EDMONTON – Anyone who has spent time behind bars can now rate their experience.
A popular review website used to rate everything from restaurants to cemeteries, called Yelp, is now being used to rate jails and prisons across the globe.
According to the Washington Post, lawyers, inmates, and their families are using the site to rate prisons and shed light light on poor living conditions and alleged prisoner abuse.
It is unclear how long, or how many times, the website has been used to review prisons, but new reviews are popping up all over the place, including for prisons across Canada.
“I think it is a good idea because one major purpose that it serves is that it brings to the attention of the public what prison conditions are like,” said Tom Engel, a criminal defense lawyer at Engel-Brubaker in Edmonton.
Users rate the facilities out of five stars, and make comments on food, living conditions, and staff professionalism.
The website has become, some say, a mechanism by which prisoners can speak out against abusive guards or inhumane treatment.
Engel says without a site like Yelp, prisoner complaints are rarely taken seriously.
“If you’ve got a complaint about a guard, and you make a complaint about that guard, then in some twisted way guards think ‘oh you’ve broken the code of silence, you’ve gone outside the closed group,’ and you’ll suffer repercussions,” he says.
“You can make complaints up the ladder to management, but a lot of the times, the process is a joke. Inmates quickly learn that it’s futile to complain, and it will probably just make your situation worse.”
The complaints on the website are unverified; meaning the truth of the accusations has not been confirmed.
However, Engel insists that prisoner abuse is real, and says Alberta facilities, in many cases, do not meet the United Nations’ standards for prisoner treatment.
Prisoner mistreatment may also increase the chances a prisoner will reoffend.
“People don’t go to jail to be punished; people go to jail as punishment,” he says. “You have to treat prisoners in a humane way. Just taking away their freedom is a lot of punishment.
“If you mistreat prisoners while they are in jail, they are going to become angry,” he adds. “They are going to actually disrespect the justice system, which is mistreating them. They will come out of that system worse than when they went in, and they will be more likely to reoffend.”
The Edmonton Remand Centre has a review on Yelp as well. The reviewer gave it out of five stars.
With files from Emily Mertz
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