Thank you for inviting us, for we too share in our country's collective desire to increase community safety and agree that we need cross-sectoral collaboration to do so.
It is visible to all of us who walk through any downtown core in Canada that we have serious social problems, and at the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, we think about public safety every day as we support women and gender-diverse people at all stages of justice involvement: pre-, during and post-incarceration.
We understand prisons, and so we worry about how strongly current discourses are calling for us to use prisons as the tool to solve our social problems.
Expanding upon the sentiments of previous police witnesses, we simply won't improve public safety and solve the problems at hand by only changing laws that get rid of bail and increase sentence length. We will be back at this same table in five and 10 years, for we cannot change laws without duly addressing what those laws will do in society, which will be to send more people into expensive and dysfunctional prisons.
Our system can't handle increased incarceration. Ours is already one of the costliest prison systems globally, where, despite our federal system having one of the highest ratios of staff to incarcerated people, our institutions remain harmful both to those kept in them and to those working in them. Prisons are costly, counterproductive and responsible for significant ongoing public dollars being paid in continual damages and in broad peripheral, social and economic costs.
We have acknowledged as a country that punishing people doesn't work since 1938, when the Archambault report was released, which recognized then that sending young people into prisons causes them to be more likely to be recruited into further criminal activity and that rehabilitation and reintegration are what work. Today, some 87 years later, conditions in prison are as dangerous and unproductive as ever.
I don't say this to pit the experiences of the incarcerated against the needs of victims but to underscore that this approach does not work for anyone.
People are leaving prisons worse than when they arrived, and this must be part of our conversation, for it contributes to our ongoing problems. People return to the community with untreated and worsened addictions or addictions they developed in prison, with chronic physical and mental health issues, and with no money. Each of these factors decreases a person's ability to become a contributing member of our community and costs Canadians.
We know what works, and it is community investment and vocational opportunity. These things can shrink our prison problems and populations so we can meaningfully respond to those people who do pose real risk, but we are continually up against public calls that imagine a responsible prison system is one that is soft on crime.
I offer that there is wide stakeholder agreement here suggesting otherwise, and that it is not a soft-on-crime approach but a responsible and smart approach to understand that what happens to people in prison has an impact on public safety. Unless we are prepared to incarcerate people forever and want to build endless specialized prisons, we need to implement solutions that go beyond incarceration, focusing on cross-sectoral and community-led solutions that work, such as Ontario's bail verification and supervision program, which operates at a fraction of the cost of incarceration. In the Peterborough region, for example, it's just $1,100 per person per year, as opposed to the almost $90,000 per person per year it costs to provincially incarcerate them. This lowers public safety risk and provides individuals with support and supervision on bail and keeps them out of prison.
Right now, our prison system is overwhelmed. It cannot meaningfully respond to the very small number of people who do pose risk, because there are few off-ramps for people who do not need to be incarcerated and because prisons are being tasked with responding to an influx of unmet community needs, such as our addiction and mental health crises. Certainly, if we weren't unproductively incarcerating so many who could be better served in treatment facilities or who are incarcerated lengthily where they could much sooner become contributing members of our community, and for all of the indigenous women who simply need support to heal from intergenerational trauma, then the professionals in our system would have much more capacity to meaningfully respond to those small numbers of people we are trying to address here.
We need a responsive system in both directions: one that can respond to risk but also provides opportunities to let people move forward and be well. I know it seems intuitive that when we see violence from previously system-involved people we would lock them up for longer, but to every call being made for failed three-strikes policies, for femicide to raise murder convictions to first degree and for more reverse onus, we could discuss further how these policy responses will fail at solving the problems they seek to.
I'll close with a question: How many people would not have committed new crimes post-incarceration had they not been swept up into a dysfunctional prison?
I offer the words, which I'll never forget, of a previous farm manager from a transformative justice agricultural initiative in British Columbia. He was a repeat offender who learned from childhood, as he told me, to be a better criminal in prison and continued this for 20 years until he was given one good opportunity, and that was a chance to farm. He learned to grow food and then grew food for and with victims of crime, and he said to me, “Nyki, I would never hurt this community. I would never harm a community that I'm part of, and I've never been part of a real community before.”
Thank you for your questions.
