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Protecting Their Rights A Systemic Review of Human Rights in Correctional Services for Federally Sentenced Women Preface
In March 2001, the Canadian Human Rights Commission was approached by the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the Native Women’s Association of Canada and other organizations, including the Canadian Bar Association, the Assembly of First Nations and the National Association of Women and the Law regarding concerns about the treatment of federally sentenced women in federal institutional and community correctional services. Of particular importance to the Elizabeth Fry Societies and the Native Women’s Association was the treatment of incarcerated Aboriginal women and women with cognitive and mental disabilities.
Given the wide range of concerns raised, the Canadian Human Rights Commission agreed to conduct a broadly based review of the treatment of federally sentenced women on the basis of gender, race and disability, rather than dealing with individual complaints. The Correctional Service of Canada on behalf of the Government of Canada has a mandate to provide correctional services. The exercise of its mandate is at the core of our review. Our focus has been on understanding the extent to which federal correctional services have achieved the goal of providing correctional services relating to custody, supervision, rehabilitation and reintegration that are responsive to the situation of all federally sentenced women. The objective of the Commission’s review was to identify ways of bringing the correctional system into line with the purpose of the Canadian Human Rights Act. 1
The Commission used several sources of information to prepare this report. Initial discussions were held with the Correctional Service of Canada, the Elizabeth Fry Societies and the Office of the Correctional Investigator to clarify the scope of the review. Then on February 25, 2002, the Commission held a workshop consisting of three plenary and three concurrent sessions with 20 presentations on key issues. It was attended by about 60 people from a range of non-governmental organizations and government departments, as well as women who had served time in federal prisons. On November 8, 2002, a roundtable was held with 20 experts to address the question of appropriate redress and accountability procedures for alleged breaches of inmate rights.
The Commission also met individually with key stakeholders and experts. It conducted interviews with women inmates and staff at all regional facilities for women, at men’s facilities where federally sentenced women are collocated and at the healing lodge in southern Saskatchewan. Interviews were also conducted with staff and residents at different types of community release facilities.
In January 2003 the Commission sent a discussion paper to 100 organizations and individuals working with or on behalf of federally sentenced women. To enable key stakeholders to participate fully in the review, the Commission also supported an application by the Elizabeth Fry Societies for funding under the Voluntary Sector Initiative.2 The Elizabeth Fry Societies received funding to carry out its own consultations and to help non-governmental organizations engage in policy dialogue and prepare policy submissions. In addition to its own work, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies submitted papers prepared by: DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada; National Association of Women and the Law; Native Women’s Association of Canada; Strength in Sisterhood; and Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. See Annex B for more information on this aspect of the review. The following organizations and individuals responded directly to the Commission’s consultation paper with written submissions: Correctional Service of Canada; Joliette Local of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers; Office of the Correctional Investigator; Sarah J. Rauch; St. Leonard’s Society of Canada; Union of Solicitor General Employees–PSAC; West Coast Prison Justice Society; Amnesty International; Canadian Federation of University Women; and National Council of Women of Canada. Acknowledgments
The Commission would like to acknowledge the assistance we received from the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the Correctional Service of Canada and the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the workshop and roundtable participants and those individuals and organizations that took the time to prepare submissions. We are particularly grateful to the federally sentenced women, correctional staff and service providers who volunteered to be interviewed. We were impressed by their ideas for ways the correctional system could more effectively respond to the unique needs of women offenders. Many of the women indicated that, although they expected to be released soon, they wanted to be interviewed in the hope of improving the situation for women entering the federal correctional system in the future. We are also indebted to the wardens and their assistants who welcomed us into their facilities and did everything possible to accommodate us. Introduction
Historically, correctional philosophy, law and practice were developed to control and manage a predominantly male inmate population. Extensive reforms to federal correctional legislation in 1992 gave the Correctional Service of Canada an explicit mandate to provide programming and other correctional services that were sensitive to the needs of women offenders, Aboriginal offenders and other offenders with special needs. Despite the legislative amendments, observers have noted that conditions for federally sentenced women have been slow to change. This may be because the basic principles and practices underlying the correctional system, including those based on the assessment of women offender’s risk and their criminogenic factors have not been challenged. This despite research in Canada and the United States that shows that the security risks posed by most women offenders and some of the factors that lead to their offending and re-offending are different than men’s.3
In 1990 the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women signalled the start of a new era in corrections for women serving federal sentences. In its report Creating Choices, the Task Force concluded, “[t]he ability of CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] to meet its responsibility for federally sentenced women has been eroded by trying to fit a small, diverse relatively low-risk group of women with multi-faceted needs into a system designed for a large, more homogeneous and high-risk population. In the process, inequality and insensitivity to the needs of federally sentenced women have become unanticipated consequences of our current system.” Creating Choices articulated a new vision intended to transform a correctional system based largely on male norms into one that was responsive to the needs of female offenders. It outlined a model for women-centred corrections based on five principles, namely empowerment; meaningful and responsible choices; respect and dignity; a supportive environment; and shared responsibility.4 The model promised to deliver a correctional system that would respect the dignity, rights, needs and hopes of women.
The ground-breaking nature of Creating Choices, which had been commissioned by the Correctional Service of Canada, made the Service’s response to the events leading up to the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at The Prison for Women in Kingston particularly disappointing. The Honourable Louise Arbour, then a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Ontario, headed up the inquiry into events at the Prison for Women in April 1994 that culminated in a cell extraction and strip search of eight women in segregation by a male Institutional Emergency Response Team. Justice Arbour’s report, released in April 1996, confirmed not only that the Correctional Service of Canada was not fulfilling the promise of Creating Choices, but also that the path to achieving a women-centred correctional system would be longer and more difficult than the Task Force had contemplated. The report concluded that fundamental and systemic changes to the correctional system were needed to bring it “into the fold of two basic Canadian constitutional ideals...: the protection of individual rights and the entitlement to equality.“5
Notable events in the federal correctional system for women since then include the closure of the Prison for Women in Kingston and the opening of four regional facilities and a healing lodge. Many Aboriginal women prisoners now have the option of serving their sentences in an environment that is respectful of their culture. Most federally sentenced women are housed in community-like accommodations that permit them to take more control of basic activities such as cooking and cleaning. And the content of programming for women inmates is increasingly sensitive to the reality that women’s needs are different from those of men.
Yet many of the underpinnings of a correctional system designed for white male inmates have remained unchanged and hinder its capacity to be truly gender-responsive. Although both Creating Choices and Justice Arbour’s report pointed to research showing that women inmates generally pose a lower security risk, have a much lower risk of re-offending, and have different needs than men, the Correctional Service of Canada continues, for the most part, to use the same risk and needs assessment tools for both populations. This results in the incarceration of women offenders in a facility with a higher security level than required and less access to corrections programming that could advance their rehabilitation and their reintegration into society.
In the meantime, Canada’s understanding of what equality and human rights mean and how they can be achieved continues to evolve. Not only have developments in human rights law in Canada moved beyond procedural equality (an approach to equality in which everyone is treated the same), but achieving equality is now understood to require the transformation of systems, practices and policies to make them fully inclusive. Inclusion demands responsiveness — responsiveness to gender, to race, to disability and to all other prohibited grounds of discrimination, as well as to their combined effects.
Against this backdrop, this report reviews the treatment of federally sentenced women. Federally sentenced women are women offenders serving federal terms of imprisonment of two or more years. They are a small minority of all federal offenders in Canada. Many of the difficulties they face in prison are also faced by men inmates. Regardless of gender, “doing time” involves many hardships, some of which flow from the deprivation of liberty that is part of being sentenced to a correctional institution.
The men and women who become offenders tend to be people who are at risk of becoming marginalized even before their contact with the criminal justice system. But the very factors that set these people at a disadvantage in the first place — lack of education, low employability — tend to be disproportionately prevalent among women inmates, Aboriginal inmates and inmates with disabilities, and when these factors are present, their impact can be even more acute on women than it is on men. To help rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders, the correctional system must address these factors and their unique impact on identifiable groups of offenders, including women, Aboriginal inmates and inmates with disabilities.
Although Canada’s correctional system may not be particularly effective in addressing social disadvantage and exclusion, it tends, for the most part, to be gender neutral. But because women and men are different, a one-size-fits-all approach is bound to create greater hardship for some inmates than for others. A system fashioned to rehabilitate able-bodied white men may ill-serve female inmates or inmates with disabilities or members of racialized groups. Canada needs a correctional system that is equally responsive to the needs of men and women and that recognizes the equality rights of all offenders be they members of racial minorities or persons with disabilities.
Similarly, the human rights of individuals and groups other than federally sentenced women, including men inmates, correctional staff and victims of crime, are not directly or comprehensively addressed in this report. This should not be taken to mean that they are not of equal importance, or that others in the correctional system are without need or disadvantage. Rather, in response to the concerns brought to us, our report focuses on a small but diverse group with unique and pressing needs: federally sentenced women.
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