After spending nearly a solid month alone in a jail cell in Hamilton, Cedar Hopperton remembers how the deafening quiet and isolation impacted her. "The main thing that strikes you is the silence ..

. it definitely aggravated feelings of anxiety and fear, like listening to every little sound in this totally silent environment, just being really worried and stressed," she said. While at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre (HWDC) in 2018, Hopperton was put in what the province calls segregation — or what prisoners often call "the hole," she said.

"You're literally in a little cream-coloured box with nothing ...

usually all your possessions are taken away from you and you have to bargain for them back," said Hopperton, who is now an advocate for incarcerated people. Cedar Hopperton, who was in the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre (HWDC) in 2018, says her longest stay in segregation was a month. (Bobby Hristova/CBC) Segregation, also known as solitary confinement, is when prisoners are physically and socially isolated in a cell for 22 hours or more.

A CBC Hamilton analysis of data shows segregation in Ontario jails has been ramping up since 2019, despite the Ontario Human Rights Commission urging the province to phase out segregation in its jails since 2016 . In Hamilton, it has been happening at a far greater rate than the rest of Ontario and has met the United Nations' threshold for torture, with some segregation periods lasting as long as 21 days. Under its Mandela Rul.