Inside B.C. jails: Former inmates and their relatives speak out   
   200 former inmates of Oakalla, Alouette and other B.C. jails have filed civil   
   claims in court alleging they were sexually abused when they were teenagers or   
   young men incarcerated for relatively minor crimes.    
   Lori Culbert & Dan Fumano Updated: November 25, 2019    
       
   Peter Muni in 1983 when he was 17 years old. PNG    
      
   Back in 1986, when he was 21 years old, Errol Patrick Johnson was sent to   
   Oakalla to serve his first jail sentence. He remembers the prison as a cold   
   “dungeon” with large enough holes in the windows for pigeons to fly in and   
   out.   
   “Oakalla was a pretty scary place. And that was kind of where I grew up,”   
   said Johnson, now 55 and living in the Lower Mainland.   
   “And I grew up fast.”   
   Johnson is one of more than 200 former inmates of Oakalla, Alouette and other   
   B.C. jails who have filed civil claims in court alleging they were sexually   
   abused when they were teenagers or young men incarcerated for relatively minor   
   crimes. Postmedia    
   accessed hundreds of pages of court documents and conducted dozens of   
   interviews to chronicle this story for the first time.   
   Roderic David MacDougall, who worked as a jail guard for 21 years from 1976 to   
   1997, is the defendant in the court cases, and his former employer, the   
   province of B.C., is typically listed as a co-defendant. They have both denied   
   any wrongdoing in    
   various court documents.   
      
   Most of the 200 or so claimants allege the attacks left them angry and   
   confused, compounding pre-existing drug and crime problems, and spiralling   
   them into even more difficult lives.   
   “I just want people to know we’re not just drug addicts. We’re regular   
   people, too. We have families that care about us,” said Johnson, who is in a   
   longterm relationship but still struggles with a heroin addiction. “What   
   (happened) affected a    
   lot of people.”   
   Johnson filed a civil suit in 2014 that alleged he was sexually assaulted   
   three times in MacDougall’s Oakalla office in 1986 and 1987, when he was 21   
   and 22 years old and serving a two-year sentence for a break-in.   
      
   Errol Johnson is photographed in Vancouver. [PNG Merlin Archive]    
   Johnson’s allegations have not been proven in court. He has paused his own   
   civil claim to join a new, proposed “representative action” lawsuit —   
   which is similar to a class-action suit — along with 60 other men with   
   unsettled civil suits    
   against MacDougall.   
      
   MacDougall was convicted of sexually abusing five young inmates in 2000, and   
   the trial judge, Justice Mary Ellen Boyd, found the accused had “extensive   
   power” over his victims, offering parole applications or prison transfers in   
   exchange for sexual    
   favours. If the inmates declined his demands, he would threaten to make their   
   lives far more difficult behind bars, Boyd’s reasons for sentencing said.   
   MacDougall maintained his innocence at the trial, but was given a four-year   
   sentence.   
   About half of the 200 civil suits are now completed, some with court-ordered   
   payouts by the provincial government, others with private, out-of-court   
   settlements, and some were dismissed.   
      
   An undated photo of Roderic MacDougall taken before 2005.    
   In 2004, the B.C. Supreme Court awarded Joe Brown (a pseudonym to protect the   
   sex-assault plaintiff’s identity) $275,000 after finding that in 1988, when   
   he was 18 years old in Oakalla, he was twice forced to submit to fellatio by   
   MacDougall in    
   exchange for a promised transfer to a lower-security facility.   
   Justice Bruce Cohen wrote in his reasons for judgment that Brown had resorted   
   to crime to support his cocaine addiction before entering jail, but there was   
   no evidence from his past to conclude his life would spiral into more serious   
   addiction or that he    
   would spend a large part of his adult life in jail.   
   So, Cohen concluded, Brown had “suffered a myriad of psychological injuries   
   as a result of the sexual assaults.” Cohen agreed with a psychologist who   
   testified at the trial that the abuse “contributed to the plaintiff having a   
   serious antisocial    
   personality disorder, low self-esteem and chronically poor self-concept,   
   chronic sexual anxieties, self-defeating behaviour, and exacerbated drug   
   dependence.”   
   The Crown did not appeal the damage award for the sexual assault, but did   
   appeal the $200,000 in past and future lost wages that Cohen determined Brown   
   had been deprived of because of the sexual assaults. That appeal went all the   
   way to the Supreme Court    
   of Canada, which cut Brown’s total payout to $140,000, arguing inmates   
   cannot be compensated for income loss while in prison, except for in wrongful   
   conviction cases.   
      
   B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Cohen.    
   The other half of the 200 civil suits remain ensnared in a long, complicated   
   legal process that has pitted the plaintiffs against the legal weight of the   
   provincial government, which is a co-respondent in most of the remaining cases.   
   The “representative action”, which must still be approved by a judge to   
   proceed, alleges the province, through its own “systemic misconduct,”   
   failed to respond to the many complaints about its employee and therefore   
   “facilitated the sexual    
   assaults.” It alleges that MacDougall may be “one of Canada’s most   
   prolific sexual offenders, with more than 200 former inmates who have already   
   come forward.”   
   The province and MacDougall have not yet filed statements of defence and the   
   allegations made in the representative action remain unproven.   
   Cristen Gleeson, a lawyer with Baker Newby in Chilliwack, has represented   
   roughly 70 inmates who have alleged sexual abuse while inside B.C. prisons.   
   Her clients were profoundly affected, she said.   
   “Oh, horrific, just horrific effects. Loss of confidence, fear, anxiety,   
   post-traumatic stress disorder, depression,” she said.   
   “I can’t even imagine the horror. … You have absolutely no recourse.   
   Your helplessness is appalling, it really is. There is no way out, there is no   
   where to go.”   
   At least six of the men who have alleged abuse by MacDougall have died “as a   
   result of their own attempts to self-medicate and/or addiction” since 2016,   
   the representative action alleges.   
      
   Peter Muni    
   One of those men was Peter Muni, who joined Johnson in the 2014 civil suit.   
   But he passed away in October 2017, at age 52, after battling a drug addiction   
   for many years, his sister-in-law Sharda Muni said in an interview.   
      
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