Kingdom of Fear

It only took a few seconds for the video to burn itself into my memory.

A man cowers in the corner of a prison cell as he gasps for air. The first kick hits him in the jaw and snaps his head back. Still, he manages to stay upright and cover up before a second assailant enters the frame and kicks him.

The first assailant draws a blade and slashes the victim repeatedly, cutting into him as he tries to turn away.

There’s nowhere for the victim to run, the only way out of the cell is to get past three men — one with a shiv, another who continues kicking him and a third filming the scene on his phone. Eventually, the victim staggers toward the door but slips in a pool of his own blood.

“Caliss de tabarnak!” he groans. “Caliss.”

The footage lasts just 20 seconds but once you’ve watched and heard someone being mutilated, the scene lingers in your mind.

It was filmed in late July inside Montreal’s Bordeaux prison. The provincial jail houses men sentenced to less than two years custody and those awaiting trial for crimes like murder. 

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The victim, a 36-year-old man from Saguenay, is serving time ahead of his trial for first-degree murder. He was arrested last year in connection to a drug-related homicide. 

Sources inside the prison say the attack appears to be the work of one gang looking to send a message to another. And given the victim’s lengthy criminal history, it’s possible he’s affiliated.

The fact that it was filmed, that the assailants had access to a smuggled cell phone, that it was disseminated and that it involved at least three people bolster the gang theory, according to two former inmates.

“I’ve seen the video once and it still haunts me, I can’t stop seeing it when I close my eyes,” said Greg*, the man who showed me the video. “I don’t care what crime you’re accused of, no one deserves to be beaten and slashed open like an animal. That’s not how justice should work. And I have so many questions; where were the guards when this was happening?

“Most importantly, is it even being investigated?”

Contacted by The Rover, a representative of Quebec’s Ministry of Public Security said detectives from the Sûreté du Québec’s (SQ) major crimes division are investigating.

“All of the relevant information, including a copy of the video, have been handed over to police,” said Louise Quintin, a spokesperson for the ministry.

Three lawyers and two inmates who spoke to The Rover say what happened in that cell is the product of a prison ruled by brutality, one where inmates are returned to society in much worse shape than when they arrived. They say Quebec’s prison system is outdated, underfunded and that despite a series of provincial government reports raising the alarm about suicides and violence in jail, little is changing. 

In fact, there are more suicides in Quebec’s prisons than in any other province’s, according to a report from corrections Canada. Last year on Christmas Eve, a Bordeaux inmate died after being pepper sprayed by guards. The inmate, 21-year-old Nicous D’Andre Spring, was unlawfully detained at the time of his death. A judge ordered his release on Dec. 23 but he remained behind bars until he was killed the following day. 

During an altercation with Spring, guards placed a mesh restraining device over his face to prevent him from biting or spitting on them. Though it’s against protocol to use chemical irritants on an inmate wearing a face restraint, guards pepper sprayed Spring three times before he went into cardiac arrest and died.

The SQ and Quebec coroner are investigating Spring’s death, which resulted in the suspension of two guards and a manager at Bordeaux. Less than nine months later, provincial police are back at the prison to probe this latest violent incident.

“It’s hard to imagine the investigation will get very far,” said Bianka Savard-Lafrenière, a criminal defense attorney who has clients inside Bordeaux. “You have to understand how things work in prison. The guys commit these assaults inside a cell because there are no cameras and fewer witnesses. But even then, the victims almost never testify against their assailants because — well you saw it in that video — reprisals are extremely violent.

“Maybe, with the video, they have a solid enough body of evidence to press charges without the victim testifying. But that’s a pretty big piece of the puzzle missing.”

Savard-Lafrenière says she’s had two of her clients nearly die in Bordeaux. One was beaten so bad he wound up in a coma and the other had to have facial reconstructive surgery after his eye was bludgeoned into his skull. 

“It has a reputation as one of the toughest prisons in Quebec,” she said. “They take measures to make it less dangerous; they separate members of rival street gangs — in Montreal they keep the Blues and Reds separate — but there are inevitably wings of the prison that are tense and violent.

“And if you’re gang affiliated and you don’t want to be in a gang anymore, it’s incredibly hard to leave that life when you’re in prison.”

***

Bordeaux was a marvel of Canadian architecture when it opened its doors in 1912.

Designed by Montreal architect Jean Omer-Marchand, the jail centers around a circular, domed building that sprawls into six narrow cell blocks. Seen from above, the star-shaped prison looks almost serene. Inside Bordeaux, stone arches buttress the ceilings and sunlight trickles through tall, narrow windows.

The prison is one of Omer-Marchand’s signature projects alongside the chapel in Montreal’s Grand Séminaire, the Russian consulate on Du Musée Ave. and the reconstructed Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

But in the 111 years since its construction, Bordeaux has fallen into an abysmal state; mould contamination and other structural problems routinely force staff to close sections of the jail. The end result is that prisoners are housed three to a cell — with two inmates in a bunk and one sleeping on the ground — and often deal with infestation from mice, rats and cockroaches. 

The tension from overcrowding is made worse by chronic staffing shortages. 

Of the 550 jobs at the prison, there are 35 vacancies, according to the Public Security Minister’s latest statistics. And while that may not seem like much, that number doesn’t include the dozens of guards and staff on sick leave. Last year, for instance, the guard’s union said that in addition to 55 vacancies at Bordeaux, there were another 53 long-term absences — that’s roughly 20 per cent of the workforce missing at Quebec’s largest provincial prison.

The president of the guard’s union, Mathieu Lavoie, did not return The Rover‘s interview requests.

What staffing shortages mean, for the 1,000 inmates at Bordeaux, is almost no access to a prison psychologist, little to no access to rehabilitation programs, and — without enough guards to watch over the prison yard — inmates sometimes spend 23 hours a day in a cell the size of a closet.

“As in so many sectors, the (Minister of Public Security) is struggling with a labour shortage among its correctional agents,” Quintin said. “(The ministry) put in place a series of measures to attract talent … and optimize training of new agents.”

Quintin says prison officials know how resourceful inmates can be when it comes to smuggling in contraband like phones, tobacco, narcotics and weapons. There were 1,368 cell phones confiscated from prisoners at Bordeaux last year — that’s more illicit phones than all of Quebec’s other provincial prisons combined.

Though much is made of the drones that drop contraband off inside the prison grounds, gangs hide a variety of smuggling tactics that exploit Bordeaux’s status as a provincial prison. Some offenders only serve their sentences on weekends and get released every Monday. Those convicts are often recruited, by force, to act as drug mules for biker gangs.

But one of the most pressing problems, the presence of homemade knives in Bordeaux, is exceptionally difficult to stop. Prisoners file down benign objects like toothbrushes, a leftover chicken bone or scrap of metal into a weapon that can cut through flesh just as a blade would.

There were 17 assaults causing “grave injury” in Bordeaux between 2017 and 2022 but insiders say those statistics are misleading. For starters, COVID-19 protocols meant prisoners were in lockdown for most of 2020, almost all of 2021 and a good chunk of last year.

And the nature of prisons is that inmates rarely self-report injuries for fear of reprisals. Pierre Parent served 10 years in federal prison and says it was rare for convicts to get medical care even for the most severe injuries.

“This is going to sound dumb but I got into an argument over a computer chair and the guy stormed off, went to his cell, grabbed a blade, came back to find me and slashed my leg open,” said Parent, who is now an intervention worker in Montreal. “The bleeding would not stop and I needed stitches but I didn’t go to the infirmary. Because that means you have to fill out an incident report and that’s seen as snitching. 

“So I went to the old guys, the ‘lifers,’ and they cleaned the wound and closed it with superglue. There’s so much more violence inside than what gets reported and everyone, including the prison, knows that. Christ, I was on an exercise cycle once and some guys walked up to the guy in front of me and stabbed him in the neck. He died right there at my feet. I’ll never forget it, he actually turned blue from all the blood loss. 

“I went back to my cell just covered in someone else’s blood. You don’t come out of an environment like that without serious PTSD. Prison doesn’t fix you, it just makes ‘bad people’ worse people.”

Another problem with reporting attacks to prison authorities is that the victims will likely end up losing many of their rights and privileges just to stay alive.

“Protective custody, in jail, is its own sort of punishment,” said Savard-Lafrenière. “You get less time outside, you spend a lot of time alone in your cell. That might keep you safe but it’s incredibly isolating, almost a form of psychological torture. 

“So, as bad as it sounds, some people would rather take their chances then end up alone.”

***

Here’s the part of the story I struggle with.

Though the victim suffered an unspeakably brutal attack, he’s also accused of murdering a young man, a 20-year-old student who came to Canada from Morocco to learn a trade at a technical college. Friends described him as a shy kid who “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

When the police were done gathering evidence from his body, a man from Montreal’s Moroccan community worked with the young man’s family to ship his remains back home. Sometimes I find myself thinking of his mother and siblings, of the people who watched him learn to walk and changed his diapers, the ones who helped him with his homework and tucked him in at night. 

They deserve justice. 

But if the man’s killer is in fact the same person who was slashed and beaten inside Bordeaux last month, can that be called justice? It won’t bring the young man back and it’s doubtful that such brutality would cause a hardened criminal to atone for their misdeeds.

“I didn’t rehabilitate myself because I was locked in a cage,” said Parent, who was convicted of killing his narcotics anonymous sponsor in 2011. “I tried to take my life that first week in prison. But it was the elders, my Indigenous elders who took me in and helped put me on the right path. It was through federal rehabilitation programs that I was able to really understand my crime, my criminal history and take the steps to change.

“When I was inside, I got to work on suicide prevention, I got to find my way back by helping others. You don’t really get those opportunities at a place like Bordeaux because it’s a revolving door of people coming in and out for short sentences.”

About two-thirds of convicts who leave Bordeaux will reoffend within two years, according to the Public Security Ministry. That’s nearly twice the recidivism of Ontario’s provincial prisons. 

“There’s an emphasis, in politics, about being tough on crime, everyone wants a leader who’s tough on crime,” Parent said. “But we need to be smart on crime. Yes, some of these inmates have done horrible things and it’s tempting to think they deserve all sorts of violence and torture. But that will not fix them, that will not make society safer because — most of these prisoners — they’re going to be released one day.

“Do you want to be neighbours with someone who was kept in check with violence or do you want to be neighbours with someone who had a chance to work on themselves?”