‘It was fully ignored’: This woman’s medical emergency in Ontario jail reflects broader health-care crisis

Ashley Stevens has scars inside and out from her time in an Ontario jail.

It’s not because she was involved in violent confrontations with other inmates, but because she suffered a miscarriage and then an unrelated infection.

“I got sepsis,” said Stevens, who was treated at an Ottawa-area hospital. “The doctor even said if I didn’t come in when I did, I would have been dead.”

Earlier this year, Stevens, 30, spent four months at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre for crimes related to domestic violence — uttering threats, mischief and assault. She was initially granted bail, but ended up in jail after breaching her conditions.

The day she was sent to jail, she found out she was pregnant. It would be her fourth baby.

Weeks into her incarceration, she knew something was wrong.

“I kept telling the nurses I’m still bleeding a lot,” she said.

Stevens said she bled for five days before she was sent to the hospital, where it was confirmed she’d lost the baby.

When she returned to jail, she noticed a wound on her left buttock that was painful and swollen.

“I was just feeling really sick, but not, like, pregnancy sick. I felt like I was dying, and I ended up passing out,” said Stevens.

She was taken back to hospital and had surgery to remove the failed pregnancy from her uterus. While there, Stevens said a doctor told her the wound on her buttocks had gone septic.

“It was fully ignored… I was pulling my pants down, showing [correctional officers] my infection,” said Stevens, to which the officers replied, “‘Don’t worry, just stay off of it and if it gets worse, just let us know.’”

She said she had little contact with jail medical staff because “to see the doctor, you’re only allowed to see him once a month, and you get to see him for a few seconds.”

Stevens’s struggle to get care is not unique. According to CBC’s analysis, complaints filed by inmates have doubled over the past six years.

‘These are not frivolous claims’

More than a third of the complaints received between January and June 2025 were related to health care — primarily access to doctors and nurses and issues around medication.

“The health complaints jump off the page. These are not frivolous claims,” said University of Ottawa criminology professor Justin Piché, one of two researchers who read CBC’s findings.

“People with health issues and with mental health issues often end up behind bars. When they end up there, they still require care, but it’s in short supply,” he said. “They don’t have enough staff … enough resources for that, and the prison is not a hospital.”

WATCH | Too many prisoners, too few staff:

Jails lack staff, resources to properly deliver health care, criminology prof says

University of Ottawa criminology professor Justin Piché says health complaints in Ontario jails ‘jump off the page.’

When accounting for the significant increase in prisoner population, complaints have gone from the equivalent of nine complaints for every 100 inmates in 2019 to 17 per 100 inmates in 2024.

The figures were obtained as part of a larger CBC investigation that revealed Ontario jails are also heading toward a record year for overcrowding, remand populations and lockdowns, just as politicians debate bail reforms that could lead to a further influx of people behind bars.

The Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, which is responsible for provincial correctional facilities that house prisoners with sentences of less than two years and those on remand, said it could not comment on Stevens’s case because it involved personal medical information.

In an email to CBC News, it said there are policies and procedures in place to respond to situations where an inmate is in medical distress or requires hospitalization. 

“Each facility has primary care practitioners responsible for the provision of primary medical services,” the ministry said. “Inmates have access to health care practitioners, such as nurses, nurse practitioners and physicians.” 

Government-employed medical staff dropped by nearly 50%

CBC also obtained daily staff counts for all jails — including correctional officers, medical staff, social workers and programming staff — for January 2019 to June 2025. (The government data does not specify whether these positions were permanent or temporary, full or part-time.)

The figures suggest jails employed hundreds more medical staff before and during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, more than 1,000 medical professionals were considered “active staff”; by 2025, that had dropped to around 550.

The statistics are not surprising to Piché. “If you talk to nurses or doctors, they’re already finding it extremely difficult to work in hospitals. They’re going to go and work in a prison?”

Adam Cygler, co-chair of the occupational stress and injury subcommittee for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), said nurses contracted through agencies have been brought in to boost staff levels, but it’s not enough.

A CBC investigation has found that Ontario’s jail population has increased by more than 30 per cent since 2019.

“Everybody is just being run off their feet, because there’s 30 per cent more people to provide services to, and we don’t have the staff alongside to be able to continue to do that,” said Cygler, who is also a social worker at the Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton.

In an email, the Ontario Solicitor General’s office told CBC “correctional capacity has also been supported by hiring over 2,500 new staff — including correctional officers, mental health counselors, nurses and other professionals.”

‘We’re in a health-care crisis’

Dr. Louisa Marion-Bellemare, who works in an Ontario jail, said access to health care isn’t just a corrections problem.

“If we’re in a health-care crisis outside of jails or provincial corrections, then there’s also a crisis for health-care providers within provincial corrections,” said Marion-Bellemare, a physician with a focus in addictions and Indigenous health.

Before building more jails as a solution to overcrowding, Marion-Bellemare said leaders should take a step back and look at who’s currently detained. For example, she estimates more than 95 per cent of the patients she assesses in jail have substance-use disorders and are significantly sicker than 20 years ago.

“They do cocaine, drink alcohol, do crystal meth and fentanyl. It’s a much more complex patient,” she said.

With limited resources, she said jail staff have to triage problems.

“As health-care professionals, that is the ethical thing to do,” said Marion-Bellemare. “Because we have limited health-care resources, we must see the sickest people first.”

She also said more programs and transitional housing are needed to support people suffering from addiction and mental health problems before they land in jail.

“What’s going to solve this problem is keeping people out of jail in the first place,” she said.

Piché says the way society perceives the most vulnerable is also an issue. “When we see public drug use, people living with mental health issues … people who are unhoused or encampments, it makes us uncomfortable,” said Piché. “They’re not going to find care in cages.”

Judge acknowledges hardship in sentencing

In April, Ashley Stevens pleaded guilty to some of the charges against her and was sentenced to another 30 days in jail.

Stevens’s lawyer, Nevada McEniry-Hatajlo, told CBC that during sentencing, the judge acknowledged her client’s medical hardship in jail when handing out punishment.

“The judge had seen everything that I had went through,” said Stevens, who has now recovered from the infection, but is still coming to terms with the miscarriage.

Judges have already stayed cases or given shorter sentences, citing a variety of conditions for detainees in Ontario jails.

“I think judges are becoming much more aware of it,” said Ontario Sen. Kim Pate, who is also the former executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

“The waits and the conditions of confinement to which they’re subjected means that oftentimes, judges are trying to compensate for that.”