EDMONTON – Hundreds of parents, grandmothers and children turned out to tour the new Edmonton Remand Centre Saturday, sneaking in a visit before the pods and cells are off-limits to those without criminal charges.
The new $580-million facility, the largest correctional centre in Canada, opens next month. Free public tours continue Sunday through Tuesday from noon to early evening.
“I’m quite impressed with it so far, just for the size of it,” said Scott Cameron, carrying his toddler on the tour.
“There’s nowhere to hide. You can see everyone, which is good,” he said. “I can’t see anyone getting out of here. It’s so much different than what you see in the movies.”
The new centre, located on 127th Street just north of the Anthony Henday, is built to hold 1,952 inmates arranged in a system of pods spread out across a site the size of 27 football fields. Each pod is broken into four units, and each unit holds 72 prisoners.
On a normal day, there will be no reason for the any of those prisoners to leave the unit.
The inmates won’t even get out to see visitors. A bank of four video conferencing stations replaces that, reducing chances for people to smuggle drugs or weapons onto the unit. They each have a skin sensor, so if an inmate decides to flash someone, the video immediately shuts off and an alarm notifies the guards.
The units also have a small outside courtyard with a metal grate for a roof and a heated concrete floor to melt the snow.
The unit has an exercise room, a classroom, eight telephones, tables with chess and checkers, a warming unit to heat the airplane-style frozen meals that come from the centre’s kitchen, and three floors of cells. The cells each have two bunk beds, a table and bench built into the wall, and a small toilet with a sink visible from the door. They have a 15-centimetre wide window to the outdoors along each bed and a firm foam mattress encased in plastic.
All the cell doors are visible from the correctional officers’ desk, which is open to the rest of the unit.
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That’s made some guards and union officials uncomfortable. They’re used to supervising from behind glass at the current remand centre. But the Fort Saskatchewan prison and many other new facilities work with the open concept.
“Although it sounds a little scary at first, picture banks in the old days with bars. If a bank doesn’t need that to be secure, we don’t either,” said Melody Kotyk, program manager for the new remand centre project, giving the initial presentation to groups of visitors.
With direct supervision and interaction, guards have better relationships with the inmates, she said. “You can have a casual conversation like, ‘Oh, you did a good job making your bed today.’
“‘Thank-you boss. There are drugs in the unit. We didn’t have this conversation.’”
“That’s the kind of stuff we can get from this and I have see that happen in other jails,” she said.
In addition to the two officers in the open on the unit, there will be two more officers stationed in a surveillance room above each pod. They have controls for all the doors and can call for help quickly if needed.
The facility has five general population pods, with space to construct three more, and there’s a maximum security pod. Those 288 beds can be fully segregated with inmates exercising behind glass for an hour a day if necessary.
The doors have slots, so they can eat their meals in their cells if they pose a danger to the guards or the rest of the inmates. With good behaviour, they can work themselves up to more freedom, something that was harder to manage with the lack of space in the current remand centre.
“We have a carrot and a stick now, where as before we had neither,” the tour guide in the admissions area told the crowd. None of the supervisors answering questions for the public were authorized to speak with the media.
Removed even from the maximum security area is a separate pod with just eight beds. That would be for someone with so much media profile they would cause a disturbance even in the maximum security unit, said one supervisor answering questions in the maximum security pod.
An RCMP officer arrested on criminal charges might be housed in there, for example.
At the public open house, people were allowed to roam through much of the facility on their own, asking questions to staff stationed throughout.
“It makes me feel safer to know they are well contained,”said Claire Donaldson, sitting down for a rest in the male infirmary, a separate unit on its own.
“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to come,” she said, worried it would feel dark and oppressive. Instead, all of the hallways, cells and units have windows and natural light.
“Coming here made it much more real than just the numbers,” added her daughter, Annette Dawson.
The infirmary will hold prisoners suffering from alcohol withdrawal, infections, bites from a police dog and other illnesses. There’s a segregation section with negative air pressure so airborne illnesses such as tuberculosis can’t spread.
Just down the hallway, the medical clinic has an X-ray machine and the ability to make casts. It looks like a regular medical clinic, except that the waiting rooms are all behind locked doors with concrete benches and a toilet.
Staff say it will save many trips to local hospitals.
The 32 booths of the video court conferencing wing should also reduce travel time. Staff expect most court appearances to be handled from those rooms, which include secure private lines for lawyers to follow up with their clients.
One of the biggest challenges will be moving the roughly 850 inmates from the old remand centre to the new one in early April. They’ll move the women first Friday evening, the supervisor in the admissions area told the public. Then they’ll move the general population on Saturday, recruiting every available sheriff’s van in the region.
The inmates will all be strip searched and issued new orange jumpsuits and foam sandals, a change from the dark blue jumpsuits used in the old centre. Finally, the maximum security inmates will be moved Sunday.
“It’s a more humane facility,” said Jason Said, the project architect with ONPA Architects. He travelled to prisons throughout the United States and many still feel oppressive and dark.
The inmates will only be at the remand centre for an average of 17 days, perhaps up to two years while they wait for be tried and sentenced. But the correctional officers are there for years, he said.
For their sakes in particular, he said, we “just tried to get as much light in there as possible.”
The tour is still being offered Monday/Tuesday from noon to 8 p.m.
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