When Denise Warriner decided to not bail her nephew out of jail, she thought she was helping him.

Theo was addicted to crystal meth and had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had been in a “downward spiral” since his mother’s death a few years earlier, Warriner said.

She had bailed Theo out before, but it didn’t seem to do him any good. It felt to her like he was stuck in an endless cycle of addiction-fueled crime.

If he was in jail, Warriner figured, she would at least know where he was and he wouldn’t be able to use drugs.

“I thought he would be protected from himself.”

Given what she now knows about the conditions in Ontario’s jails — the overcrowding, the lack of mental health care, the drugs — Warriner feels incredibly naive.

“This will haunt me to my last breath, but I trusted that he would be safe.”

Theo Warriner-Bowen died of a fentanyl overdose in his cell at the Toronto South Detention Centre in October 2023. The 29-year-old, who was awaiting trial on drug and assault charges, is one of 162 inmates who died in Ontario’s jails in the last four years — the deadliest period in the province’s history for people behind bars.

The largest driver of jail deaths are illegal drugs smuggled inside.

While Premier Doug Ford and federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre are both touting bail-reform policies that would see more people incarcerated, Ontario’s jails are deadlier and arguably more dysfunctional than they have ever been.

Chronically overcrowded and understaffed, the province’s jails have recently been described by judges as “deplorable,” “disgraceful,” “unsanitary,” “inhumane,” “appalling” and “unworthy of us as a society.”

Roughly three quarters of inmates in these jails are awaiting trial and have not been convicted.

“If the Canadian public heard that one of our citizens was being held in similar conditions in a foreign prison, especially while presumed innocent of any charges against them, they would be outraged, as they should be,” Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy wrote in a sentencing decision last year.

The Ministry of the Solicitor General, which is responsible for provincial jails, did not directly respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Solicitor General Michael Kerzner declined an interview request, but a spokesperson for his office issued a short statement, blaming the problems with Ontario’s jails on previous Liberal governments.

“Since 2018 we have made historic investments to repair the damage, including over $500 million to build new facilities, repair existing ones, and hire more corrections staff,” Chelsea McGee said. “Our message to repeat and violent criminals is clear — we have room for you in our jails. Dangerous criminals who are repeat offenders should stay behind bars for as long as possible, where they belong.”

Experts who have studied jail deaths draw a direct line between deteriorating conditions — frequent lockdowns, widespread triple-bunking, inadequate health care — and increasing deaths, including overdoses.

“We have people dying because the prisons are literally unsafe environments,” said Norm Taylor, a veteran policy adviser to governments.

Taylor recently led an in-depth study of jail deaths for Ontario’s chief coroner. Almost every death the researchers reviewed could be considered preventable, the study found.

“What we learned disturbed us to the point that we wanted to write a report that screams at people,” said Taylor. “We couldn’t stress ‘urgent’ enough.”

The researchers delivered a report to the province, which included nearly 20 recommendations on ways the system should be improved, including establishing a “capacity threshold” for all jails.

In the two years since the report was published, the number of jail deaths has gone up.

Preliminary data from 2023 shows nearly half of the 33 deaths in that year were from drug overdoses. (Causes of the 46 jail deaths that occurred last year — a record-high number — have not been publicly disclosed.)

Drugs are by far the most common form of contraband seized in jails. Over a four-year period from 2017 to 2021, there were 3,300 seizures of substances confirmed or suspected to be illegal drugs, compared to 1,102 seizures of improvised or manufactured weapons, and 1,089 incidents of all other contraband, according to ministry records obtained through a freedom-of-information request.

This was totally unknown to Warriner, who recalled her confusion when she was told her nephew died of a drug overdose. “I was like, ‘How does this happen? In a facility that’s locked down?’”

She was further taken aback when a representative of the jail — the family support liaison — seemed to suggest that drugs were just a fact of life in the jail and there was little that could be done about it.

Drugs get into jails multiple ways, according to the expert panel’s report. They can be hidden in the body cavities of inmates entering custody, snuck in by visitors, lawyers or jail guards, or even delivered by drones that fly over a prison’s walls to make clandestine drops.

Correctional officers and other staff are not required to go through a body scanner when they enter a jail, unlike inmates, lawyers and other visitors. There is only random screening of staff.

The chief coroner’s expert panel wrote in their report they were “shocked” to discover that correctional officers are not screened every time they enter a jail.

“Not only are staff the most frequent in-bound path,” the report reads, “permitting their exemption from screening places them at great risk as ideal targets for extortion and duress.”

The Star interviewed two former corrections officials whose responsibilities included preventing contraband from entering Ontario’s jails. They estimated that approximately 75 per cent of the drugs smuggled inside are brought by jail staff, including correctional officers, kitchen workers and even managers. The correctional officers’ union vehemently denies the allegation.

At the province’s large jails, which typically have more inmates connected to organized crime, the former officials said roughly five per cent of guards would be under suspicion for dealing drugs at any given time. They stressed that most correctional staff are professional.

Rarely would internal investigators be able to collect sufficient evidence for police to lay criminal charges, they said. But sometimes an investigation would lead to staff resigning or being fired.

The former officials spoke to the Star on the condition that their names not be published because they are still employed by the province and could lose their jobs for speaking out.

Selling drugs in jail is extremely lucrative, they said, estimating average prices to be 10 times what they would be on the street. “It depends on your level of connection in the jail,” one of the former officials said. “If you’re Joe Blow and you don’t know anybody, you’re probably paying 20 times.”

The correctional officers’ union said it was “wildly inaccurate and insulting to our members” to suggest most drugs are brought into correctional facilities by staff.

“This type of baseless accusation only further reinforces the negative stereotypes of correctional officers, overshadowing the work we do on a daily basis to keep this province safe,” said Janet Laverty, chair of OPSEU’s corrections division, in an email. “I reject it completely.”

Laverty said correctional officers do their best to keep drugs out of correctional facilities, “despite the challenges of chronic understaffing, overcrowding, and limited resources.”

Criminal defence lawyer Alison Craig said all correctional staff should be scanned for drugs every time they enter a jail because they are the weakest link in any effort to stop drugs from getting in.

“Is it possible sometimes that our clients swallow a bag on their way in and then get it back out when they get inside? Sure, that happens, but it’s not easy for inmates to get drugs in there, and it’s next to impossible — if not completely impossible — for family and friends of inmates to get drugs in there. So where else can they come from?”

Laverty said any decision about increasing screening of employees “rests solely with the employer.”

She added that there are “many ways” drugs get into jails and “multiple layers of protection” are required. She cited several examples, including dedicating more staff to specialized security roles and implementing “no-fly zones” for drones around jails.

“Closing all these gaps would increase safety within correctional institutions.”

McGee, the spokesperson for the Solicitor General’s office, did not respond to questions asking what the ministry is doing to prevent jail staff from smuggling drugs into jails or why staff are not screened every time they enter a facility.

“Ontario’s correctional officers are the best in the world,” McGee said. “We hold them to high standards and every day they answer the call.”

When Hamilton police called Kylee Rogers to inform her that her brother Zak had been arrested and was being held in jail, she was actually relieved. Rogers had been unable to reach Zak for weeks.

“I was just so happy to know he was alive,” she said. “I was like, ‘He’s safe, he’s going to be fed, he’ll get his meds, we’ll figure the rest out as we go.’ ”

A registered nurse, Rogers told herself she just needed to get through her weekend shifts at the hospital and she would deal with her brother’s situation on Monday. By then, he was gone.

A 26-year-old father of three, Zak Rogers died at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre on Jan. 31, 2021. His cause of death remains undetermined and the circumstances surrounding it are unusual.

He suffered from bipolar disorder and opioid addiction, and he had been off his medications after he had trouble filling his prescriptions over the Christmas holidays. Without his medications, Rogers said, Zak had a mental health crisis and ran away from her home, where he had been staying.

He was arrested Jan. 28, 2021, and transferred to hospital a day later for an apparent drug overdose after he was found unresponsive in his cell. He was revived and treated at the hospital, then sent back to the jail around noon on Jan. 31.

He was found dead in a dry cell — a cell with no running water, used when jail authorities suspect an inmate may be hiding drugs or other contraband within their body — just hours after he had been discharged from the hospital.

A coroner’s report Rogers shared with the Star shows that Zak did have drugs in his system at the time of his death, but not enough to conclude that’s what killed him. The coroner couldn’t determine a cause of death.

Four years later Rogers still has so many questions, some of which she hopes will be answered by an eventual coroner’s inquest, which are mandatory whenever someone dies in jail and the cause is not deemed natural.

There were 17 such inquests last year, including three so-called “super inquests,” when several similar deaths at a single jail are combined. Due to a years-long backlog, some of the deaths examined last year happened more than a decade ago.

Rogers has observed several inquests into jail deaths since Zak died. With three kids and a full-time job, she has little free time, but she said she watches the inquests to support other families and to better prepare herself for her brother’s, which has not yet been scheduled.

While the stated purpose of an inquest is to make recommendations to prevent future deaths, Rogers said she has come to feel that they are often little more than “a process to appease families.” People keep dying of the same things, she said, while recommendations are ignored.

One example Rogers gave is how multiple inquest juries have recently recommended that responsibility for delivering health care in provincial jails should reside with the Ministry of Health, not the Ministry of the Solicitor General, but nothing has come from it.

Rogers would like to see the process change so that inquest recommendations are more narrowly focused, but also legally binding with institutions audited for compliance. Currently there’s no obligation for an institution to implement any recommendation.

As she speaks about her brother, Rogers holds a quilt made of some of his old clothes, a gift from her mother-in-law.

Four years since Zak died, she is still sometimes overwhelmed with sadness, which can “hit like a train” without notice. She is also frustrated by the mounting deaths in Ontario’s jails — 46 last year, matching the record high that occurred in 2021.

“If 46 dogs died in care last year, people would be up in arms,” she said. “People would be losing their minds. There would be change happening, there would be reform.”