OTTAWA—It was a vicious slashing in the middle of the day, a deliberate blow struck by a prisoner gripping a cunning weapon.

The woman, a correctional officer of three years’ experience at B.C.’s Kent Institution, had just glanced down at a request form the inmate casually handed her.

The blade, possibly a razor hidden in a toothbrush, caught the guard at the top of her head.

He carved deep into her right cheek, running it down below her chin, just missing her carotid artery. He fled back into his cell, and either passed off the weapon to another offender or flushed it, her fellow guards believe. It hasn’t been recovered.

She survived, will undergo more surgery and is not ready to talk.

Now badly disfigured, hers is the face of a new reality behind the walls of Canadian penitentiaries where there is a disturbing rise in violence, as well a greater use of force by guards striving to maintain order.

The data has not been publicly reported by correctional authorities, but in an exclusive interview with the Star last week, Canada’s chief prison investigator Howard Sapers first flagged a trend that shows no sign of waning.

It includes more inmate-to-inmate violence, inmates assaulting guards, as well as guards who are violent toward inmates, across all federal facilities housing male and female offenders in Canada.

Over the past three years ending March 31, 2012, the total number of assaults Correctional Services Canada reported behind bars rose from 1,415 in 2009/10, to 1,566 in 2010/11, to 1,669 in 2011/12.

That’s an increase of 15 per cent in just three years.

Over those three years, the federal prison population jumped to 14,400 from about 13,500.

What’s also clear is the use of force by guards — involving physical restraint, pepper spray, tear gas or guns as they try to break up a fight, contain inmates who refuse a lock-up or are trying to hurt themselves — is on the rise.

Sapers said the number of incidents were force was used against federal offenders has increased by 37 per cent in the past five years — to 1,339 in 2011-12 from 975 incidents in 2007-08.

(The number spiked in 2009-10 to 1,399, and dipped again the following year due to a very small number of inmates who drew “frequent use of force contacts moving out of the system,” said Sapers. Now it’s on the rise again.)

The confounding thing about use of force numbers is that the prison system has changed what it requires to be a “reportable use of force.” For a short time, a guard’s hauling out a gun wasn’t “reportable.” That’s changed, said Sapers, in part because of a series of incidents at British Columbia’s Kent Institution that he reported in January 2010.

But based on the data he has seen, Sapers is satisfied the overall trend is clear, and worrisome.

Last year alone, he said, there were more than 600 security incidents that involved use of pepper spray, a 26 per cent increase over the previous year. “It’s pretty serious.”

They are the clear signs of a prison system under strain.

Sapers, the ombudsman for federal inmates, is often at odds with the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers which represents the guards. But on this, they are on the same page:

They say Canada’s prisons are overcrowded — no matter what the federal government claims when it boasts that it doesn’t need to build new prisons since the worst case projections of its tough-on-crime agenda haven’t materialized.

They say the climate inside federal prisons is tenser. There are more mentally ill offenders serving federal sentences (meaning two years or more), more substance abuse problems. There are more gang members inside prisons, and adversarial gangs housed in the same facility.

Moreover, guards say even where overcrowding isn’t the main issue — as it doesn’t appear to be at Kent — they are up against a different kind of inmate. In corrections jargon, it’s called a changing “inmate profile.”

“They don’t care,” says Gord Robertson, Pacific regional president for the guards’ union. “None of the old rules that used to apply to inmates — they used to have rules, a hierarchy among inmates — none of those rules apply. It’s each for his own.”

Look at the number of women guards who are targeted, Robertson says. A few months ago another inmate at Kent Institution hurled urine and feces at two female guards.

Robertson says the targeting of women in planned assaults by offenders in a general prison population is “odd behaviour.” It goes against the traditional credo that it’s a cowardly gesture, seen by other inmates as going after “a weaker target.”

The guards say the changing profile of offenders — younger, more likely to be affiliated with gangs — on the inside, plus overcrowded conditions across the country, make for a more violent, less predictable environment.

Jason Godin, the union’s Ontario regional president, said it’s only going to get worse. He said the rate of double-bunking has doubled in the past three years, suggesting it’s about 18 per cent across Canada. All the minimum security institutions in the Kingston, Ont., area are over 60 per cent double-bunked, he added.

“The Conservatives’ theme is safer streets and safer communities. Well, I can tell you that’s not where we’re going,” Godin said. “We’re headed down (toward) an American model where they are just going to cram as many inmates as they can into our federal facilities.”

Certainly, it’s hard to see how the federal government will adjust to what the guards’ union and Sapers see coming. The Conservatives’ budget requires Correctional Services Canada to cut $295.4 million by 2014/15.

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Julie Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, said he was unavailable to discuss the root causes of the problem or solutions. She was sanguine in a brief emailed response to the Star.

“Prisons are correctional institutions, not hotels.”

She said Canada double-bunks prisoners “when necessary, just like many other Western countries.”

However, it goes against the standard set by Corrections Services Canada’s own policy of single-cell accommodation for inmates. It also flies in the face of international standards set by the United Nations and the European Council, Sapers says.

Though much of its omnibus crime bill hasn’t yet taken effect, the Conservatives have already abolished accelerated parole review, brought in mandatory minimums for gun crimes, regulatory changes to how the parole board works and reviews cases, made policy changes around the provision of correctional programs inside institutions, as well as changes in the caseload numbers and assignments for institutional and community parole officers. Right now, Sapers says, parole grant rates are at an all-time low. There is a huge drop in the escorted and unescorted temporary absences that used to aid prisoners in advance of release to look for a job or adjust to post-prison life.

“All of these things together create a whole new dynamic,” Sapers says.

The Conservative government makes a virtue of saying it is building no new prisons. It is, however, expanding existing ones to add 2,400 to 2,700 new beds to accommodate needs. (That’s the equivalent of building five and a half new maximum security institutions or more than 10 minimum security facilities.) Sapers says that all the new cell space is not yet available — only 40 new beds have opened — at Alberta’s medium security Bowden Institution.

Part of the problem is this:

Ottawa is closing three federal prisons — the maximum security Kingston Penitentiary, a medium security Quebec facility, and the Ontario Regional Treatment Centre for the most serious mentally ill prisoners. It intends to shift the 1,000 inmates affected into other existing institutions.

Even without the impact of Bill C-10 and its nine new laws (which will be implemented in staggered fashion over the coming months), the federal prison population rose by 1,000 inmates in the past three years.

As Sapers sees it, those new beds under construction are already mostly spoken for.

Worse, Godin says, is that the government is not augmenting existing services in the other prisons to accommodate the boom in population. For example, he says there are more than 400 inmates in Bath Institution, and plans are to add 192 more, without increases to hospital space, “visiting and correspondence” space, where inmates receive visits and check mail, or program space where they might take part in anger management, addictions programs or other treatment.

“Obviously the temperature of the institution begins to rise,” Godin says. “This Conservative government would have everyone believe that they’re managing this properly. Well, they’re not.”

Sapers does not go that far. He says he’s confident the prison authorities are trying to manage things. But acknowledges he is “very concerned” about the trends.

“An institution that is safe is safe for everybody, and an institution where safety is an issue is an issue for inmates and staff,” Sapers says.

Toews’ spokeswoman, Julie Carmichael, and other government officials say because Tory tough-on-crime measures have put more violent and serious offenders in jail, the government is seeing “positive trends in the rates of violent crime and recidivism” on Canadian streets.

Likewise, she says, violent behaviour in prisons will be “punished appropriately.”

The guards’ union believes the inmate who slashed their fellow correctional officer on June 23 should be charged with attempted murder.

Suzanne Leclerc, a spokeswoman for Correctional Services Canada, said only that the investigation is still going on.

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