Justice committee  I would say it's difficult to categorize my research in those terms, other than to say that it was very apparent that the colonial context was completely embedded in their experiences of victimization and criminalization, and how their victimization and criminalization intersected.

Justice committee  Yes. Again, I'm not sure exactly how to respond to your question, but certainly there are gendered contexts that also intersect with this colonial context and are interrelated with women's offending and indigenous women's criminalization. For example, I mentioned in my opening statement that some of the women in my research became criminalized because they were afraid of contacting police or medical authorities because they were afraid of their children being apprehended by the child welfare system.

Justice committee  —anything that would keep indigenous women out of the system.

Justice committee  I would certainly support that.

Justice committee  I haven't done direct work with rehabilitation myself. I will say that in the cases that I studied, sometimes I noticed that judges would characterize prison as a source of treatment for rehabilitation needs of indigenous women. Other judges located these rehabilitative needs in the community.

Justice committee  I absolutely would be supportive of restorative justice approaches, basically—

Justice committee  Absolutely. Your comments remind me of one case in particular in my work. One judge, for example, noted that.... For the indigenous woman being sentenced in that case, the judge examined the potential impact of an institutional sentence on her family, including her children, because she would be incarcerated far away from them.

Justice committee  I'm not sure whether I understood your question fully, so I'm sorry if this doesn't answer it. I heard you ask at the end of your question why the Gladue report may not be sufficient. I don't know if you were referring to what I just mentioned about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission saying in its call to action that judges should be legislatively permitted to depart from mandatory minimums and CSO restrictions with the provision of reasons, but those are separate—

Justice committee  Thank you for that comment. First, I should say that I have not studied mandatory minimums, so it's outside the scope of my research. I can still respond, in a way. What you're describing is absolutely what happens. Judges are required.... The Gladue framework derived from the Supreme Court of Canada decision that interpreted paragraph 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, which is the provision that indicates judges must consider alternatives to incarceration, especially for indigenous persons.

Justice committee  Thank you for that context and question. I'll say just a few things that popped to mind while you were speaking. First, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's call to action 32 that I mentioned earlier directs the federal government to amend the Criminal Code to allow judges to depart from both mandatory minimum sentences and restrictions on CSOs, with reasons.

Justice committee  My research did seek to highlight conditional sentence orders where possible, because, given legislative amendments, conditional sentences—and I'm sure you've already canvassed this in the previous session—were introduced with code amendments in 1996. Then in 2007 and 2012, there were incursions into judicial discretion for issuing conditional sentences.

Justice committee  Sure. As seen in my own work and other substantial bodies of work, the experience of incarceration has profoundly damaging effects. That can manifest itself in specific ways for indigenous people generally, and for indigenous women, the focus of my work, in ways that I sort of rushed through before.

Justice committee  My belief—and it's consistent with what I uncovered in my own research—is that indigenous women need to be in their communities, in our communities, and that severing those bonds is just going to perpetuate the overincarceration and overrepresentation of indigenous people in the system.

Justice committee  I think it's a very complex context, of course. The part of my statement that I really rushed in the beginning was that number 32 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's calls to action directs the federal government to amend the code to allow judges to depart from both mandatory minimums and restrictions on CSOs when reasons are provided.

Justice committee  Absolutely, and that's at the core of my work. I'm sorry. I rushed through my statement. My work examined the sentencing of indigenous women, and at the heart of my work was a feminist theory called the victimization-criminalization continuum, which recognizes the relationship between experiences of victimization and then the criminalization and ways they are interrelated.