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A year ago this week, Louise Henry was handcuffed and loaded into a police van to make the bumpy, hour-long drive from a courthouse in St-Hyacinthe to the Leclerc Institution, a provincial women-only prison in Laval.

Never detained before, Henry, 55, had tried not to make any assumptions of what life behind bars would be like. She braced herself for the worst.

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But after entering through barbed-wire fences, being strip-searched, and trading in her clothes for prison garb, a pillowcase, a few dishes and 10 millilitres of shampoo, she says the conditions inside brought her to her knees.

“I felt like I was living in a nightmare,” Henry, who spent six months in pre-trial detention at Leclerc, said this week. “I arrived on a Monday and by Wednesday I had figured out how to hang myself. Because I wanted to die. I didn’t think I could possibly live through it.”

Henry’s concerns, and those of several other women detained at the prison, have been amplified in recent weeks by human rights groups again urging the provincial government to look into “deteriorating conditions” at Leclerc and act swiftly.