I'm just going to read my bio.
I am a Cree first nations woman. I was first incarcerated at the age of 20 and returned to prison 30 times over the next five years. In my most recent incarceration I spent six months inside of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. Previous to that, I had spent time in Surrey Pretrial and Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women, as I suffered from a severe heroin addiction for many years and lived on the streets of Vancouver's east side. I have been free of drugs and alcohol and prisons for four and a half years. I am a mother and a contributing member of society.
I am a research assistant for the University of British Columbia, working in community-based participatory research. I am employed by the project called Doing Time and I am part of the Women in 2 Healing team in which I interview women who have been incarcerated in a provincial institution within the last year. I interview women at zero, three, six, nine, and twelve months after their release from prison and ask them about how they are achieving their nine health goals.
We also have a community-based participatory research project called Aboriginal Healing Outside Of The Gates, which I will get into in more depth in my opening statement. Our goal is to support women in the reintegration process so that they can safely reintegrate into their chosen communities.
Thank you for having me here today, and I hope that you will listen to what we have to say.
As I sat and reviewed the documentary footage made of Ashley Smith's time in prison, I couldn't help but find myself being able to identify with her. I myself have been in prison 30 times. Of those 30 times, 29 of them were spent either all in segregation or the majority of time in segregation. I can identify completely with the desperate need to have human contact and the loneliness and isolation that you feel being locked in a cell with nothing to do all day. I remember I would look forward to meals because I could read the labels of my drink containers over and over and over again. I was not segregated because of behaviour issues or security issues, but because I was withdrawing from heroin.
I was still unable to have anything in my cell to help me stay occupied, such as a book or a pen or paper. I looked forward to count, when the guard would come and count us and hopefully we'd have a nice guard to sometimes tell us how their day was. It was human contact.
I continued to go through those revolving doors until my last stay in corrections in 2005. For the first time I was sent to Alouette Correctional Centre for Women and for the first time I was not segregated. This happened to be when Brenda Tole was the warden and Ruth Martin was the doctor in the prison. When I arrived at Alouette I was checked into health care, and to my amazement I was sent to a unit.
From there on I got a job in the institution, as it was a work camp, and I reconnected with family outside of prison with the help of a wonderful doctor who encouraged me to do so. I also received health care when I was in prison, something I had rarely ever encountered in other prisons. I was a very sick girl with many different complications from my drug use. I was on remand, so I was unable to access any of the programs geared towards substance abuse or anger management.
However, there was a program that was happening all around me that was hard to go unnoticed. There were babies in this prison. I was shocked when I first saw the babies. The way the prison was being run was more like a rehabilitation centre than a prison. It was amazing. Not only was there a library and a gym there, there was a native elder there to talk to. As well, there was drumming and dancing every Tuesday night. As a mother myself, I have to say that it helped me to remember the things I was giving up, and I know that the other inmates dealt with their problems and reacted differently because there was a baby there.
I was released from prison in October 2005, and I have not been back since. I will be the first to say that this exact prison changed my life. I had been in many prisons before, but this prison treated me like I was a person and not a number.
A year after my release I connected on Facebook with a group called ACCW alumni. We all met up outside of prison and started up the research that Ruth had started us on in the institution. Today I am employed by the University of British Columbia as a research assistant, and have been for over a year, and I am a team member of Women in 2 Healing. We research our passions with the hope to create change.
We are a supportive network of women who are facing the challenges of being incarcerated. Working with Women in 2 Healing has changed my life in so many ways. I can help other inmates today to face those challenges.
I also work for the Doing Time project. I interview women when they are released from prison, as well as at three, six, nine, and twelve months after release. We ask them questions about health care access, housing, community resources, drug use, spirituality, self-esteem, and employment, and numerous other questions. Our team has interviewed over 500 women.
We have just gotten to the halfway point of our third grant-funded project, another community-based participatory research project, and it's called Aboriginal Healing Outside of the Gates. In this project, we are doing interviews with aboriginal women who have been in a provincial or federal correctional centre.
The goal of this project is to see exactly what challenges women face after they have been in the community for a while, what kind of impact incarceration has had on their journey into reintegrating, and what the barriers are. We're also looking at what percentage of women have been accessing health care and community resources after their release.
What we have heard from women so far is that a big percentage of women have reverted to doing drugs and alcohol due to an inability to properly access resources and gain employment. But women still have hope that they will be able to make things change.
They have also told us that they need to treated with dignity and respect. That's not always the case after being incarcerated. They all have a need to not be pushed into anything after they've been incarcerated. They don't want that. I have to say that stable employment, a supportive network of safe people, and having someone who listens to me are the biggest positives in my life today.
Among some of the biggest challenges we see with women when they are released--and I want to stress this--is that women are not getting housing referrals when they are released and they are ending up homeless. Of 500 women, 40% women leave prison homeless--that's 40%--and many more, a bigger majority, end up homeless within months. This has to change.
They're also not getting the proper drug and mental health treatment that they need and want. Also, they're not given enough places that take women from prison, the treatment centres that will accept women from prison. The ones that do accept them have long waiting periods, as the majority of centres will not accept women from prison just because they've been in prison.
Giving a woman in prison a welfare cheque and saying “be on your way” is not rehabilitation. The gaps in the system need to be closed.
Thank you for listening.