'INMATES SHOULD BE TREATED BETTER'

"Beware."

It's the first word out of Susan Guilbault's mouth when asked about
the upcoming coroner's inquest into the death of her daughter Laura
Eileen Coward last year in police custody at the Chilliwack RCMP detachment.

"I had faith in the police and I thought my daughter was safe,"
Guilbault says.

But the 26-year-old was found dead in her cell on Feb. 4, when she was
awaiting a court hearing on charges of assault and breach of probation.

The Maple Ridge mom acknowledges her daughter was a drug addict, but
adds she was trying to turn her life around and deserved better treatment.

She says Coward had been a "hard-working" woman with a good job in
corrections until her father died and she fell "into the comfort of
drugs" for several years.

"But she wanted her life back, she was doing all the right things,"
says Guilbault, a youth worker familiar with drug addictions. "She
told me, 'I miss my dad, I miss him terribly, but it's really time I
grow up - and I miss my family more.'"

But she never got the chance.

"Feb. 5 was her birthday ... she would have been 27," says Guilbault.
"But that was taken from her too, and us."

Chilliwack mom Pat Wigham tells a similar story about her 20-year-old
son Kyle, who was found dead last March of a suspected drug overdose
in his cell at the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre in Maple Ridge.
She is still waiting to hear when a coroner's inquest will be held to
look into her son's death.

Kyle was sent to FRCC for nine months - despite the objections of a
drug counsellor - for robbing a 7-Eleven store while on one of the
periodic drug "binges" he was struggling to overcome.

Wigham had turned her son in to police for violating bail conditions
because she hoped it would get him into a treatment program sooner.

But drug addicts are "just a bunch of losers" in the eyes of prison
officials, she says, despite their duty to ensure the health and
safety of inmates in custody.

"They're not just a bunch of nobodies," Wigham says. "They're sick and
they need help."

"If there was more done to treat their addiction, better programs to
offer," she adds, "these guys wouldn't have to steal."

Chilliwack is reportedly on the list of B.C. communities that will see
the creation of a community court, which gives petty-crime offenders a
chance to opt out of the regular criminal justice system, if they
plead guilty and agree to work with health and social service
providers on the issues that drove them to crime: addiction, mental
illness and homelessness.

A community court pilot project, the first in B.C., was announced last
September in Vancouver by Attorney-General Wally Oppal.

Guilbault says her daughter was "doing all the right things" before
her arrest on non drug-related charges.

She had a heart condition, perhaps inherited from her father, died at
age 45.

Guilbault says her daughter vomited 16 times in the last 12 hours of
her life in custody.

"You'd think that would set off alarms to send her to the hospital,
but they didn't," she says.

Police were also advised to return Coward to hospital for treatment of
a leg wound suffered before her arrest, according to a written note
Guilbault says she has seen - but that wasn't done either.

She's been told that's because there wasn't enough staff at the police
lockup to take her daughter back to the hospital, or to check her cell
regularly.

"I'm not blaming anyone in particular," Guilbault says, "but the
system needs fixing."

Like hiring more staff and installing more up-to-date surveillance
cameras to check on prisoners.

Better training for police in the treatment of mentally-ill inmates,
and better surveillance monitors were among recommendations made to a
coroner's jury looking into the 1999 death of an inmate at the
Chilliwack RCMP detachment.