Beaten to death in RDP prison
A man was beaten to death in Rivière‑des‑Prairies prison on September 10, a few hours after being told he was soon going to be released. Why Mahdi Hijazi was placed in maximum security that night has not been explained.
The death has not been counted as a homicide number (I don’t think jail deaths are) and the circumstances evoke both the beating death of André Lapierre at the same jail in 2021, and the death of Nicous D’Andre Spring when he was illegally locked up in Bordeaux Jail over Christmas 2022.
walkerp 11:33 on 2024-09-18 Permalink
Prisons in Quebec are f’ing scary. I mean they are scary everywhere, but Quebec has a long tradition of particularly brutal prisons compared to the rest of Canada and it feels like that hasn’t changed much. I feel bad for this guy’s family. Sounds like the guards (whom he had pissed off by constant complaints) and some inmates (to whom he owed money) got together to take him out. Quite nasty.
dwgs 11:58 on 2024-09-18 Permalink
@walkerp, I would have said the same but this excerpt from the CBC coverage gave me pause.
“According to data provided by the Ministry of Public Security, there was one murder in Quebec jails in 2020-2021 and another in 2021-2022. Between 2011 and 2020, no murders were recorded, states a report by Observatoire des profilages, a Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a group focused on racial profiling.”