Now I'll go to my comments on COVID-19.
During COVID-19, there has been less CSC oversight than ever, making prisoners even more vulnerable to abuse. This lack of oversight, we believe, has contributed to unacceptable and unlawful conditions of confinement during COVID-19 that were certainly not contemplated or foreseen by the courts at the time of sentencing of most of the prisoners.
From the very beginning of the pandemic, CAEFS, our organization, joined the calls of prisoners, prisoners' families, prisoner rights groups, academics, politicians, lawyers, health care experts and other NGOs, like the John Howard Society, which I believe you will hear from in the next hour or perhaps next half hour, to depopulate the prisons as quickly as possible. This was following the advice of the World Health Organization and actions taken by other states to keep people in prison safe. These calls were not heeded, and it resulted in prisoners being kept in torturous conditions of confinement and further exposed to the deadly virus.
We have documented conditions of confinement that have been implemented at different times for varying lengths of time throughout the last year and a half, which I can't go into because of time, but I will answer any questions you may have about them.
A commonality in the conditions is this restriction of access to mechanisms that support the well-being of prisoners, their timely release and CSC oversight. We are concerned that the conditions under which people have been held have not been to protect their health but rather for the operational convenience of CSC. All of this could have been prevented if the prisons had taken the calls for depopulation seriously and had taken swift action. CSC's operational restrictions cannot and must not be downloaded to restrict the rights and the well-being of prisoners.
Finally, with regard to the structured intervention units, I will try to be very brief, as you have the experts in the room here today, on the lack of transparency, clarity and reporting. We support all the findings of the reports put out by Dr. Doob and Dr. Sprott.
Since the changes to the CCRA through Bill C-83, we have observed that the unconstitutional practice of segregation, often colloquially referred to as solitary confinement, is ongoing. Prisoners are still experiencing the same human rights violations as they were prior to the court rulings of 2019.