Not the worst hole, but Don jail's close

May. 9, 2003. 06:24 AM LINDA DIEBEL <a href=www.thestar.com>TORONTO STAR

So, okay, maybe the Don jail isn't the worst stinking hole in the world.

But that's only because there's no torture room.

There's no "parrot perch,'' or hanging metal bar that is a staple of most Brazilian prisons. Prisoners on the perch have been stripped naked, thrown over the bar, hands and ankles tied, then beaten and jolted with electric shock until they pass out, or die.

At the Don, there's no saw-horse, a device similar to the parrot perch, except that torturers get the added kick of being able to submerge a prisoner's head in water while administering shock treatment to the genitals and anus.

I've seen these torture chambers.

As the Star's Latin America correspondent for many years, I have seen more than my share of Third World prison conditions. I have nightmares to last a lifetime.

But I came away from a tour of Toronto's Don jail this week thinking the biggest difference with any Third World hellhole I've ever seen is the absence of endemic physical torture.

That's it.

Otherwise, with the possible exception of Haiti, where I once saw prisoners, some of them clearly mad, sitting deep in their own excrement, the Don jail could just as easily be the Guerrero state prison in Iguala, Mexico, or fit nicely into the Vieira Ferreira Neto penal complex in Niteroi, Brazil.

A vermin-infested cell is a vermin-infested cell.

In some ways, living conditions at the Don are worse.

That's because prisoners don't have the same access to a tropical outdoors and frequent family visits. They also live with constant, mind-numbing din and the psychological tension it creates.

I'd never been in a prison with that kind of decibel level before my Tuesday afternoon tour of the Don with Brant MPP Dave Levac.

As Liberal corrections critic, he wanted to revisit the jail this week after yet another Toronto judge condemned "medieval" conditions that don't meet minimal standards for housing prisoners laid out by the United Nations.

Now, I wasn't there at Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1992 when military police put down a prison riot over brutal conditions, killing 111 inmates.

Clearly, with the gunfire and screaming, it must have been louder than the din I heard Tuesday.

But is that really what we want in Canada?

It would take little Canadian flags stitched on orange jumpsuits to differentiate between some of the inmates I saw — drooling, toothless, hair matted, talking to themselves — and prisoners in Brazil, Colombia or Venezuela.

It's bad enough prisoners are treated with inhumanity anywhere in the world.

But, as the critics of Ontario's corrections system point out, this jail is in our very own backyard.

Right here in east-end Toronto, prisoners live with vermin, overflowing toilets and the same all-encompassing stench of human excrement that knocks you off your feet when you walk into Vieira Ferreira Neto prison, not far from Rio's Copacabana beaches, where the tourists romp.

One prisoner at the Don talked about being "peed on.'' Happens all the time.

"We Canadians view ourselves as a just society and we like to think of ourselves that way," says Richard Coleman, co-ordinator for Toronto's drug treatment court and a veteran counsellor of Don jail inmates.

"But we've become a very hard-edged people, and it's been coming on for many years now.''

We are, he adds, "punishing people in the most brutal ways imaginable.

"It is social science gone horribly wrong, because the reality is that the criminal justice system was created to reform, not merely to punish."

Father Barry McGrory, a retired Catholic priest and volunteer at the Don jail, says he weeps to see such "devastation of the weakest" in our society.

"They are still human beings,'' he says. "They are not people from Mars. I hear heartbreaking stories from these men, and the thing of it is, we, any one of us, could end up in that place."

He, like Coleman, bristles at what he views as hypocrisy. He cringes at the comfortable Canadian notion that things are so much better for everyone here than in the Third World.

"I hate it when people say, `Oh, they should go and see what bad conditions really are. Go to the Third World,''' he says. "How much worse can it get for a prisoner than in the Don?"

For me, the cold-shower realization of the many ways in which, like it or not, Toronto wears aspects of the worst of the Third World has been the hardest part of my transition back to Canada, and home.

It was one thing to walk into a prison in Brazil and chronicle horrible conditions in somebody else's country for readers of the Toronto Star.

But it was a shock to see it in my own.

And we're not just talking about conditions in the Don jail.

For years, for example, I wrote about the murdered women of Juarez, Mexico, the disposable women whose corpses — often in pieces — have been turning up in the Mexican border town. It's estimated that, since the early 1990s, more than 300 women have been killed a stone's throw across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

Their deaths remain unsolved and, to be blunt, it's not a big issue in Mexico, or anyplace else.

Who cares? These are faceless women, poor, indigenous and, too often, anonymous.

But I came home recently to a Canada where 500 aboriginal women have disappeared or been found murdered over the past 15 years in a similar atmosphere of neglect.

I was appalled.

In Canada, you say?

There's more.

At any intersection in Acapulco or Cancun, Canadian tourists tsk-tsk — how sad! — at pregnant women begging for money, raggedy children holding their skirts or playing in the gutter.

A few years ago, a Canadian reporter wrote with disgust about a Mexican woman who agreed to sell her baby after his newspaper widely advertised for a child. He didn't buy the baby, of course.

And, yet, in my city, this past January, a newborn baby was left to die, umbilical cord still attached, in the shadow of City Hall, left by a wandering, seemingly witless homeless woman, and found in the nick of time.

Every year, an estimated 300 babies — and probably far more — are born to women living in the streets of Toronto.

There are two ways, it seems, of looking at this issue.

You can say, "Oh, things could be worse. You could be living in Calcutta or Juarez. So get used to it."

Or, you can say, as Father McGrory does, this is not acceptable anywhere.

But the problem is that Juarez is creeping closer to Toronto, and not the other way around.

"We are being swallowed by our dark side,'' says McGrory.

The Don jail is Vieira Ferreira Neto — without the torture chambers.

And, without the Brazilian sunshine.