Residents of Ahuntsic-Cartierville say living near Quebec’s largest prison is bad enough and they worry it will get worse if a second detention centre is built next door.
When Christine Barakett purchased a duplex in Ahuntsic-Cartierville two years ago, she thought the abandoned jail behind her backyard’s barbed-wire fence would be replaced by a residential development with a park and a school.
Young families, attracted by the borough’s redevelopment plan and the promise of a school, were moving into the area, including her daughter, son-in-law and their two children, age four and two, with whom she shares the duplex.
Instead, the provincial government is now planning to rebuild the Maison Tanguay jail, bringing more than 200 women awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than two years to an area that’s already home to the Établissement de détention de Montréal, better known as the Bordeaux Prison, Quebec’s largest correctional facility.
“When we bought here two years ago, there was no announcement as far as a prison,” Barakett said in an interview.
Now she worries that with an increase in the number of prisoners in the area, it will become more dangerous.
“We want to feel safe in our neighbourhood, it’s our right to feel safe,” she said.
Barakett and other neighbours say living next to the hulking Bordeaux Prison is already bad enough and they worry existing problems will only get worse once the new women’s detention centre opens.
Residents worry that the $400-million plan for the new Maison Tanguay — which would replace the Leclerc jail — is just the beginning: While the new facility is only supposed to house 237 prisoners, the amount of land being marked off by the provincial government is raising fears the government could expand it.
It’s a debate that raises questions about the use of land in Montreal and the treatment of those held in the existing Leclerc jail for women.
“In 2024, no civilized country would construct a second prison squeezed between the houses of a fully developed residential area,” said Barakett’s neighbour Sam-Philip Maliha, especially so close to one of the largest jails in the country, he noted.
For Martin Chapdelaine, who has formed a committee with Barakett, Maliha and several other neighbours to oppose the project, it feels like the neighbourhood is being penalized.
“It’s enough,” Chapdelaine said. “The neighbourhood, which is a small neighbourhood of single-family homes, shouldn’t have to carry (what feels like) the entire prison population of the province.”
A petition their committee has circulated against the new jail has received more than 2,000 signatures.
Residents say the Bordeaux Prison is already a big enough source of problems in the neighbourhood.
Completed in 1912, the Bordeaux jail is almost the quintessential image of a prison, with it high stone walls and long rows of cells stretching out from a domed central hall like the spokes of a wheel. With a capacity of more than 1,300 inmates, it holds people awaiting trial and those serving sentences of less than two years. It is bigger than any of the nine federal institutions in the province, which hold prisoners serving sentences of more than two years.
Criminals use drones to deliver drugs and other contraband over the walls; when inmates have birthdays, sometimes friends outside set off fireworks on the street; and bright security lights illuminate the night, Barakett said, while the abandoned Maison Tanguay has become a destination for urban explorers who post their exploits on social media.
“It’s hell,” Barakett said. “There’s not one week where I don’t call the police, either me or my neighbours, because there’s always someone going over the fence.”
At times, contraband cargo has fallen by drones and witnesses have been intimidated by the smugglers, Chapdelaine said. In one case, Barakett said, a drone carrying drugs crashed on the roof of nearby Ahuntsic elementary school.
From Maliha’s backyard, about a block and a half away from Barakett’s home, the imposing walls of Bordeaux aren’t far away. He points out where the provincial corrections service has patched holes in the barbed-wire fence.
Between December 2017 and January 2020, Louise Henry spent a total of 13 months at the Leclerc jail, after she was arrested for fraud. Conditions at the prison were so bad they pushed her to plead guilty and ask her lawyers to seek a sentence of more than two years so that she could serve it in a federal institution, she said.
“I wasn’t the only one who did that,” she said in an interview. “I would have been suicidal if I stayed there.”
When the federal government decided Leclerc was no longer suitable for men, “the prison was in a state of ruin, the heating didn’t work, the water wasn’t good anymore,” she said, but those problems weren’t fixed before Quebec started sending women to the facility.
Henry, who wrote a book about her experiences, is now the representative plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of all women who have been held at Leclerc since September 2019.
The lawsuit alleges that holding women in the decaying jail amounts to cruel and unusual punishment because of its physical conditions, as well as “dehumanizing” practices that include frequent strip searches that are described as abusive and a systemic lack of access to medical care.
Flies, mosquitoes and pigeons enter the building through the open windows that don’t have screens, the proposed lawsuit alleges, rodents are regularly seen in living areas, and there are persistent ant infestations.
Mould and mushrooms grow on the walls, according to the request for authorization, while brown water and fruit flies often come out of the pipes, including the showers, and hot water is regularly not available.
In the winter, snow comes into cells through holes in the walls, Henry said, and in the colder months, women sleep in winter coats. “You have to go outside to go to the infirmary, which is in another wing and the interior walls are crumbling so you can’t get through,” she said.
Prisoners are strip searched every time they enter or leave the jail, the proposed suit alleges, and often while moving within the jail, such as after visits with family, or when returning from work in the facility’s laundry.
The invasive searches, which involve a visual inspection inside the woman’s vagina and anus, are particularly degrading, the suit alleges, and are conducted on women returning from medical appointments, such as cancer treatments, and on women who return to the jail from court appearances to pick up property or sign documents before being released.
Conditions were better at the federal prison in Joliette, Henry said, where there were programs and classes intended to help women prepare to reintegrate into society.
According to the proposed lawsuit, strip searches are less frequent and less invasive at the federal facility.
But despite her feelings about the Leclerc jail, Henry said she doesn’t think a new $400-million facility is the answer.
Given the small number of women in Quebec jails — fewer than 300 — smaller facilities, more like halfway houses, could be built around the province and help give women tools they need to live in the community, she said, adding that most women in provincial jails need help, not guards with batons.
Her lawyer, Clara Poissant-Lespérance, said the government doesn’t need to wait for a new building to start treating incarcerated women with dignity and providing appropriate health care.
“If it’s the same staff and the same ways of doing things that continue in the new establishment, the problem won’t be fixed,” she said.
Most sentences at Leclerc are short, rarely longer than 90 days, Poissant-Lespérance said, but they’re still long enough to disrupt a woman’s life. Many lose their apartments while they’re detained, and many have to find someone to take care of their children while they’re inside.
Henry said one of her fellow inmates at Leclerc — who was serving a three-and-a-half-month sentence for drug possession — had a medical condition that went untreated because of poor access to health care in the facility and ultimately had a leg amputated.
“Her sentence will continue for life, even though the debt she had to pay to society was only a few months of incarceration,” said Poissant-Lespérance.
The provincial government declined to comment on Henry’s allegations, citing the fact that the matter is before the courts.
Some other countries are moving away from the type of short sentences that generally send women to Leclerc and will send women to the new Tanguay jail, said Chloé Leclerc, a criminology professor at the Université de Montréal.
Around 70 per cent of women in Quebec’s two provincial prisons for women are there for 30 days or less, she said, while another 15 per cent have sentences of less than six months.
For offenders like that, who are often jailed for breaching probation conditions, prison isn’t the answer, she said.
“I think what women need is someone who will take the time to listen to them and have the time with them to see what their needs are and how they can help them, it’s not to be removed from society for a short time, become completely disrupted and then get sent back into society like that — that’s clearly not what they need,” Leclerc said.
Women who are incarcerated in Canada tend to have more mental health needs than men, said Amélie Couvrette, a professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais whose research focuses include imprisoned women. They’re also more likely to have had relations problems with their families and are more likely to use drugs or alcohol than incarcerated men.
Prisons in Canada are built for men, she said, and efforts need to be made to adapt them for women.
The Quebec government says the Leclerc facility in Laval was only meant to be used as a temporary measure and that the new jail in Montreal will be adapted to the needs and realities of the women who will be held there.
“It is essential for Quebec to have a detention facility that meets the specific needs of female inmates,” Louise Quintin, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Security, wrote in an email.
Other sites were considered for the new facility, Quintin said, but the old Tanguay jail was the only one that met all of the government’s requirements. Those include environmental considerations, as well as the site’s proximity to courthouses, public transit and community organizations.
“The site chosen belongs to the Quebec government and has been used for prisons for more than 100 years,” she said.
Quintin said the new jail could be expanded in the future, but also provided statistics showing that its proposed capacity is equivalent to the number of women currently imprisoned in Quebec’s two provincial jails that hold women, Leclerc and the Quebec City detention centre.
In 2022-2023, there was an average of slightly less than 237 women in provincial custody at any given time, down from a peak of more than 329 in 2015-2016, according to ministry data. Over the past 14 years, the province has incarcerated an average of around 264 women at any given time.
The government understands residents’ concerns, she said and is trying to work with them, holding information sessions and community meetings, posting information online and organizing a “good neighbours committee” whose members will include local residents.
Incarcerated women are also less dangerous than men, she said.
“For example, there was only one serious assault between people incarcerated at the Leclerc detention centre in Laval over a five-year period, between April 1, 2017 and March 31, 2022, and no escape attempts, escapes, hostage takings, riots or disturbances during the same period,” she wrote.
Events involving drones are also relatively rare when compared with men’s prisons, she said, with only four reported in 2022-2023.
The government’s position — that the site has been used for prisons for more than a century — misses the point, said Chapdelaine.
When Bordeaux was built, the area was farmland, he said. Since then, a residential neighbourhood has grown around the jail.
As for the public meetings and the “good neighbours committee,” that’s not enough for Chapdelaine and the other members of the committee. He said they’re essentially being asked what colour they want the walls of the new jail, rather than whether they want a jail at all.
The local member of the National Assembly, André Morin, a Liberal, said there wasn’t enough consultation. When the project was first presented to residents, it seemed like it was already a done deal.
Morin, who tabled the residents’ petition at the National Assembly, said he understands the concerns about drug drones and security issues.
“If the Department of Public Security builds a new jail, which is larger than the one that’s there already, that will increase the number of these dangerous events and the people in my riding fear for their security and I understand why and I believe them,” he said in an interview.
His riding of Acadie is increasingly home to young families, he said, and there’s a need for another school. He’d prefer to see the province work with the city to develop needed housing on the Tanguay site, not build another jail.
“Unfortunately, we have not been listened to.”
Other sites could have been considered for the new jail, he said, such as around the existing Rivière-des-Prairies detention centre near Montreal’s eastern tip.
“It’s a bad plan,” he said.
In a response to the petition tabled at the National Assembly, Public Security Minister François Bonnardel said sites in eastern Montreal were rejected because of security concerns or because they were too contaminated.
The site of the Leclerc jail in Laval was unsuitable because of environmental considerations, as well as its location too far from community services and the Montreal courthouse, he wrote, while a proposed site in Joliette was rejected because power lines would have made it difficult to secure and also because of its distance from Montreal.
In an emailed statement, Bonnardel’s office said ministry staff and representatives of the provincial infrastructure company, the Société québécoise des infrastructures, have taken steps to meet with residents before and during construction.
“We have always been open to hearing the concerns of citizens in order to identify the measures required to reduce the impact and the nuisances experienced during the reconstruction of the Tanguay Institution,” the statement reads.
On June 25, Bonnardel visited the neighbourhood and spoke to residents — a meeting that Morin and members of the committee had long been asking for.
But Maliha said the meeting was a disappointment. Bonnardel just repeated that the area has been used for carceral purposes for 100 years, he said.
“This past 100 years, the whole area became residential. If you wish to expropriate all the houses on Tanguay and Poincaré and put a fence on the street and declare the whole sector is carceral, maybe that will work,” Mariah said, referring to the two residential streets that border the jails. “But you cannot put a prison in front of our face, a second one.”
While Bonnardel asked residents what could be done to minimize the impact of the new jail, the main details, such as the size of the project, didn’t appear to be up for reconsideration, Maliha said. “You take a pig and you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.”
Ahuntsic-Cartierville Borough Mayor Émilie Thuillier said her borough’s thinking hasn’t changed since 2016, when it developed a plan to replace the jail, then in the process of closing, with housing, a school, a park and businesses along Henri-Bourassa Boulevard.
“For us, that remains the shared vision of the borough and the community,” Thuillier said.
Building housing on the land could have been a way for the provincial government to help address the housing shortage in Montreal.
But there’s little the city can do, she said; the land is owned by the provincial government, which doesn’t have to abide by municipal bylaws and regulations.
Thuillier said her borough administration is now trying to ensure the province listens to residents and does what it can to reduce the impact.
Chapdelaine said he has accepted that there’s one jail in his neighbourhood, but he worries a second will tip the balance between the area’s residential and carceral uses.
It’s not an issue of not in my backyard, Chapdelaine said. “It’s not again in my backyard, because we already have one.”