The Decibel - Segregation of child inmates being challenged in landmark lawsuit

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

A landmark class action lawsuit is alleging that Manitoba has subjected thousands of incarcerated children to solitary confinement — the province denies it. The case is the first of its kind to head to trial in Canada.Today, Globe reporter Robyn Doolittle joins The Decibel. She’ll describe what segregated confinement looks like, how widespread the practice is, and what the case could mean for youth inmates in Manitoba and across the country.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

A warning before we start today. This episode includes mentions of suicide and child abuse. So please take care. It just eats at your mind. You're just sitting there staring off to the wall. You're thinking, thinking why. Devon Daniels was 14 years old the first time he was put in a segregated cell. Starting to think of just hopelessness, right?

You're just thinking you're never going to get out of this place. How did you get to this place? And he says the time he spent there was traumatizing. It took a part of your innocence, in a sense, as a child. Took you part of freedom, safety, voice. You know, it makes you quiet. According to a new landmark class action lawsuit, Devon's experience was not unique.

He's among thousands who say they were put in segregated cells while in youth detention in Manitoba. Some of them were as young as 12 years old. The lawsuit alleges that Manitoba's use of segregation violates the Canadian Charter. And it's the first time a case like this will go to trial in Canada. Today, Robin Doolittle is here. She's going to tell us about Devon's experience

and what this historic class action is hoping to change. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Robin. It's nice to see you again. Good to see you. Welcome back. Thank you so much. And thanks so much for coming on to talk about this landmark case. I think it's a really important one to talk about. Before we get into it, I want to talk about Devon. We heard from him in the intro. And what did you learn from him? Who is he? Devon Daniels is a member of the class. So the group of people that are being represented in this landmark case that's set to go to trial. this November in Winnipeg. Devon is of mixed race. He's black and indigenous. He was raised for a period of time

as a child by his grandmother who was a residential school survivor. And, you know, he talks about all of the trauma that was in his life because of this, because of what has been passed down through generations in his family. There was a lot of abuse and poverty and neglect in his life.

One of his first memories is being locked in a basement by his grandmother. He talks about being forced to eat feces as a child. And he was arrested for the first time when he was about 12 years old. A lot of the time it was stealing things like food and chocolate bars, things that a kid might want but not necessarily have any money to get. And this then starts this cycle. And he's getting picked up for more severe things.

There's breaches now. And eventually he gets sent to a youth detention center. and he was placed in solitary confinement for the first time when he was about 14. And, you know, when we counted it together, he estimates he was sent to solitary about 15 times before he was 18 as an adult. Wow. So you talked about how this cycle started with these kind of minor offenses. And then eventually, you know, he's in detention and he ends up in segregation. Do we know why he was put there? He remembers, I mean, this is going back a long time ago. He remembers getting in a fight with the guard. Like, not a physical fight, but in his telling, a lot of the incidents that come about are,

it's about control, controlling the youth inmates. And he alleges that the guards try to purposely sometimes provoke the youth. Guards are getting that or, you know, triggering other inmates to youth. They used to kind of get other inmates twist up other people and stuff and, like, terrorize each other, right? Kind of feed into the behavior, and then a kid would kind of break. The kid breaks and has a standoff or something. and they got sent to their room for three days. Again, they have a lot of stuff and trauma going on in their lives.

You're a kid. You're not mentally equipped to deal with some of these things and that they might lash out. And then this can result in what he would describe as a punishment. And, I mean, let's really underscore this point. Segregation is not to be used as a punishment in youth detention centers. Yeah, and we'll dig into how segregation is and isn't technically allowed to be used in a moment, Robin.

But before that, let's just talk about what segregation was like and what Devon remembers the space specifically. What do they like? What did he say to you? He describes a cell as being very small. I'd say half of a parking spot, maybe less than that, a little bit like one third of a parking spot around. So the room looks like a little tiny box, right? And then it has a window on it. The window is like maybe four inches and it's blanked out the window so you can't see. outside. But sometimes

if you're lucky, you get a cell where you can see maybe a centimeter through a window at the bottom so you can kind of crack and peek through and look outside. Lights on 24-7. The bed is a concrete slab. He remembers walking in and the smell.

It's smell like piss and sweat. It just smelled really horrible. You can smell the other. You struggle, basically, when it smelled like in there. The people who were in the cell before sometimes are smearing excrements on the walls. They're saying, he's saying that they're doing this because it's like, you can't do anything. And this is like one way to defy, you know, what he would describe as oppressors.

And I imagine you have nothing in the cell with you. So what else can you do? Yes. And he talks about the, like, the crippling boredom. Like you're sitting there and you have nothing to do but think. For people who have PTSD, you just go into the state where you're standing at the wall and you're just reliving trauma, really living trauma. You know, the things that he's thinking about are not pleasant.

He's remembering being locked in a basement as a kid. He's remembering all the trauma and abuse and poverty in his childhood. His grandma, who while she may have been abusive, he did deeply love and he found forgiveness for her. She died when he was in segregation and he alleged is dangling in front of him. Like if you do X, Y, and Z, maybe you'll get to go to the funeral and that wasn't the case. You felt so trapped and so humiliated, you know? It really made you feel like inhuman being in that place

the way you were sure your food slots handing through the teasing and the knocking. It wasn't a good feeling at all. The best way to describe it was just traumatic. It just really messes with you. You know, Robin, hearing what Devon has been through, you know, it sounds a lot like solitary confinement, and I think that's something that a lot of our listeners

are probably familiar with here. hearing, but we're talking about segregation here. Can you just explain what is the difference between these two things? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge legal semantics fight. It's kind of the subject of the lawsuit. But solitary confinement is generally defined as this idea of a person being confined to an area without meaningful human contact for 22 hours or more. And segregation is, you know, we're isolating a youth. And And Manitoba flat out denies that it is subjecting kids to solitary confinement. And there's been a number of court cases in recent years dealing with the practices of solitary confinement in adult prisons.

The science is extremely clear that solitary confinement is very damaging to a person. It can cause irreversible anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, paranoia, hallucinations. Like the list goes on and on. And what this lawsuit alleges is also that those effects are just amplified in kids whose brains are still developing and it's so, so damaging. But yeah, Manitoba denies that what it's doing is amounts to solitary confinement. One of the examples they give is that youth who are sent to these segregation cells are being observed and that that observation amounts to meaningful human contact. Okay, let's talk about this case because Manitoba is saying, that they are not subjecting youth inmates to this solitary confinement.

But Robin, this class action is saying that it is. So can you break down what exactly is being alleged here? I mean, what this lawsuit is alleging, and I guess we should just make a note here that these allegations have not been tested in court, is that the government isn't following its own policies and that youth are regularly being subjected to what it describes as solitary confinement. Kids are being put in cells without meaningful human contact for weeks, even months at a time, and that this is a violation of their rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And the claim, it says that these youth inmates are being made to sleep on mats on the floor sometimes. They talk about cells being covered in filth, blood, excrement. They say that what youth are being subjected to in Manitoba is torture. They call it torture in the document. They describe these segregation rooms as, quote, a dungeon inside a prison. And while the government may deny that what it is doing is amounting to solitary confinement, it does not deny that it is segregating the youth in these detention centers. So is that segregation, is it being overused or misused in the eyes of the class action?

Yeah, let's really hit this point that segregation, is supposed to be used as an absolute last resort and not for punishment. And so the class action would say that the government is absolutely not following that policy, that stipulation, that requirement, that it is being way overused, dramatically, inappropriately, and they would say illegally. We'll be right back. So, Robin, this case alleges that Manitoba is subject. objecting youth inmates to solitary confinement and that they're going against their own policies

when it comes to the use of these segregated cells. And I should also note that Manitoba denies these allegations. But Robin, how widespread does the class action say this practice is? The government produced a large data set about incidents of segregation and the globe obtained this and analyzed it. The records go from about 2006 to 2022. They document document 34,000 incidents of segregation used on youth. Chen Wong, an analyst and reporter here, crunched the numbers, and it looks like these incidents involve around 6,000 different inmates. And again, I can't stress enough.

Like, some are as young as 12 and 13 years old. These aren't all, you know, 17-year-olds about to turn 18, spending days, weeks, months in these cells. The incidents range from, you know, a couple of minutes to, you know, over 300 days. But what's really of note is it also appears that some of these incidents are documented over multiple lines of data. So it's likely that the averages are much higher. And I think what we found is around 12 or 13 days was the average length of time that these kids were spending in solitary. Of real significance here is that in 2019, two watchdog groups in Manitoba, including the Manitoba Ombudsman,

released warning reports about the dangers of what Manitoba was doing with youth segregation. So this is not the first time that this has come up? No, people have sounded the alarm on this. But what was interesting in the data is that nothing really changed after those reports came out. Between 2019 and 22, 600 more kids were subjected to segregation. This data seems to show. So this is numbers from Manitoba specifically. And, I mean, to me, that sounds like a lot.

6,000. Is that a big number? I think that's a really big number. We did, you know, put these numbers to the Manitoba government and they declined to comment. And in fact, I guess it's worth underscoring here that the government refused to comment on anything about this story as the cases before the courts. Okay, so the government has refused to comment, but has Manitoba responded at all to this class action lawsuit and to these allegations? They filed a statement of defense. And in that statement of defense, they say that what they are doing does not. amount to solitary confinement. So is segregation of youth, is this allowed in prisons at any point?

I mean, yes, is the short answer. But it is supposed to be used not as a punishment and as an absolute last resort. And when I say last resort, I mean last resort. This is, you know, a kid is so out of control that they are a danger to themselves and others. And by out of control, I mean not. you know, fighting or yelling or something. I mean, like, they are, like, lost control of their limbs. They're having, like, a complete meltdown tantrum. Like, think of a, think of a toddler.

This is not a great analogy. But, like, you know, how a toddler who's just completely flipping out and has lost control of their emotions and they can be put aside just to calm down, like, in a timeout. And that's kind of what this is supposed to be. This is someone has completely lost it and needs, you know, some time to just calm down by themselves. And, you know, if you just think logically through that, if someone is in a state where they cannot calm down at all after more than a couple of hours, they probably need more help. Maybe they need to go to a hospital. So this is the idea that segregation is supposed to be used in this very specific circumstance and hours, not days, months, years. And what I've heard in doing this reporting is that

it's not that segregation of youth doesn't occur in other provinces or other parts of this country. But what's happening in Manitoba, they allege is so extreme that it goes far beyond what is okay. Do we have a sense as to why Manitoba is so extreme? I mean, this is a big question. So I just need to ask it because it does seem like an outlier. Yeah, like what's going on there. I think that's what's going to be litigated this fall. Yeah. And I mean, you know, one point I didn't mention that I think is, it's going to be brought up a lot as this case goes forward is there are a lot of international agreements that prohibit the solitary confinement of youth and Canada is a signatory to them, including the Mandela rules and agreements

that are the United Nations. So I think that is what's really given people pause on this. This case, like so many of these cases, includes evidence from expert witnesses. And one of the experts who have submitted an affidavit as part of this lawsuit is Craig Heaney. He's this really famous psychology professor with the University of California in Santa Cruz. He was actually one of the principal researchers in this really famous case. You might have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yes, of course. This is where students are assigned the role of either a prisoner or a guard in a simulated environment. And what they found is that the students who were assigned to be guards started acting, you know, the power was corrupting. And anyway, it's a very

famous experiment. He's such an expert on prisons and segregation cells. He has toured dozens of states prisons and he's been around the world looking at prisons. He, in his affidavit that he submitted, he said what he saw in Manitoba was as bad as the worst that he's ever seen in the United States. And I think that that might shock some Canadians. Yeah, absolutely. So Manitoba does seem like an outlier here. I think we touched a little bit on the rest of Canada, but What do we know there about the use of segregation in the rest of Canada? In terms of what's happening with youth, there hasn't been a lot. I mean, there was a case in Ontario that the government settled.

And that's why this case it's happening right now with Manitoba is so significant because it seems like it's going to be the first major case dealing with youth segregation to go to trial. And why is that significant? Why is it important that it's going to trial? What's the difference there? I mean, when a case goes to trial, a judge makes a ruling, and then there is precedent set from it. And then, you know, what often happens with these types of class actions is there's going to be, if this lawsuit is successful, there's going to be damages. It's going to be very expensive for the government to have to pay out damages to these class members.

And the government's still doing this right now. So in order to limit its liabilities going forward, it may be financially incentivized to stop doing youth segregation in the way that it is now in its prisons. So that can actually change an outcome, right, for the province. And other provinces will look at what the judge says and say, oh, we're financially vulnerable if we're doing this. So that's how these big class actions can really change public policy through financial incentives to, change your behavior. So this case is set to go to trial in mid-November. What are we expecting? Yeah, this trial is going to happen in two stages, just the way that they've scheduled it. So there's some dates starting in November of this year, and then they're going to come back early next year,

I think, in March. And then there'll be a decision. That is if the government doesn't settle first, but it looks like right now they're kind of digging in, and this is going to be litigated in a trial. So, Robin, we started this conversation off by talking about Devon. How was he doing now? He's 27 now. He was released from prison in 2020, and he's turned his life around, he says. And he speaks so eloquently and powerfully about the impact of this on his life. It's been long term.

And he seems like he's doing well. but, you know, how do you ever escape it? You're scared of grown-ups. You're scared of the system. You're scared of authority figures, you know? You're scared of a doctor. You're scared of a nurse, you know? You're really scared of people after that.

You know, one of the last times that we talked, he said it feels like a piece of me is still in that room and that it haunts him. He thinks about it. It impacts every day. And, you know, I spoke to one person, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of these kids. And you think about what is the goal of these detention centers?

You're a youth. You've done something that's requiring you to be in here. The goal is to get back out into society, that you can be not caught in this cycle. And I think he would say that this is just inflicting the trauma and making it harder to move forward. Robin, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about this really important case. Thank you.

That was Robin Doolittle, a staff reporter with The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk. talk to you soon.