Inside B.C. jails: Former inmates and their relatives speak out
Credit to Author: Lori Culbert| Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2019 01:03:06 +0000
Back in 1986, when he was 21 years old, Errol Patrick Johnson was sent to Oakalla to serve his first jail sentence. He remembers the prison as a cold “dungeon” with large enough holes in the windows for pigeons to fly in and out.
“Oakalla was a pretty scary place. And that was kind of where I grew up,” said Johnson, now 55 and living in the Lower Mainland.
“And I grew up fast.”
Johnson is one of more than 200 former inmates of Oakalla, Alouette and other B.C. jails who have filed civil claims in court alleging they were sexually abused when they were teenagers or young men incarcerated for relatively minor crimes. Postmedia accessed hundreds of pages of court documents and conducted dozens of interviews to chronicle this story for the first time.
Roderic David MacDougall, who worked as a jail guard for 21 years from 1976 to 1997, is the defendant in the court cases, and his former employer, the province of B.C., is typically listed as a co-defendant. They have both denied any wrongdoing in various court documents.
Most of the 200 or so claimants allege the attacks left them angry and confused, compounding pre-existing drug and crime problems, and spiralling them into even more difficult lives.
“I just want people to know we’re not just drug addicts. We’re regular people, too. We have families that care about us,” said Johnson, who is in a longterm relationship but still struggles with a heroin addiction. “What (happened) affected a lot of people.”
Johnson filed a civil suit in 2014 that alleged he was sexually assaulted three times in MacDougall’s Oakalla office in 1986 and 1987, when he was 21 and 22 years old and serving a two-year sentence for a break-in.
Errol Johnson is photographed in Vancouver. [PNG Merlin Archive]
Johnson’s allegations have not been proven in court. He has paused his own civil claim to join a new, proposed “representative action” lawsuit — which is similar to a class-action suit — along with 60 other men with unsettled civil suits against MacDougall.
Errol Johnson is photographed in Vancouver. [PNG Merlin Archive]
MacDougall was convicted of sexually abusing five young inmates in 2000, and the trial judge, Justice Mary Ellen Boyd, found the accused had “extensive power” over his victims, offering parole applications or prison transfers in exchange for sexual favours. If the inmates declined his demands, he would threaten to make their lives far more difficult behind bars, Boyd’s reasons for sentencing said.
MacDougall maintained his innocence at the trial, but was given a four-year sentence.
About half of the 200 civil suits are now completed, some with court-ordered payouts by the provincial government, others with private, out-of-court settlements, and some were dismissed.
An undated photo of Roderic MacDougall taken before 2005.
In 2004, the B.C. Supreme Court awarded Joe Brown (a pseudonym to protect the sex-assault plaintiff’s identity) $275,000 after finding that in 1988, when he was 18 years old in Oakalla, he was twice forced to submit to fellatio by MacDougall in exchange for a promised transfer to a lower-security facility.
Justice Bruce Cohen wrote in his reasons for judgment that Brown had resorted to crime to support his cocaine addiction before entering jail, but there was no evidence from his past to conclude his life would spiral into more serious addiction or that he would spend a large part of his adult life in jail.
So, Cohen concluded, Brown had “suffered a myriad of psychological injuries as a result of the sexual assaults.” Cohen agreed with a psychologist who testified at the trial that the abuse “contributed to the plaintiff having a serious antisocial personality disorder, low self-esteem and chronically poor self-concept, chronic sexual anxieties, self-defeating behaviour, and exacerbated drug dependence.”
The Crown did not appeal the damage award for the sexual assault, but did appeal the $200,000 in past and future lost wages that Cohen determined Brown had been deprived of because of the sexual assaults. That appeal went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which cut Brown’s total payout to $140,000, arguing inmates cannot be compensated for income loss while in prison, except for in wrongful conviction cases.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Cohen.
The other half of the 200 civil suits remain ensnared in a long, complicated legal process that has pitted the plaintiffs against the legal weight of the provincial government, which is a co-respondent in most of the remaining cases.
The “representative action”, which must still be approved by a judge to proceed, alleges the province, through its own “systemic misconduct,” failed to respond to the many complaints about its employee and therefore “facilitated the sexual assaults.” It alleges that MacDougall may be “one of Canada’s most prolific sexual offenders, with more than 200 former inmates who have already come forward.”
The province and MacDougall have not yet filed statements of defence and the allegations made in the representative action remain unproven.
Cristen Gleeson, a lawyer with Baker Newby in Chilliwack, has represented roughly 70 inmates who have alleged sexual abuse while inside B.C. prisons. Her clients were profoundly affected, she said.
“Oh, horrific, just horrific effects. Loss of confidence, fear, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression,” she said.
“I can’t even imagine the horror. … You have absolutely no recourse. Your helplessness is appalling, it really is. There is no way out, there is no where to go.”
At least six of the men who have alleged abuse by MacDougall have died “as a result of their own attempts to self-medicate and/or addiction” since 2016, the representative action alleges.
Peter Muni
One of those men was Peter Muni, who joined Johnson in the 2014 civil suit. But he passed away in October 2017, at age 52, after battling a drug addiction for many years, his sister-in-law Sharda Muni said in an interview.
“He was the greatest guy. He just had issues with drugs. This guy would give the clothes off his back, food out of his mouth,” said Sharda, who is married to Peter’s brother James.
The lawsuit alleged that in 1986, when Muni was 19 years old, he was allegedly abused at Oakalla in exchange for preferential treatment in jail. The allegations have not been proven in court, and Muni’s name was removed from the lawsuit after his death.
When Postmedia spoke with Sharda, she said his family never knew about the alleged abuse or the lawsuit, which he may have been hesitant to share because of the stigma. These taboo subjects can be difficult to discuss in more traditional families, she added.
“It’s sad that he’s an Indian kid, an immigrant kid, and his voice wasn’t heard,” she said. “Peter could not find that straight line to walk, but he tried many times.”
One of the 60 pending claimants listed in the representative action told Postmedia that his experience as a young man at Oakalla in the mid-1980s had a profoundly negative impact on not only his own life, but the lives of those around him.
“I’m really concerned about the extended families,” said the man, now 54, who asked to be identified only as H.
He kicked his drug addiction after his last conviction in 2016, and said British Columbians should care about abuse inside jails, even if they don’t believe they or their family members will ever be in prison.
“I don’t think they should care about this any less than (abuse in) the Catholic Church or the residential schools,” he said.
Saturday: A jail guard, the government and 200 inmates
Monday: A failure to improve oversight
Tuesday: Life sentences of shame and fear
Wednesday: A long road through the courts
Twitter: @loriculbert
Twitter: @fumano