It was late September 2023 when correctional officers discovered four tennis balls wrapped together with electric tape, which appeared to have been thrown over the fence of the Fort Frances Jail in northern Ontario.
Inside the bundle, guards found Android and Apple chargers, cigarettes and a leafy green substance they believed was marijuana.
They searched the jail the next day, looking for the cellphone they assumed the cables had been thrown over the wall to charge. They found a portable charger, more cigarettes and a lighter; they couldn’t find a phone.
The search was one of many across the province’s overcrowded jail system in 2023, as correctional officers attempted to keep up with a wave of contraband, overdoses and understaffing.
Hundreds of pages of contraband reports obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws paint a picture of a jail system where illegal drugs, from cocaine to MDMA or fentanyl, are regularly found, along with weapons and occasionally technology.
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The government said contraband was “unacceptable and not tolerated,” pointing to the introduction of enhanced searches and scanners.
Some, however, believe it is a symptom of an over-worked and under-resourced correctional service, which is struggling to manage over-capacity jail facilities.
“It’s a broken system and the current government lacks the will to even try to repair it,” Norman Taylor, who worked on a landmark report on deaths in Ontario’s jail system, said.
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“We’ve got jails that are so crowded people are sleeping three to a two-bed cell, one on the floor, all their programming is cancelled, all their access to health care is limited. About the only thing that works well is contraband. Somehow that flows like gravy.”
Last year, Global News requested all the reports of contraband in Ontario’s jails for the year 2023 to understand what is being found inside the province’s correctional facilities. It took the government roughly six months to pull together the full list, which included drug seizures, sharpened blades and charging cables.
The drugs ranged from 40 grams of methamphetamine found in the Kenora jail in February to 25 grams of fentanyl in Hamilton Wentworth Detention Centre in March.
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Officers discovered 3.5 grams of cocaine in the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre in December, as well as diluted morphine and MDMA in the same facility in May.
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The seizures generally came after searches of inmates or their rooms. On March 28, 2023, for example, guards found a large bulge in an inmate’s socks; inside was stuffed roughly $12,000 worth of cocaine and fentanyl.
Other instances suggest correctional officers may be finding only a fraction of the contraband in Ontario’s jails.
At the Niagara Detention Centre in early March, a search revealed “remnants of fentanyl,” which was discovered on “various wrappers” around the cell. Another case involved an officer observing an inmate snorting a white powder.
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For years, the province’s jails have struggled with a flow of illegal drugs and overdose deaths. An investigation by an expert panel, including Taylor, released at the beginning of 2023, found that toxic drug overdoses were a major cause of inmate deaths in Ontario.
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The panel examined patterns in 186 deaths that occurred from 2014 to 2021 and said almost every life lost could be deemed preventable. It said almost 40 per cent of the deaths examined occurred after inmates consumed a toxic drug, and deaths by suicide accounted for 24 per cent.
The report said there is a severe lack of accountability and transparency, and there needs to be a focus on the well-being of inmates and staff in Ontario correctional facilities.
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At the same time that correctional officers try to track down contraband, jails are facing staffing issues and a growing number of violent incidents and attacks on guards.
The number of incidents of staff being assaulted by inmates increased from 545 in 2017 to 953 in 2024, according to figures from the union. That’s a jump of 75 per cent. Inmate-on-staff violent incidents, which include assault, attempted assault and threats, also increased from 1,574 in 2017 to 1,929 in 2024.
Chad Oldfield, with the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, said overworked staff can have a larger “margin of error” when it comes to trying to find contraband or stopping it from getting in in the first place.
“We’ve been dealing with an opioid epidemic for years,” he said. “We’ve been advocating for better protection, better ways to detect, better ways to respond to overdoses when we’re dealing with them.”
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He said staffing was made worse by the number of people inside Ontario’s jails.
“We’re experiencing probably the worst overcapacity issues that we’ve ever seen, which is really just going to stress all of these other issues,” Oldfield said. “We just don’t have enough beds in Ontario.”
As recently a June, Ontario’s Ombudsman found the province’s jails were in a “growing crisis,” triggering a “staggering” increase in complaints to his office.
“Ontario’s correctional system is in urgent need of meaningful, systemic reform — not only to relieve pressure on overcrowded facilities and burned-out staff, but to realign the system with its rehabilitative purpose,” he wrote.
“This is a matter of public safety, human rights, and basic decency. We cannot afford to ignore it any longer.”
A spokesperson for the solicitor general’s office said work was underway to improve the tools available to jails to detect contraband.
“Plans are also underway to pilot drone detection systems to prevent the delivery of contraband onto institution property,” they told Global News. ” These initiatives are in addition to other existing technology and tactics, such as body scanners, metal detectors, and canine units.”
The government also plans to build more than 1,000 new jail beds over the next few years.
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Two years after finishing his report, however, Taylor said he is concerned that little has actually changed in Ontario’s jails.
“They’re not even trying —that’s all I can see, they’re not even trying,” he said.
“If this was any other aspect of human enterprise, people would be fired for the intransigence at moving forward.”
— with files from The Canadian Press
