Prison discipline without context

To survive in prison, many prisoners must resort to violence—not because they want to, but because they have to. 

Yet across the ten provincial BC jails where I worked as an internal adjudicator of internal discipline charges against prisoners, the zero-tolerance policy does not recognize self-defence. A violent act is a policy violation, period. Whether a prisoner protected themselves or instigated the altercation, they faced the exact same consequence and the exact same institutional charge.

Senior management rarely reviewed all of the evidence to determine if a prisoner had acted out of necessity. Instead, the reporting officer’s account was taken at face value, even if that officer was sitting far away behind a desk, or delayed in responding to the incident. 

For the prisoners involved, this almost always meant being sent to “the hole”—confined in isolation for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact—while awaiting a disciplinary hearing. 

Days, sometimes weeks, would pass before a prisoner held in isolation had a hearing and appeared before me. The hole wore them down until they wanted the hearing over with so they could be reclassified and returned to a regular range. In one case, a prisoner waived their right to a lawyer and insisted on proceeding out of fear of being kept in the hole longer. After 40 days in isolation—a practice recognized as torture —their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) made any further waiting unbearable.

During the hearing, the officer presenting the institution’s case would play the video footage. Almost no one had watched it prior to the hearing, yet once played, it was immediately clear who had initiated the violence, and who had been trying to survive. If the footage had been reviewed beforehand, the jail could have used its discretion not to invoke administrative segregation. 

When the video footage fell short, largely because it lacked audio, giving the accused an opportunity to explain their actions helped fill in the gaps. Their words revealed a reality the footage couldn’t capture.

One prisoner explained fighting to prevent future attacks: 

“Spence kept calling me a ‘goof’ in front of everyone on the range. Here, if you let that kind of disrespect slide, you put a target on your back—it’s an open invitation for anyone to test you or get at you when you least expect it. I sat on it for a second, weighed my options, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to fight him to protect myself.”

Another prisoner described being backed into his cell over a meal dispute:

“Jack followed me all the way back to my house and shut the door. I wasn’t looking for trouble, but he boxed me in. The whole thing started earlier over food. I’m working as a meal server, and he demanded an extra tray. I couldn’t hook him up, so he lost his mind.”

For others, violence was about defending someone who couldn’t defend themselves:

“My only goal was to stand up for my friend Robert. As the unit rep, I spent time trying to mediate the situation before it blew up. CO Kent was right there; he watched as the whole situation escalated throughout the day and saw me trying to deal with it. I was angry with Dave, who was acting arrogant and assaulted Robert, who is significantly smaller than him and couldn’t defend himself. I wasn’t about to stand by.” 

Under the zero-tolerance policy, these individuals were sent to the hole and charged as the aggressor.

Prisons are meant to reduce crime and keep the public safe, yet on the inside, they systematically produce violence. When an individual is defenceless, the correctional  system does not protect them. Instead, to survive, incarcerated individuals are forced into violent behaviour, only to be punished for acting out of necessity. 

To end this cycle of violence in BC provincial prisons, corrections administrators must overhaul rigid zero-tolerance policies and account for the real circumstances that force incarcerated individuals to protect themselves. Once the dangers posed to incarcerated people are recognized, human-centered practice and training can lead to solution-oriented approaches to resolving disputes.

Author’s Note: The cases are drawn from my experience as an external independent decision-maker presiding over disciplinary hearings for BC Corrections (2021–2023). Identifying details have been changed to respect confidentiality and protect privacy.

Explore the Terms: To better understand the institutional terms used in this post, you can explore my Beyond the Bars Prison Glossary.

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Meet Harpreet: Harpreet Ahuja is a lawyer, human rights consultant, and social justice advocate driven by the conviction that systems need reimagining. Her work explores the intersection of law, policy, and lived experience—and tells the human stories behind injustice. Harpreet is based in Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and publishes on her website.