Thursday, March 23, 2000

Cruel, unusual and loud

Ian Hunter
National Post

Canadians do not like to think we have prisoners of conscience, still less that we torture them. After all, Canada is Charterland, where human rights commissions inquire into such portentous issues as in which public washroom should a partially transgendered person relieve him/herself; or is the traditional bow of respect to one's opponent before a martial arts competition unbearable discrimination?

In November, I wrote in this space about one of Canada's prisoners of conscience, Linda Gibbons, a 52-year-old grandmother who has spent most of the last five years behind bars because she insists on praying silently outside Toronto's abortion clinics. Free speech in Canada is not sufficiently robust to permit her conduct. Linda Gibbons has been incarcerated under the "bubble zone" injunctions, a brainchild of Marion Boyd, a former NDP attorney-general in Ontario. When they were in Opposition, the Harris Conservatives denounced these injunctions as "totalitarian"; now they rigorously enforce them.

Linda Gibbons is an exceptional criminal. She usually attends court without a lawyer. She says little or nothing in her own defence. She refuses to acknowledge a court's jurisdiction to prevent her praying.

In my earlier column I said that Linda Gibbons made no complaint about her treatment. I was wrong. She has sent me a 16-page handwritten letter complaining of one aspect of her treatment: noise torture.

She writes: "The noise in the prison system [is] the only thing I care to have written about ... Systematic aggravation. So horrible. So unnecessary."

She writes that at the Metro West Detention Centre, the radio comes on at 7:20 a.m. It is "so loud that normal conversation is impossible." The "music" is apparently piped into the range through built-in ceiling speakers; "the music setting level is not controlled by the guards (other than the ability to shut it on or off)." So, from 7:20 a.m. until 1 p.m. (when the TV comes on), heavy metal or rap "music" booms through the range.

To make themselves heard, both prisoners and guards must bellow. The TV (sometimes in addition to the radio) provides an afternoon and evening blare until lights out at 10:00 or 10:30 p.m.

"Due to bad acoustics -- our rooms have nothing to absorb sound, metal table along the centre surrounded by wood-topped metal stools fixed to the floor -- the room echoes with sound."

Ms. Gibbons has noted that the effect of the "totally discordant screaming" (i.e., music) is to make the inmates raucous, lewd, and sometimes violent. She estimates that fights are three times more frequent at the Metro West Detention Centre than at the Vanier Institute (a prison for women), and she attributes this primarily to the noise level. On the rare occasions when the radio and TV are both turned off, she has observed that the women quickly settle to normal conversation.

A detention centre guard told her that when she goes home at night she cannot bear to turn on either radio or TV, so much does she "crave silence." Another guard said her single dream in life was just "to be left alone in quiet."

Ms. Gibbons tries to read during the day with her hands over her ears. At night she tries to sleep with her head covered by blankets, pillows or a pile of clothes. She has trained herself to wake up at 5 a.m. when "the silence is most sweet."

As a result of 66 months of almost continuous incarceration, Linda Gibbons has suffered migraine headaches and short-term memory loss, both of which she attributes to the noise. She calls the noise levels "unnecessary torture." Is she right?

A 1990 study, Types of Psychological Torture, lists "torture by noise," and says it frequently causes "both short-term and long-term damage." In the Western Journal of Medicine (September, 1996), three researchers list "excessive noise" as one of the "commonest forms of psychological torture." Amnesty International has recently condemned several countries for "the practice of systematic torture" by such methods as "exposure to continuous raucous sound."

The solicitor-general and his Cabinet colleagues are not tinpot barbarians; they are decent men and women. They could stop noise torture in provincial detention centres. But will they? Or, as with the continuing prosecutions of Linda Gibbons, will they look away and condone what once they condemned?

Ian Hunter is professor emeritus in the faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario.