Thank you.
Thank you again to the committee for having me here today.
As you probably already know, as I've been here before, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies works to address the persistent ways in which women and gender-diverse people who are criminalized are routinely denied their humanity and excluded from considerations of community.
Our head office is located on the unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinabe territory in what is colonially known as Ottawa.
I suppose I would like to begin by stating the obvious. This is not an easy topic to discuss, and I don't need to tell all of you that it is both nuanced and complex. To be a victim of certain types of harm is to be followed by an anguish and a grief that do not go away.
Our family has first-hand experience with the pain that is characterized here as victimhood. My cousin was murdered in a gruesome and violent manner here in Ottawa, and more than a decade after her death, we are still impacted by the loss of her in our lives.
In my current professional capacity as the executive director of a national organization that works with and on behalf of people who are in federal prisons designated for women, I am acutely aware that their stories and their lives do not fit neatly into the box of perpetrator or victim, as they are often both, but they are not the people we traditionally see as model or perfect victims. They are poor. They suffer from mental health disabilities. They are not white. They have been harmed by other people and by systems their whole lives with little to no recourse for that harm. They are survivors of violence many times over and rarely, if ever, have had the support or therapy for the harms they have suffered.
In conversation with one of the executive directors of a local Elizabeth Fry Society when discussing the provision of therapeutic supports for the people who use her services, she asked me, “Where does one start when the incidents of victimization are so numerous?”
The myth that there is a clear binary distinction between who is a victim and who is a perpetrator of a crime is ever-present in the work we do. Most people in prison have experienced substantial adverse events in childhood and adulthood. For example, if you look to the Office of the Correctional Investigator's research, it has shown that at least half of the people in federal prisons have a history of childhood physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse, and those numbers are even higher in the prisons designated for women.
By creating a narrative that portrays a false binary between those who experience violence, we are encouraging a system and a culture that does not adopt an informed or responsible analysis of harm. For example—and this is a key one for us—the majority of street-level crime is inflicted by poor people on other poor people. A solution is not to incarcerate these people in a violent place like a prison. The solution is to ensure that there are no more poor people by eradicating poverty.
CAEFS has witnessed this false binary narrative having a number of negative outcomes, and one of the biggest is the lack of understanding of the justice system from the charging, to trial, to sentencing and parole, which can create false expectations for registered victims. I have seen people who have attended a parole hearing and have mistakenly equated the denial of parole with justice and the granting of parole with injustice, with little to no understanding of why the person in prison is being approved for release.
Second, we do need to ensure the safety and wellness of people who have served their prison sentence and been reintegrated, but who have registered victims who actively monitor their lives. In many cases, people leaving prison move to a new geographic region through conditions of parole or by choice, even if this means living in places where they have little to no community support, have increased social marginality and the real and ironic risk of being revictimized and re-incarcerated.
Lastly, we must challenge the prevalence of a certain “tough on crime” narrative that a punitive system keeps anyone safe when the contrary has been proven to be true over and over again. The body of Canadian and global evidence suggests that punishment and incarceration are harmful for people, communities and society and that this model does not reduce or resolve crime.
Taking accountability for harm is a necessity, but we really only have one test for accountability in Canada, which is the length of time that a person is sentenced to prison. This is entirely inadequate and contributes to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that are so often expressed by the people who have experienced harm.
In our adversarial system, there is no room for a person to express remorse and a desire to make amends. In our adversarial system, we focus only on the punitive and not the transformative potential of healing and, where appropriate, rehabilitation. In our adversarial system, there really are very few chances for healing.
It is for this reason that the most important task here is to be looking at ways that prevent people from becoming victims of harm. I know that I would like to have my cousin here living and with us. We have to invest in communities that create a world that addresses the root causes of violence and harm.
Thank you very much.
