Sixty inmates at a detention centre near Toronto, Canada, have gone on hunger strike in protest at the Ontario provincial government's plans to ban smoking in all of its prisons by the end of this year.
The protest, at the Metro West Detention Centre in Mississauga, coincides with a boom in black market sales of cigarettes and spiralling prices. The black market price for a packet has already soared to $C30. Barbara Hill, director of policy development at the John Howard Society of Ontario, a social services group for inmates, has criticised the high prices: “It is one of the things that creates a hostile, tense environment in prisons . . . and that could be dangerous.” The higher the price for black market cigarettes, the more prisoners will get into debt.”