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Ashley Smith’s experience in the adult prison system flowed from certain of its systemic features. This article considers whether and how it is possible to reconcile the basic commitments of sentencing law, including the legal aims of punishment, with that systemic portrait. The youth court that ordered Smith’s transfer to adult custody relied upon an idealized conception of adult imprisonment, just as ordinary adult sentencing courts do. Judges purport to stipulate the severity of punishment, but tend not to consider how prison conditions will shape the severity of the sanction. Even where a particular defendant is likely to face unique difficulties in custody, courts tend to take notice in limited and rare ways. Smith’s experience in adult custody challenges us to more clearly identify, and to consider extending, doctrinal sentencing rules that represent a judicial concern with the effects and prospects of imprisonment in particular cases. , L’expérience vécue par Ashley Smith dans le système carcéral pour adultes témoigne de certaines caractéristiques de ce système. Le présent article tente d’établir, d’une part, s’il est possible d’harmoniser les engagements de base des lois régissant la détermination de la peine, y compris les visées légales des sanctions, au système carcéral et, d’autre part, comment arriver à une telle harmonisation entre ces lois et la réalité de ce système. Le tribunal de la jeunesse qui a ordonné le transfert d’Ashley Smith dans un établissement correctionnel pour adultes a eu recours à une conception idéalisée de la détention des adultes, une conception partagée par les tribunaux pour adultes. Les juges prétendent stipuler la sévérité de la peine sans toutefois tenir compte du fait que les conditions de détention accroissent la sévérité de la sanction. Même si un accusé est susceptible d’éprouver des difficultés particulières durant sa détention, les tribunaux ont peu tendance à le remarquer ou à en tenir compte. L’expérience de détention d’Ashley Smith dans un établissement correctionnel pour adultes lance le défi d’identifier plus précisément, voire d’élargir, la doctrine en matière de détermination de la peine témoignant d’une préoccupation judiciaire pour les effets de la détention dans certains cas particuliers.
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Prisons present a special context for the interpretation of constitutional rights, where prisoner complaints are pitched against the justifications of prison administrators. In the United States, the history of prisoner rights can be told as a story of the ebb and flow of judicial willingness to defer to the expertise-infused claims of prison administrators. Deference is ostensibly justified by a judicial worry that prison administrators possess specialized knowledge and navigate unique risks, beyond the purview of courts. In recent years, expansive judicial deference in the face of “correctional expertise” has eroded the scope and viability of prisoners’ rights, serving to restore elements of the historical category of “civil death” to the legal conception of the American prisoner. In Canada too, courts have often articulated standards of extreme deference to prison administrators, both before and after the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and notwithstanding that the Charter places a burden on government to justify any infringement of rights. Recently, however, two cases from the Supreme Court of British Columbia mark a break from excessive deference and signify the (late) arrival of a Charter-based prison jurisprudence. In each case, prisoner success depended on expert evidence that challenged the assertions and presumed expertise of institutional defendants. In order to prove a rights infringement and avoid justification under section 1, the evidence must illuminate and specify the effects of penal techniques and policies on both prisoners and third parties. The litigation must interrogate the internal penal world, including presumptions about the workings of prisoner society and conceptions of risk management.