Ashley Smith prison video 2

The video depicts scenes, in chronological order over a four-month period, of Ashley Smith's detainment in a segregation cell at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont. The 19-year-old mentally ill teenager is at times enraged and at others, playful with her guards. But mostly, she is distressed. She is seen snatching a nurse's glasses through her narrow food slot and using them to cut her wrists, and, in a different incident, grabbing a corrections officer's shirt. The final scenes in the video, just a few days before her death, shows the young inmate tying herself to strips of cloth knotted to the window bars in her cell as guards watched. Ashley Smith's struggle in various correctional institutions culminated in her death on Oct. 19, 2007, when she choked herself with a strip of fabric.