I would definitely be approaching corrections more like what Brenda Tole was talking about. I personally have seen a difference. There are nine members I work with who were all incarcerated at the same time in the institution that Brenda Tole was running. We're all doing well. We're all employed. We're all doing very, very well. We went from being restricted to being unrestricted. Taking the segregation out was such a huge, huge thing.
I'm just going to talk about one thing that I remember. Earlier, we were talking about fighting. This is how the jail dealt with some of the issues that came up. When I was there, there were two girls who fought. They were sent to segregation for one hour--not one night, not two days, not 16 days, but one hour--and then they were sent to conflict resolution. If they didn't deal with their differences, they were sent back to the maximum security prison. Nobody wanted to go back to maximum security prison so they dealt with their issues. It's amazing how women can actually deal with their issues if they're given the chance to deal with them.
We've been talking about bringing in the community. We need the community in the prisons. When women are in prison, how are they supposed to learn about the things they need to do on the outside? They're being taught by somebody who is dealing with them for security, you know what I mean, like the correctional officers. I'll tell you something right now. I don't want to learn about substance abuse from a correctional officer. I don't want to learn about anger management from a correctional officer. I want to learn about it from a registered counsellor or from somebody from the community, somebody who is neutral, not somebody who is going to lock my cell at night.