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This is important: Most of the people at the Innes Road jail haven’t been convicted. They’re awaiting trials. Some are awaiting bail hearings. Others are unable to make bail or so down and out that a judge worries they don’t have enough ties to keep them here if they’re let out. Some are mentally ill.

But well over half of them are not legally guilty of a thing. They’re “on remand” while the courts decide what to do with them.

The segregation units at the jail are used for punishment, but also to protect vulnerable inmates and to confine people with psychiatric problems — illnesses, that is — that make them difficult to manage in the general population. These are the people sleeping on the floors of showers on Naqvi’s watch.

Ontario’s jails shouldn’t be resort hotels but nor can they be dungeons. Civilized people do not keep prisoners this way.

Ontario’s jails shouldn’t be resort hotels but nor can they be dungeons. Civilized people do not keep prisoners this way

Repairing the province’s jails so that people don’t come out of them more dangerous and broken than they were going in has been Naqvi’s explicitly assigned job since June 2014. Yes, it takes time to get the hang of such a complicated problem, but he is not new at this. And still he was ignorant of one of the most appalling practices his jailers have been using, to the point of scorning people who talked about it.

How did the minister find himself denying something that was provably true? His spokesperson Clare Graham was silent on that Saturday morning.

Naqvi’s been making some progress. He and the government averted a strike by corrections officers early this year and they’ve been hiring and training more guards. Now he says there’ll be a high-level ministry task force dealing specifically with the Ottawa jail’s overcrowding. Maybe it’s just too small. Maybe it’s housing inmates who’d be better kept elsewhere, or who could even safely be released. Sorting that out isn’t as easy as it might sound at first.

First, unfortunately, the boss will have to glue his credibility back together.