Ontario.Sit on the benches of a criminal courthouse for a morning and the truth of who the system processes arrives without anyone having to say it. It is not, mostly, the dangerous. It is the sick. A man in a wheelchair, waiting for his name. A person whose body will not stay still, who cannot follow what is being said about them, being said about them anyway. People who are visibly without a home. People in the open grip of addiction, sweating, shaking, waiting hours for a matter that will take ninety seconds. One after another, for offences so minor they would be invisible if the person committing them were not poor and unwell.

At one point a man stood before a justice of the peace, an addict, asking to be released. He was not released. He was sent back into custody, and as they took him he screamed that he was going to die in there. The room treated it as a disturbance. It was not a disturbance. It was a medical warning. People do die in custody, from withdrawal left untreated, from conditions ignored, from the simple fact that a cell is not a place that keeps a sick body alive. He may have understood the stakes of the next forty-eight hours better than the process deciding them did.

These are not criminals in any sense that matters

Addiction is a health condition. Disability is a health condition. Homelessness is a housing failure. Untreated mental illness is a failure of care. None of these is a crime, and a person living through them has not become a criminal by living through them in public, where the rest of us can see it and call the police. Yet the criminal court has become the place where all of it ends up, because it is the one door in the public building that is still open. We did not decide this on purpose. We decided it by closing every other door.

A courtroom cannot detox anyone, cannot house anyone, cannot treat a psychosis. It can charge, adjourn, detain, and discipline. So that is what it does, to people for whom none of it is the answer and much of it is harm.

What the court can and cannot do

This is the heart of it. A courtroom has no detox bed. It has no apartment to offer. It cannot treat a psychosis, cannot manage a withdrawal, cannot give a disabled person the care they were already going without. It has charges, adjournments, conditions, fines, and cells. Hand it a person whose problem is medical or social, and it will respond with the only tools it owns, which are the tools of punishment. So a person who needs a doctor gets a docket number. A person who needs housing gets a set of release conditions they have no fixed address to satisfy. A person who needs treatment gets a record that will close the few doors still open to them. Every one of these responses is the wrong one, and the system delivers them anyway, all day, because it is the system we left standing.

Discipline does not treat addiction. It deepens it.

There is a belief, rarely said out loud but built into everything, that what the addicted and the disordered need is consequence. That if the court is firm enough, the cell unpleasant enough, the person will be corrected. It is not true, and the people who work in the system know it is not true. Incarceration does not cure addiction. It interrupts it, dangerously, and returns the person to the street sicker, poorer, and now with a record. Detaining someone in withdrawal can kill them. Sending a person in crisis to jail to be disciplined is not a treatment plan. It is a way of moving suffering out of sight for a few days and calling it order.

And they face it with the least help

Compounding all of it: the people least equipped to defend themselves are often the ones in that room with no lawyer of their own. For charges minor enough, legal aid will not issue a certificate for full representation, only a few minutes with duty counsel. For people whose income is anything above the lowest threshold, legal aid is out of reach entirely. So the person who cannot follow the proceedings, who is dope-sick or disoriented or in a wheelchair they cannot self-propel, is frequently the same person standing alone against a trained Crown. We have written elsewhere about what happens when no lawyer will take a legal aid certificate. For the people on these benches, the gap is wider still.

The verdict

We have decided, without ever deciding it out loud, that the answer to sickness, to addiction, to disability, to poverty, is a court date and a cell. It is the most expensive answer available and the least effective, and anyone who spends a morning on those benches can see both facts at once. The man in the wheelchair needed care. The man who screamed needed a doctor before he needed a judge. The country handed each of them a place in a queue and a number on a docket. That is not justice being done. It is human suffering being processed, by the only institution we left funded to receive it, using the only tools it was ever given, none of which can help.

This is an opinion essay based on direct observation in an Ontario criminal courthouse. The people described are not named or identified. Legal aid coverage rules referenced are drawn from Legal Aid Ontario's published criteria as of 2026. General observation and commentary, not legal advice.