Evidence of meeting #2 for Public Safety and National Security in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was health.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Dave MacKenzie Conservative Oxford, ON
Fair enough. How do we get you detoxed the first time, second time, or fifth time so you don't have to go back in?
4:45 p.m.
Research Assistant, Women in 2 Healing
Well, Ruth was talking about bringing in community health care. Coming off drugs is not an easy thing. I didn't have the luxury of getting onto the methadone maintenance plan like some people. I had to do it cold, hard turkey. In the majority of cases people don't get methadone when they go to jail. They get methadone if they're already on it when they go to jail. So you have to do that cold, hard bit. When you're doing it for 13 days at a time and most of that time you're segregated like I was, there's no time for you to have any sort of treatment plan afterwards. Then you're just released right back onto the street anyway.
4:45 p.m.
Retired Warden of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, As an Individual
Just to clarify something, you don't have to segregate people when they're coming off drugs. That's not a necessity at all.
4:45 p.m.
Retired Warden of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, As an Individual
Amber didn't go into segregation when she came to Alouette. I think you were sort of implying that she was in segregation and then got out when she was there, but she wasn't in segregation there.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Dave MacKenzie Conservative Oxford, ON
Somehow I got the impression that during the time she spent in city cells, which was almost segregation--I don't know what else you would call it--she dried out, rightly or wrongly, with or without any medical help to get her there.
But is that what you needed--to get detoxed? Was that the biggest single thing that changed?
4:45 p.m.
Research Assistant, Women in 2 Healing
Yes. I needed a detox where I was safe. It was not segregation. I had six other women in the cell with me.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
4:45 p.m.
Bloc
Luc Desnoyers Bloc Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am the newcomer to the committee and I am fascinated by what I hear regarding prevention and the way you work in this establishment. I'm going to ask you three or four questions and then you can respond to them. I have one question in particular for Ms. Christie.
Would we be able to transfer this approach so that it can be used for both men and women? Obviously, at the provincial level, there may be medium-security prisons—as you mentioned earlier, where it is easier to operate in this way, compared to the federal system. Earlier, we talked about costs. In my opinion, interesting projects that can lead someone, with respect to mental health, to a level where the individual will become productive when he returns to society are priceless. These are major, significant projects that we should be proud about, as a society, if we are successful.
I would like to hear Ms. Christie speak about the Doing Time project. You meet with the women on a regular basis. However, there seems to be a problem, from the way you describe the situation, regarding community services that are not always available, including social housing. You talked at great length about the women who get out of prison and had no housing. Eventually, they even find themselves homeless.
Unless I am mistaken, our society creates poverty despite the fact that there is a great deal of wealth. We put people in prison and segregate them. You, however, have a new formula which enables these people to be reintegrated into society, through significant partnerships. I am fascinated by this and I would like to hear you speak about the Doing Time project, among other things, and find out whether this project is transferable.
4:45 p.m.
Research Assistant, Women in 2 Healing
Absolutely. We are hoping to be able to start training men to do what we're doing. The Doing Time project is a community-based participatory action research project. I can't remember how many team members we have, but we've got nine women, I think--maybe more, maybe less--who are employed now by the University of British Columbia, who are going out and interviewing other women who have been incarcerated within the last year. We are asking them questions and we seem to get better answers when it's coming from somebody who's done some time herself. We seem to get some really, really honest answers, not to mention that we invite them to come and do research with us.
We're hoping that it will have the same effect on men that it has had on us. I am only one. I am part of a team that could fill this room with women whose lives have changed through doing this. So it can definitely work and it can definitely change.
4:50 p.m.
Bloc
Luc Desnoyers Bloc Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
I would like to ask you a question about social housing. You said that the women found it difficult to find housing.
Could you comment on this issue and on the transferability of this project to other prisons, be they at the federal or provincial level?
4:50 p.m.
Clinical Professor, Department of Family Practice and Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly, but we have a research grant to do this among women, and we're following women for this year. It's a three-year research project, but I think the next step will be to actually see if we can get equivalent research funding to actually see if we can apply this same type of research with men. There is a similar project working in the south of England I am in consultation with.
The power of participatory research, as Amber has attested to, is that people are engaged in helping design the research questions and actually gathering the data and helping also with the analysis. So the transformation of people engaged in this type of community-based participatory research is profound. It's a mutual learning experience.
4:50 p.m.
Bloc
Luc Desnoyers Bloc Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
We are told that there are 2,500 people in jail and 25,000 under supervision in British Columbia. For these 25,000 others, are there any organizations that work with these individuals before they get to prison?
4:50 p.m.
Retired Warden of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, As an Individual
One of the things that hasn't been mentioned in terms of mental health, and one of the things that probably you're alluding to, is having interventions prior to sentencing. In B.C., they have a community court that's operating, they have a drug court that's operating, and one of the things for mental health patients that would probably be very beneficial is a mental health court. The focus of those courts is to divert people to resources that are in the community--residential and treatment types of resources--that will benefit them and keep them out of the jail system, because a good percentage of those people don't belong in the jail system. I think you've had much previous testimony about that.
Those are the interventions that I see. And with mental health, that's an intervention that I think would make a huge difference, for both the federal and provincial systems.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Rick Norlock Conservative Northumberland—Quinte West, ON
Thank you very much.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming today. It's been very instructive.
When we visited the prisons in Great Britain--you alluded to Great Britain--I can tell you some of the people we spoke to have varying opinions as to the cost and the affordability of some of the programs. My challenge is going to be for you to tell me, given the real world we live in, and the fact that the cash register is not open and you don't just make a wish list and the money flows.... I guess the challenge to me, when I was working in my previous job, was the boss would come to us and say, given the resources we have, I want you to reconstruct or to change some things. Given, though, that the federal government.... You know we're operating in silos, and I think, Ms. Tole, you alluded to the fact that some of the things we're dealing with can't be dealt with in a silo. So you have the federal government's responsibility, you have provincial responsibility--we were talking about social housing--and we sometimes have municipal responsibilities.,
You were talking about some of your experiences going to a local lockup and the hint is that the federal government hasn't done its share. We've increased and we will be increasing every year by 3% social transfer payments to the provinces. For Ontario, that's $9 billion in various transfers. But I think we have to do things better.
I'm going to ask you some hit-and-miss questions on some of the things I'm going to talk about. We went to Okimaw Ochi in Saskatchewan, first nations treatments--very successful, from what I understand, building on what Ms. Christie has to say. We went to Saskatchewan, and the integration.... One of the prisons there is now basically treated as a hospital, as opposed to a prison.
Then we went to Dorchester and we talked to some of the inmates. One of the inmates who was suffering from mental illness told us that he actually tells them when he needs to go to segregation, that he needs to be by himself. I forget what he was suffering from--schizophrenia, I believe--and he thought it very helpful to his mental illness to be alone. So if we're going to wave a wand and say do away with segregation, I think we have to be careful--that it does have some usages and sometimes people need to be alone and need to be afforded an opportunity to do that.
There's social housing, $2 billion towards that. In my community, $400,000 is going to a home for battered women.
I just wondered if you would each comment on the fact that maybe we need to have some new relationships between the federal government and provinces and share best practices and do some of those things.
My former executive assistant was on leave from Corrections Canada and he's now back working in one of Canada's largest institutions, which is Warkworth. Sometimes we're dealing with staff and unions that actually demand some of those things. So it's not as easy as saying we'll wave a wand and do away with it, when we have unions saying we want more of it.
Some comments, please.
4:55 p.m.
Retired Warden of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, As an Individual
I would like to comment about that, because that is a situation. The staff, often through the union, will push very hard for more technology, more security, and there is a balance. When we opened the institution that we did and moved things in a different direction, it took a tremendous amount of communication and time. There was slow movement to change that.
All I would say is my experience has repeated over and over again--making the institution more secure and more restrictive does not make a safer place at all. I agree with you that at times.... At Alouette we had people come to us and say we need to be separate and apart. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's the way in which it's done. It's the conditions under which it's done, and it's the fact that the person who's saying I need to be alone is basically still having some level of control in their life.
A lot of the acting out, the self-harm, is an issue of control. A lot of it is those people have no control whatsoever in anything in their lives, and it's a desperate sort of act. So there's a balance. And I know that Corrections Services Canada has a different union from what we have, so it's tough. But I think it's a matter of communication and education, because best practices at the end of the day will make a safer community.
4:55 p.m.
Research Assistant, Women in 2 Healing
I'm in agreement with Brenda. You will find those instances where there are going to be people who will want segregation. I don't know why, but it's the manner in which you do it, right? Taking away someone's mattress and blanket and pillow and a magazine is inhumane. That's not segregation. It's not right. If segregation were treated differently and it weren't taking absolutely everything away, maybe it could be different, but they're not dealing with it in the right way.
4:55 p.m.
Clinical Professor, Department of Family Practice and Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
As she was talking, I was just reflecting on something we said at lunch. I think it was Amber who said it doesn't actually cost any money for people to be kind.
You say there is difficulty with staff, maybe, or opposition. I think, frankly, your committee here has an enormous opportunity at this point to actually influence the future of corrections. We've all been appalled by the Ashley Smith death. It would be wrong to say that things like that happen all the time; however, unfortunately I suspect that many people are mistreated because of the system we have.
You have an enormous opportunity to make recommendations that maybe aren't going to cost very much but actually could bring about profound changes. Increasing staff's cultural competence, cultural knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and gender sensitivity probably costs less than trying to increase their security skills.
Rewarding and commending wardens for providing safe, healthy settings would probably not cost very much but actually would reap enormous benefits in terms of staff satisfaction and job enjoyment. I can't see that any staff who are dealing with hostile, angry individuals, locking them in segregation, are actually enjoying their day. I suspect that if they're actually engaged in meaningful ways with the people they're caring for and they're feeling that the whole prison is working on the same vision, it would be a much more fun place to work.
So yes, it will take a paradigm shift and it will take recommendations, but it's not an impossible task.
5 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Garry Breitkreuz
Thank you. We've gone a bit over time, but I wanted to give you all a chance to respond.
We'll go now to Ms. Crombie, but we have to be out of here in about ten minutes. So we have time for two more--
