> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thecanadareport.ca/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Kent Institution Issued 35 Modified Routine Notices in Six Months, Records Show - URL: https://www.thecanadareport.ca/kent-institution-lockdown-records/ - Published: 2026-08-25T12:39:34.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-25T12:39:33.000Z - Description: ATI records show B.C.'s Kent Institution issued 35 modified routine notices in six months, restricting some units to as little as 10 minutes out of their cells a day. Only four used the word lockdown. - Author: Steve Cogbill - Tags: Government Files, British Columbia Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below. ## Full Document *The complete document is available for download below:* [A-2026-50062A-2026-50062.pdf9 MBdownload-circle](https://www.thecanadareport.ca/content/files/2026/08/A-2026-50062.pdf "Download") --- Between December 2, 2025 and May 29, 2026, staff at Kent Institution issued 35 separate notices telling prisoners that their unit — or in a dozen cases the entire institution — was moving to a restricted routine. That is roughly one every five days across six months. Four of them use the word lockdown. The rest call it a modified routine. The distinction matters more than it might sound, because the same package of records contains the Commissioner's Directive that governs when Correctional Service of Canada has to report a lockdown up the chain to Regional and National Headquarters — and the phrase "modified routine" does not appear anywhere in its list of defined incidents. The records were released by CSC under Access to Information request A-2026-50062, which asked for every inmate communiqué from Kent referring to lockdowns since December 1, 2025, all policies and bulletins governing lockdowns, and an updated version of Security Bulletin 99-07\. The 67-page response was disclosed in full. ## What the Documents Show Kent Institution is CSC's maximum-security federal facility in Agassiz, British Columbia. The communiqués in the release follow a rigid template. Each one names the affected units — Alpha through Papa, plus Pod 1, Pod 2 and the courtyard units — gives a date and usually a reason, then works through the same fixed list of what prisoners will and will not have access to: yard, tier, structured activities, school and programs, case management, inmate pay, chapel and sweat lodge, psychology, legal phone calls, visits and private family visits, meals, and health services. Each is signed by a Correctional Manager or, in a handful of cases, the Assistant Warden of Operations. Read across all 35, the pattern is consistent. Structured activities and school or programs are suspended in nearly every notice, frequently "until further notice." Case management continues on an as-required basis. Inmate pay carries on as per policy. Chapel and sweat lodge access is usually suspended, replaced by an invitation to submit a written request to speak with a spiritual advisor. Health services shift from prisoners walking to the medication line to healthcare staff attending the blocks. Meals switch to what the notices call Level A or Level B feed — a distinction the records never define, though the context indicates food is delivered to the units rather than served normally, with Level A appearing alongside the most restrictive routines. Legal phone calls are the most rigidly handled category in the entire set. Almost every communiqué requires prisoners to request a legal call through the Inmate Request form with a minimum of 24 hours notice, and three notices add the phrase "No exceptions." That requirement holds even in notices where a unit's total out-of-cell time has been cut to 15 minutes for a shower or a phone call — meaning a prisoner would have had to anticipate the need for legal counsel a full day before the restriction was announced. The stated triggers are mostly violence and non-compliance. Assaults appear repeatedly: a security incident in the gym involving Alpha unit prisoners on February 12, an assault in Pod 2 on the evening of March 19, a serious assault in the gym in April that temporarily locked down Golf unit, and an incident on May 7 in which staff used physical handling on one Tango unit prisoner while another threw an unknown liquid at officers. Other notices cite suspected brew, threats against staff, blocked cell doors and tier barriers, or simply "ongoing deteriorating behavior." Assaults inside maximum-security units are not unique to Kent — a fight at Saskatchewan Penitentiary earlier left [one prisoner dead and two others in hospital](https://www.thecanadareport.ca/saskatchewan-penitentiary-fight-death/). Not every notice is incident-driven, either: one announces Kent Clean-Up Day, a scheduled April 29 modified routine while staff cleared out rubbish, and another cancels programs to accommodate an institutional event. ****Want future Government Files like this?** We release new Canadian public-records breakdowns weekly. [Get Government Files by email ](#/portal/signup/free) ## Where a Modified Routine Ends and a Lockdown Begins Commissioner's Directive 568-1, Recording and Reporting of Security Incidents, is included in the release. Its definitions annex describes a lockdown as a non-routine situation resulting in the full suspension of all activities and privileges, with prisoners locked in their cells on a non-individualized basis, and notes that the definition applies only to multi-level, maximum and medium security institutions. Kent is one of them. That definition carries reporting consequences. Under the directive's Annex C, all complete lockdowns of an institution must be reported immediately — to Security Operations at Regional Headquarters during business hours, and to the National Monitoring Centre outside them. Annex D adds that all non-routine partial lockdowns must be reported within one working day. Security Bulletin 99-07, also in the package, goes further: it directs that both Regional and National Headquarters be advised of all lockdowns, and says consideration should be given to notifying the union, the Citizens' Advisory Committee, local police, the John Howard Society, the Elizabeth Fry Society, the Correctional Investigator and visitation groups. Twelve of the 35 notices suspend yard access and tier access outright across multiple units or the whole institution. On their face, several read like the directive's own description of a lockdown. But the word appears only four times in the entire set, and in each case it describes something that has already happened before the modified routine begins: Tango unit will remain locked down for the night, Tango unit was locked down after the March assault, Golf unit was temporarily locked down, Pod 2 was locked down after an incident during morning medication. In each instance the lockdown ends and a modified routine takes its place. Nothing in the release indicates whether any of these events were recorded and reported as lockdowns under CD 568-1, and the records contain no reporting paperwork of any kind. CSC has flagged the modified-movement problem before, in its own words. Policy Bulletin 680, issued in December 2021 and included in this release, records that a Board of Investigation raised specific concerns about institutional staff modifying routine movement with no control mechanism to ensure a return to routine movement. The bulletin explains that CD 566-3 was revised in response, adding oversight by the Correctional Manager of the Operational Desk and requiring approval of all non-routine movement, so that modified movement ends at the earliest possible time. Four years later, the Kent records show modified routines being extended day after day on the standing promise that they will be re-assessed every 24 hours. ## How Little Time Some Units Got Outside a Cell The most restrictive routines in the release are unusually specific. On May 7 and again on May 8, the upper tier of Alpha unit was limited to one prisoner out at a time for 10 minutes, once, with yard access suspended; the lower tier got 50 minutes and an hour in the yard. On March 20, Tango unit was restricted to one up and one down for a shower or a phone call — 15 minutes, one time. On May 19, both Golf and Delta units were held to one up and one down for 15 minutes, once. After the April gym assault, Golf unit had no yard access and one prisoner out at a time for 20 minutes. Thirteen notices suspend tier access entirely and give no out-of-cell figure at all. Some of those are short — the February 6 and March 6 institution-wide restrictions ran until 11:45 in the morning, and the March 31 notice covered 11:30 to 15:00\. Others are longer. The February 10 and February 11 notices place the institution on a modified routine from 08:00 until roughly 16:30 on both days, with yard and tier access suspended and visits cancelled. The March 11 and 12 notice puts the courtyard units and both pods on cell restrict after morning medication until 18:30. Security Bulletin 99-07 sets out basic requirements the institution is expected to meet during a lockdown, drawn from the Corrections and Conditional Release Regulations. Among them: at least two meals per day with at least one hot, adequate bedding and toilet articles, reasonable shower and telephone access, and at least one hour of exercise every day, outdoors weather permitting. The Kent communiqués suspend yard access in at least 20 of the 35 notices. The records do not explain how the daily exercise requirement was satisfied on those days, or whether tier time was counted toward it. ## Eleven Notices That Give No Reason at All Eleven of the 35 communiqués — close to a third — cite nothing beyond "operational requirements." No incident, no behaviour, no explanation. These are also disproportionately the institution-wide ones. The February 6, February 10 and 11, March 6, March 20, March 31, April 23, May 4, May 28 and May 29 notices all restrict either the courtyard units or the full institution on that basis alone, and most suspend yard access, tier access, structured activities, school and programs together. Visits and private family visits are suspended outright in ten notices across the set. Security Bulletin 99-07 is explicit that restrictions should be applied to the smallest group of prisoners possible — a range, a unit, a cell block — before being applied to the whole institution, citing the requirement in section 4 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act that the Service use the least restrictive measures consistent with the protection of the public, staff and offenders. The bulletin also lists planned lockdowns as legitimate, including general searches conducted under an institutional search plan and labour disruptions. The Kent notices never say which, if any, of these categories the "operational requirements" fall into. The bulletin's guidance on communication is equally direct: staff and prisoners should be informed of the reasons for a lockdown, its anticipated duration and the daily routine during it. The communiqués deliver the routine in exhaustive detail. On the reasons, a third of them say almost nothing. ## A 1999 Bulletin That Still Promises a Manual The request specifically asked for an updated version of Security Bulletin 99-07, or the relevant policy in the event the bulletin was outdated. What CSC disclosed was Security Bulletin 99-07 itself, dated April 12, 1999, classified Protected B and signed by the Director General of Security at the time. Its second paragraph states that the requirements it describes will be issued in a Standard Operating Procedures document "in the near future." No such document appears in the release. The disposition on the file is recorded as all disclosed, which makes the absence meaningful — this is not a case of records being withheld under an exemption. Twenty-seven years after a bulletin promised a procedures manual on institutional lockdowns, the bulletin is what the Service produced in response to a request for something newer. The other governing document in the package, CD 568-1, came into effect on June 6, 2016 and carries a printed review date of June 1, 2018 on every page. The repeat patterns in the communiqués suggest why current guidance would matter. Tango unit appears in six separate notices between December and May. Alpha unit appears in four, including two consecutive days in May with identical wording. Golf unit appears in four, three of them in the same week of May, with two different routines issued under the same May 19 date. Delta unit was placed on a modified routine on May 19, May 20 and May 21 — three consecutive days, each announced as a fresh assessment of behaviour. ## What's Missing from the Records The release contains beginnings and no endings. Every communiqué announces a restriction and commits to re-assessing it daily, but not one document in the package announces a return to normal routine. Where an end time is given at all it is inside the same notice — regular routine to resume at 11:45, or at 15:00\. For the incident-driven restrictions, which are the majority, there is no record of how long they lasted. Security Bulletin 99-07 requires the Warden to ensure complete records are kept of the extent and duration of a lockdown and the date normal activities resumed. Those records were not part of this request, and they are not in this release. Also absent: any incident report, any indication of how many prisoners each restriction affected, any notification sent to Regional or National Headquarters, and any correspondence with the Correctional Investigator or the community organizations the 1999 bulletin says should be considered for notification. The package includes one document that has nothing to do with restrictions at all — the Christmas 2025 visiting schedule, which limits booking calls to a single hour each afternoon between December 22 and January 2\. Sparse disclosure around institutional incidents is a familiar pattern at CSC; after a prison transfer crash near Edmonton killed two correctional officers and a prisoner, the agency [released few details publicly](https://www.thecanadareport.ca/edmonton-prison-transfer-accident/). What the release does establish is a rhythm. For six months at Canada's maximum-security institution in the Pacific region, restricted movement was not an exception interrupting normal operations so much as a recurring operating state, announced in a standard template, justified in a sentence or less, and re-assessed one day at a time under a bulletin written in 1999. **Support Public-Records Analysis** This analysis is based on government records released under access-to-information laws. If this breakdown was useful, you can support future Government Files work with a one-time tip. [Support Government Files](https://www.thecanadareport.ca/#/portal/support) [View Other Government Files](https://www.thecanadareport.ca/tag/government-files/) *All documents referenced are from Correctional Service of Canada, request A-2026-50062, obtained through an Access to Information request. The 67-page release contains Commissioner's Directive 568-1, Security Bulletin 99-07, Policy Bulletin 680 on inmate movement, and 36 pages of staff and inmate communiqués issued at Kent Institution between December 2025 and May 2026.* ## Sign up for The Canada Report Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Your modern digest of Canadian news. Friendly, clear, and in your inbox.