Canada's prison watchdog says the risk of death remains unacceptably high for federal inmates and the system needs to be much more accountable for its failings.

Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, spoke at an Ottawa news conference about the ways the federal prison system had responded to two recent reports on deaths in custody.

Sapers said the federal prison system has moved too slowly when implementing changes that his office had ordered in the wake of two high-profile reports on inmate deaths.

He also said the system lacks accountability and is not always providing inmates with the access to mental-health and other treatment services that they require.

The result is that inmates' lives remain at risk.

Sapers told CTV News Channel that the Correctional Service of Canada has followed up with a few recommendations, but there are still a number of serious problems within the federal prison system.

"There is a little bit of good news and that is that some of the process issues are being addressed, some policies are being clarified," Sapers said in an interview from Ottawa, following the Friday morning news conference.

"But the big dissatisfaction, the bad news, is that on the major issues of accountability -- more oversight from headquarters on what happens inside institutions, external policing of decisions about how mentally ill offenders are dealt with, particularly whether they are placed in segregation or not -- on those kinds of issues, the progress has not been made."

In his prepared remarks for the news conference, Sapers said he will "continue to publicly highlight persistent and ongoing systemic issues within the Correctional Service that contributed to Ashley Smith's death, in the hope of preventing other needless loss of lives."

Starting this December, Sapers will begin issuing quarterly reports on the CSC's progress in implementing the changes recommended by his office.

The death of Ashley Smith

Many of the recommendations from the Office of the Correctional Investigator came after the death of Ashley Smith, the New Brunswick teenager who died in an Ontario prison nearly two years ago.

Smith died after she choked herself to death at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., about 100 kilometres west of Toronto, on Oct. 19, 2007.

Seven guards watched her choking herself, before intervening when she turned purple.

The teenage inmate had taunted guards with fake suicide attempts on previous occasions, and some guards had been reprimanded for entering her cell.

Smith was 19 years old at the time of her death.

After investigating the deadly incident, Sapers released a report that said that Smith's death could have been prevented.

On Friday, Sapers said Smith's death should never have happened, and "revealed many, many flaws in the ways that corrections is practiced."

"Ashley Smith was transferred from institution to institution to institution across every region of the country, without the proper attention being paid to the legal and policy requirements for those kind of transfers," he told CTV News Channel.

"What we're saying is, the buck has to stop somewhere. It should have stopped at the headquarters of the Correctional Service of Canada on those transfer decisions."

Sapers also said it was not appropriate to keep a mentally-ill offender in segregation or isolation within the prison.

"It's absolutely inappropriate to keep mentally ill people in isolation for extended periods of time."

Over the last two years alone, 17 inmates have killed themselves in Canadian prisons.

The same year that Smith died, the correctional investigator's office released its Deaths in Custody Study -- a report that looked at 82 prisoner deaths that occurred from 2001-2005.

Over that time period, the combined institutional homicide and suicide rates "nearly eight times the rates found in the population as a whole," the report said.

With files from The Canadian Press