An investigation is underway into a “significant incident” at a federal prison in Ontario that threatens to bring Corrections Canada’s reputation into “disrepute,” the penitentiary service’s top official says, in an internal memo distributed to thousands of workers across the country. Cancrime obtained a copy of the memo from Don Head (inset), which does not provide specifics of the incident. Cancrime learned that police and Corrections Canada are investigating the allegation that an inmate from maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary was beaten by prison staff in retribution for an assault on a correctional officer.
You have to wonder if senior bosses at Corrections Canada are starting to get nervous about a looming staffing crisis. Nearly half of the recruits in the latest prison guard training program at the regional staff college in Kingston, Ontario, failed out of the program recently, Cancrime learned. Nine of 21 recruits in the program were booted last week because they could not pass the firearms testing, sources tell me. That doesn’t bode well for an organization that is scrambling to hire thousands more employees as federal penitentiaries swell with new prisoners.
Corrections Canada turfed from its recruit training program a Muslim woman who would have been the nation’s first hijab-wearing federal prison guard. Layla Matar (inset), a 23-year-old Ottawa, Ontario woman who was born in Lebanon, was cut after she failed the firearms portion of an eight-week course, Cancrime learned. She was removed from the program “due to [her] failure to achieve a qualifying score on the 9 mm,” according to a Jan. 20 email circulated among managers and staff at the corrections staff college in Kingston.
