OTTAWA—The Conservative government’s preoccupation with crime and punishment is a recipe for serious violence, injuries and even death at federal prisons soon to be bursting at the seams, Canada’s prison watchdog warned Wednesday.

Sending more Canadians to prison for longer periods may be good politics but it poses a serious threat to inmates and staff already unable to cope with what is expected of them, Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers told a news conference.

“Crowding in general leads to more prison violence. Crowding does not make a safe correctional environment for inmates or staff,” Sapers said.

“What we see is . . . increased incidents of self injury and perhaps death.”

Sapers said the serious gaps in care and monitoring that led to 19-year-old Ashley Smith’s suicide on Oct. 19, 2007 at Grand Valley Institution for Women while seven guards watched will only be exacerbated as more men and women are thrown in prison.

About 130 federal inmates have died from a variety of causes since Smith’s death, Sapers told reporters.

“Where they (prison staff) are already challenged to meet their responsibilities, to meet their mandate of safe and appropriate correction programming, those challenges will only be made worse as prisons become more crowded,” he said.

The federal government has proposed and passed legislation to impose mandatory minimums on a range of crimes, including drug possession, and have stated their intention to make it harder for prisoners to get parole. The Conservatives have refused to put an exact price tag on the law and order measures.

“We could see thousands of new admissions to federal penitentiaries over the next five years and I can tell you right now that the (correctional) service does not have the capacity to deal with that. They don’t have the space, they don’t have the people, they don’t have the programs,” Sapers said.

Sapers on Wednesday delivered his fourth and final assessment on Correctional Service of Canada’s progress in responding to reports and investigations into deaths in federal prisons, including Smith’s.

“Disturbingly, the same governance and accountability structures and gaps in mental health services that failed young Ashley Smith are still largely in place. Security concerns still largely tend to trump clinical interventions,” Sapers said.

Court and prison documents obtained by the Star show how the young woman’s complaints of inhumane treatment were repeatedly ignored and how she wound up a “caged animal,” four years after first entering the correctional system for throwing crab apples at a postal worker.

In federal custody, Smith had been shuttled through 17 institutions across four provinces in the last year of her life alone, and spent most of that time in a segregation cell wearing only a padded gown.

Nine of the subsequent 130 deaths were particularly troubling, Sapers said.

Five were suicides, one from medical complications resulting from chronic self-injury and three were listed as natural causes.

“All of the factors contributing to the nine deaths that we are reporting on in this latest assessment have been identified in previous reports and investigations,” Sapers said.

Sapers said the frustration has been with corrections readily admitting there are problems but then moving with glacial speed to fix them.

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“The men and women we are talking about have been convicted of a crime. They have been sentenced to prison, they haven’t been sentenced to death,” he said.

Said Ivan Zinger, executive director and general counsel for the Correctional Investigators of Canada’s office: “We must make Canadians aware of the fact that today the Correctional Services of Canada is not in any position to deal with an influx of new inmates.”

Zinger said compounding that situation is that up to 30 per cent of the prison population has mental health issues, and would be best served in a psychiatric setting.

Of the nine cases investigated by Sapers, most underscore his insistence that prison staff should be doing a better job.

One 41-year-old inmate, serving a two-year sentence, who hanged himself standing up, wasn’t discovered for more than three hours because the guard doing routine rounds thought he was just standing there in the darkened cell.

In another case, the National Board of Investigation for the CSC concluded that nothing could have been done to prevent a 50-year-old native inmate from hanging himself even though he had a history of suicide and was acting strangely days before he killed himself.

Kim Pate of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, an advocate group for women prisoners, said it is hard to believe prison rates are going up at a time when crime is down in Canada dramatically.

“Based on what we know from our colleagues in other countries we know that we are likely to see more violence within the prisons . . . and more segregation and likely more death in custody,” she said later.

NDP public safety critic MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway) said the Conservative government’s approach to prisons is failing inmates with mental illness, endangering staff while doing nothing to make Canadians safer.

“Mr. Sapers is very clear that our prison system is ill-equipped to handle mental illness. These shortfalls have led to inmate deaths and create difficult and dangerous working conditions for prison staff,” Davies said in a statement.