed been disciplined.

Almeida said he was aware of only about six cases in which an employee had received even a letter of censure. Few were disciplined, he said, because systemic problems, rather than individual employees, were usually to blame.

In 2008, 11 Ontario correctional facilities were filled beyond capacity. “Any time you overload a system and overwork it,” Almeida said, “there’s potential for error”; facilities' admissions-and-discharge areas, he said, can at times be “madhouses, like Grand Central Station.”

Mistaken releases sometimes occur because paperwork does not get processed quickly enough, Almeida said. Other times, he said, facilities do not receive information in a timely manner because the various institutions of the justice system use different computer systems.

“Is there human error, at times, that occurs? Sure. But very rarely,” he said. “It’s few and far between where it’s someone in the institution that’s done something wrong.”

The ministry would not say how many releases occurred at each facility. According to a regional breakdown it provided, 46 of 132 releases between 2003 and 2008 occurred in the region that includes the Don Jail, the Toronto West Detention Centre, the Toronto East Detention Centre, and the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton.

A substantial percentage of prisoners at these and other provincial correctional facilities are not dangerous. About 80 per cent, the auditor general reported in 2008, eventually receive detention terms of three months or less; provincial facilities do not house people sentenced to more than two years.

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But more than two-thirds of prisoners in provincial facilities are awaiting trial or sentencing. Some of these prisoners are the murderers and sex offenders who end up, once convicted, in federal penitentiaries, which were not included in the Star's document request.

The ministry said it has taken steps to try to eliminate mistaken releases. In 2004, it created a task force “to develop and implement strategies” to address the problem. In 2005, it established a computer system to ensure employees had 24-hour access to information. Last year, all institutions conducted a review of their procedures to “ensure appropriate measures” existed to prevent mistaken releases. And employees involved in authorizing releases underwent enhanced training.

Almeida said OPSEU has lobbied for a prisoner identification system involving wristbands and computer scanners. He said the reduction of mistaken releases was a union priority.

“Listen,” he said, “you can get someone that was incarcerated for driving under the influence. If you release that person and they go out and harm a member of the public, well, guess what? The onus is on the ministry now to explain how someone who hadn’t fully completed their incarceration got released and killed somebody.”

Daniel Dale can be reached at ddale@thestar.ca or 416-945-8768.

Mistaken releases outside Ontario

BALTIMORE, 2010: A man serving a life sentence for shooting his ex-girlfriend and her two daughters was released after he posed as his cellmate. He was recaptured the next day. Eight employees were disciplined; one was fired.

QUEBEC, 2010: Radio-Canada reported that 34 prisoners were mistakenly released in 2009 and 24 in 2008. Public security minister Jacques Dupuis said he was feeling “a bit ashamed.”

PENNSYLVANIA, 2010: Alleged murderer Taaqi Brown was released when a clerk prepared discharge documents for him instead of his brother Taariq. Taaqi turned himself in 12 hours later. A prison official said clerks have “high-pressure, high-stress” jobs.

NASHVILLE, 2010: An alleged murderer was free for 11 days before authorities realized he had been mistakenly released due to a “clerical error.” He was rearrested more than a month later.

SASKATCHEWAN, 2009: A man freed after staff misread a report became the 11th prisoner mistakenly released in the province since mid-2006. In 2008, the deputy corrections minister was suspended over concerns about how long it took to notify senior officials of a release in Regina.

BRITAIN, 2009: An accused murderer was accidentally released from a jail in Essex. The man later turned himself in; nobody was disciplined. More than 190 mistaken releases occurred in Britain between 2005 and 2009.

SACRAMENTO, 2008: Sara Jane Olson, a Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist in the 1970s, was released a year before she should have been because of a sentence calculation error. Olson was rearrested five days later. The actions of five employees were investigated.

NEW ORLEANS, 2006: A car thief was released months into a nine-year sentence because of a paperwork mix-up. He was rearrested only after he killed a woman in 2007.

BAGHDAD, 2003: The U.S. military mistakenly released a Saddam Hussein loyalist “suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shias” from a military detention facility.

AUSTRALIA, 2002: A man convicted of robbery in New South Wales was mistakenly released because a jail did not know an appeals court had extended his sentence. “Sometimes there is a communications problem between the courts, the police and the jails,” the corrections minister said.