New database tracks more than 2,100 deaths in custody across Canada since 2000

The average age of people who died in a Canadian correctional facility in the past two decades was 44, according to a database launched Friday by a team helmed by an Ottawa criminologist.

The Tracking (In)Justice data set lists more than 2,100 deaths from all causes of people in custody across Canada over the past 24 years. It was compiled using media reports, provincial data and more than 20 freedom of information requests, said Alexander McClelland, associate criminology professor at Carleton University and lead researcher with the project.

"We don't have the death penalty in Canada, so everyone incarcerated deserves dignity, deserves access to human rights, deserves access to health care," McClelland said in an interview.

"Information about deaths in custody is often hidden from view from the public, and yet there are systemic reasons why deaths continue to occur."

The searchable online data set includes men and women who have died in provincial jails and federal prisons, as well as in correctional facilities for youth. It also includes deaths in psychiatric detention. Offenders are typically sent to federal institutions if they have been sentenced to two years or longer in prison.

Some provinces have automatic coroner's inquests or inquiries into deaths in jails and publish the results, including the cause of the death. Other provinces, including Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, do not.

Combing through available coroner's reports, McClelland and his team found that at least 910 deaths were "potentially preventable." Of those, 452 deaths were suicides and 299 were overdoses. The average age of 44 at the time of death in custody compares with an average Canadian life expectancy of 81 as of 2022, according to Statistics Canada.

"This is not a normal age to die," Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society, said in a news release announcing the project. "What this data tells us is that many deaths in custody are not due to natural causes, but are due to the conditions of confinement."

Data assembled by The Canadian Press show there were 91 deaths in provincial jails across the country in 2023. That includes four in Newfoundland and Labrador, where a father is suing the provincial government for the death of his son, Seamus Flynn, at Her Majesty's Penitentiary in St. John's in December.

Jerome Flynn's lawsuit alleges his son was beaten by guards at the jail, and that he did not receive medical care when he needed it. The claims have not been tested in court and the province has said it cannot comment on legal matters.

The Office of the Correctional Investigator acts as an independent oversight agency for the federal prison system, but there is rarely any independent oversight of provincial jails.

"We don't have oversight or accountability provincially," McClelland said. "There's nobody tasked with doing that in a consistent manner, and that means there's no one watching these institutions to hold them to account. Canadians might think that
there is, but there isn't."

McClelland was part of a team that recommended Ontario implement independent oversight of its correctional facilities as part of a public inquest last year into the death of Soleiman Faqiri at the Central East Correctional Centre, a provincial jail in Lindsay, Ont., in 2016.

McClelland said he believes every province should have such an agency.

Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.