Native Women Suffer Most in "Discriminatory" Prison System: Advocates
By Sue Bailey

OTTAWA (CP): Women, especially aboriginals, are increasingly landing in prison where they face sometimes brutal discrimination, advocates said Wednesday.

Females serving federal sentences of two years or more were better off before the fortress-like Prison for Women was replaced with five cottage-style institutions across Canada, they said.

The Kingston, Ont., institution finally closed in 2000 after a 1994 strip search incident sparked public outrage and lobbying from advocates to replace the prison.

Splitting about 350 female inmates among regional prisons brought them closer to family but has meant less access to work and rehabilitation programs, said Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

She said the new prisons were supposed to provide more programs and support for female prisoners, but those have not materialized.

That's because, with relatively few women, it's more costly and difficult to offer comparable services, she said. There are more than 12,000 men in prison.

Native women, especially those with mental illnesses, suffer most, Pate added.

"Women with the most disabling mental health issues are languishing in isolation," she said. "Others are bounced back and forth between solitary confinement in prisons and locked forensic units in psychiatric hospitals. They are effectively being repeatedly punished for their mental illness, for their mental disability."

The government's own statistics show discrimination, Pate said.

"Aboriginal women represent between one and two per cent of the Canadian population. Yet, they are 27 per cent of the women serving federal sentences."

That's up from 23 per cent two years ago when Pate's group and the Native Women's Association of Canada complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

On Wednesday, they again called for change.

"If you're poor, if you're aboriginal and if you are someone with a disability, then they literally throw away the key," Pate said.

Isolation exacerbates or even provokes mental conditions, leading to outbursts that can result in a mentally disabled woman spending years in isolation, Pate said. Fully half of maximum-security women are mentally troubled and need more help, she added.

On Tuesday, an emergency response team took two maximum-security women into custody at the Edmonton Institution for Women. The inmates had barricaded themselves in the common room of the secure unit, hit the glass panels with canned goods and then began slashing themselves, said prison spokeswoman Audrey Hatto.

The incident, which posed no public safety risk, occurred just two months after the Edmonton prison began accepting maximum-security women again.

About 40 women have spent most of the last seven years in cramped wings of three men's prisons.

They were removed from the cottage-style institutions in 1996 after security breaches and the death of an inmate marred the opening of the Edmonton location.

Now fortified, maximum-security units recently opened at women's prisons in Edmonton, Joliette, Que. and in Nova Scotia.

But the hardest to handle inmates are still being kept in separate units of men's prisons in Nova Scotia and Quebec, Pate said.

"They live in cells that are the size of most peoples' bathrooms."

The federal corrections investigator has repeatedly called their living conditions a disgrace.

Michele Pilon-Santilli, spokeswoman for the Correctional Service of Canada, said 38 women are deemed maximum-security and most have shown a violent tendency to attack themselves, each other or staff.

Life skills, behaviour modification, substance abuse, literacy and education programs are available, she said.

Progress has been made to improve life for women behind bars but more must be done, she added.

"We have learned many lessons along the way -- some the hard way. But we've been successful in changing the overall direction."

Links
Story about the lockdown at Edmonton -- note the warden's claim to have gone "above and beyond" in offering programs!

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Page last updated February 27, 2003