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“Not allowing people to call directly, it’s trying to isolate people. And the ministry states its goal is rehabilitation,” Benslimane said. “If that’s really the goal, then they should change it so you can call a cellphone. Communication is a right.”

The report, entitled Will You Accept the Charges?, includes a copy of the phone bill for a woman living in a Montreal retirement home who was shocked to receive a phone bill for $6,079 in collect and long-distance charges for the three months this year that her son was an inmate at OCDC. The woman had been told by staff at the jail that each collect call would cost $1. The bill includes $837.72 for 36 collect long-distance calls over a six-day period in July. Some charges were as much as $2.55 a minute and many 20-minute calls cost more than $30 each. The son was eventually acquitted and released.

OTTwp

The report also cites the case of Cleve Geddes, a paranoid schizophrenic who was ordered into hospital by a judge in 2017 for a psychiatric assessment, but ended up at the OCDC because no hospital beds were open. Geddes’s sister only owned a cellphone so he was unable to call her to say where he was. The family only learned he’d been in jail when they were called by the hospital and told he’d hanged himself in his cell. Changing the jail phone service was one of the recommendations from the inquest into his death.

“We hear about that quite frequently: People whose family doesn’t even know they’re in jail,” said Sarah Speight, a PhD candidate at uOttawa and one of the report’s authors.