Dawn Ostrem
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 25/00) - Corrections officials are eagerly awaiting the construction of a new facility.

As it stands, inmates at the Yellowknife Correction Centre (YCC) are crammed into small rooms complete with thin walls that allow the echoes of the kitchen, muffled voices and hallway noises to seep through.

Some of the rooms are for schooling and healing and deputy warden Guy Leblanc, who operates the facility's programming, said the current building doesn't accommodate these efforts well.

There are five dorms in the centre, each occupied by 20 inmates, some sleeping, others playing cards or watching TV.

"If you want to go and reflect on what you've learned, it's difficult to do," he said, adding he's optimistic the new jail will offer better options.

"Instead of being in a dorm environment there will be units of 30 to 40 cells with a case manager assigned to each unit."

There are also two cell blocks units where inmates who need protective custody or are deemed security risks reside. Eight cells make up a unit.

The jail currently holds 123 inmates and at 150 they can manage reasonably well, but there have been times the count was as high as 200.

A new adult facility is expected to be built by 2003 and a youth facility by 2002.

They are both currently in the blueprint stages but will eventually take the place of the pieced together YCC.

The original jail was built to hold 32 inmates.

Expanded to fit need

Additions have been constructed and the facility looks like a patchwork quilt of walls.

The new jail will offer spirituality rooms and healing rooms, living spaces and a new gym. The current gym has cracks crawling through the walls and waves of warps and bubbles in the floor.

The new dining room will be large enough to enable YCC employees to deal with meal times in one shift instead of two, which is how it presently goes.

"We've already gone through about six major renovations and the environment here is not really conducive to healing," added Warden Doug Friesen.

A little further down the hall, an open visitation room holds one small table tightly crammed between closed-in walls.

Closed visitation is a tiny hallway partitioned by glass with typical telephone-like handsets on either side.

Further yet, is a dark room with a couple corrections officers looking through glass. That's for suicide watch, usually occupied by at least one inmate.

On the other end of the jail is the room that was once used for carving, clouded over with months-old dust on the floors and walls.

The public was fairly aware of the carving program, in which inmates worked on art projects to sell at an annual exhibit.

The carving facility was condemned by the fire marshall and Worker's Compensation Board in the spring, and therefore, so was the program.

"To bring it up to standards we would have to spend over $100,000 on it," Friesen said.

It will start up again as more of a learning program in 2003 when the new adult facility is built.

"This will be a correction centre but the focus of the centre will be for healing," Friesen said.

Working on his GED at a desk crowded into a small classroom one inmate studies intently what he's reading, pencil in hand and nose pointing down to the paper on his desk.

The illustration is one of potential benefit to him and to society.

But his desk is crammed into a small room and the muffled sounds of television and hallway noises bounce off the walls.

Inmates, as well as corrections employees, may be looking forward to a different picture, conducive to reformation, within the next three years.