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Ontario is shuffling inmates between strained central Ontario jails after the Don Jail closed weeks before its replacement was ready to accept occupants.

The Don closed without fanfare at the end of December, after 156 years of incarcerating Toronto’s prisoners. But the massive new jail intended to replace it didn’t open on schedule, and the effort to find space for prisoners – many of whom are still awaiting trial – has disrupted the correctional system all over central Ontario, the jail guards’ union says.

“They’re stuffing them here, there, and everywhere,” says Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union spokesperson Don Ford.

“Inmates have been shuffled pretty much all over the province: Hamilton, Toronto West, Toronto East. Pretty much any place they can find a bed, that’s where they’ve been moving inmates around.”

The province would not say how many inmates are affected, or where they’re being housed. The new, $650-million Toronto South Detention Centre is supposed to open at the end of the month.

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In the meantime, the disruption has rippled outward from the Toronto area, Ford says.

“Let’s say Toronto’s overcrowded, they decide to ship some to Hamilton. Hamilton says, fine, now we’re overcrowded, we’re going to ship some to London or Niagara. It starts a cascade effect.”

The Don Jail was permanently closed Dec. 31.

For years, the Don held far more inmates than it was originally designed for, giving it a reputation for misery and overcrowding. Before its closure, it routinely held more than 600 prisoners, despite having an official capacity of 561.

In 2008, the province announced it had found the money to close and replace the Don and the Toronto West Detention Centre in northwest Etobicoke.

The old Don Jail building, finished in 1865, will be used as office space by Bridgepoint Health. The newer extension, built in the 1950s, will be torn down.

On New Year’s Day, the Don closed on schedule and the Toronto South detention centre, designed to hold 1,650 inmates, stood empty.

“The ministry closed the Toronto Jail prior to the Toronto South Detention Centre opening in order to decommission the facility before transferring it to Bridgepoint Health and to ensure that the remaining Toronto Jail staff had the appropriate amount of time to be trained and become familiar with the new facility,” Sierge LeBlanc, a spokesperson for Community Safety and Correctional Services minister Madeleine Meilleur, wrote in an email.

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READ: New Toronto South Detention Centre almost ready to open

Toronto West remains open for now.

Guards at Toronto South are still learning how to run the facility, Ford said.

“They’re desperately trying to get their heads around the design, the procedure, there’s new computers, there’s new controls, there’s everything. These people really have to have this stuff second-nature before they start bringing a whole bunch of inmates in. You don’t want to be trying to remember where an alarm button is if you’ve got a problem going on in the facility.”

Asked if training was an issue, LeBlanc replied that the ministry has “confidence that our professionally trained corrections staff will adapt to the new facility and its procedures.”

Toronto South will start to accept inmates on January 27, LeBlanc wrote.

“The Ministry planned the transfer of Toronto Jail inmates to other Central Ontario correctional facilities over the past several months. Using the provincial correctional system, the transfers were done gradually to mitigate any significant impact on the populations of the facilities involved,” he said.

But Ford said the dislocation in the system is disrupting volatile inmate dynamics.

“You can have a lot of gang factions within the inmate population, and once you start moving them out of their areas, that can create a lot of uneasiness within the jails.”

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LeBlanc would not say how many inmates are affected or where they’re being held. But he said they “are all within the GTA and have access to the courts. There have been no complaints from former Toronto Jail inmates related to access to justice.”

He later clarified his reference to the GTA to include Hamilton.