Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for inviting the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.
I know the committee is working very quickly on things. I apologize that I did not have an opportunity to develop a written submission, as I was actually on the road, in an airport, when I received the call asking if we could attend. I'm very happy to be here, and very happy I could get back in time, but I send regrets from my board members who were not able to attend as a result.
We have 26 members across the country. They range from organizations that are the only community service, the only women's service, the only victims service in some areas, to those that are doing prison resettlement work. We work with marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized women and girls, both those who are within the criminal justice system and those who are not.
In terms of drug use, I won't repeat things that my colleague Catherine has said. She very ably covered many of the issues. Rather than repeat those, I want to talk a bit about the differences we see, particularly for women, in this issue of drug use and alcohol interdiction methods within the prisons and the impact it has to pull the two together and not differentiate policies from time to time.
As many of you know, I've worked for almost 30 years now in this area, first with young people, then with men, and for the last 20 years focusing on women in particular. There's one thing that's vitally important to know about many of the women in prison. The estimates last done by Corrections during the task force, which was more than 20 years ago, showed that at that time, almost 91% of indigenous women and about 80% of all women had histories of physical and/or sexual abuse.
You may wonder what that has to do with drug use.
Because of limits in health care, particularly in mental health care, an area where women have traditionally been overrepresented, in large part, because of those kinds of histories when they're marginalized, often women have first been medicated even before they are in an institution. As we have seen cuts to health care across the country, we've seen women start to self-medicate when they are no longer eligible for drug plans, whether it's through their employment or through social assistance or whatever. We also see in the prison system that one of the highest rates of medication use is with women prisoners. It's also with indigenous women and with women--and men, for that matter--who have mental health issues.
So we start with the point of discussing two areas of drug use. One is legal drug use in terms of the use of drugs that essentially act as medical constraints or restraints and that interfere with, or mask sometimes, the medication or the use of other drugs. It also often gets confused with other drugs. We have a number of women who've had to go through court cases that they can ill afford.
Those of you who are aware of this area will know how difficult it is if you're charged with an offence in custody--for instance, of drug use. If you have either a false positive or a positive that isn't determined yet to be false on a urinalysis test, it's very difficult often to challenge that when you don't have access to any kind of legal support or have access to in fact be able to put forth the research that would show that this particular legal medication might be mistaken for an illegal medication, or that the interaction of certain medications may create a false positive. So we end up with situations where we have medication being confused with illegal drug use.
We also see situations, as we've seen some challenges to that medication within the prisons, of women starting to self-medicate both in the community and in the prison system.
We also know what the research done by the Correctional Service of Canada more than 20 years ago, by Dr. Diane Riley, indicated, that the war on drugs mentality that was being brought into the prison system at that time, and that was being brought in generally, imported from the United States, was actually going to drive up serious drug use within the institutions. The reason is that we know that cannabis and other so-called softer drugs--drugs that tend to not create the same sort of potentially volatile situations or aggressive tendencies as other drugs--take much longer to pass through the system.
So Dr. Riley actually predicted that we would start to see increased drug use, and we've seen that in the men's and women's prisons. We haven't necessarily seen an increase in volatility within the women's prisons, but we certainly have heard of and seen increased use of more serious drugs.
Similarly, the ban on cigarettes has actually meant that there's a greater trade now in tobacco and greater interdiction efforts used to stop tobacco entry than there ever was for drug use.
This is not a moral commentary on whether it's healthy or not healthy to be using drugs. But I also want to point out that what that has led to in the women's prisons is a massive increase in strip searching.
Going back to the history of sexual abuse and physical abuse that many women have, many women find those kinds of invasive searches not just humiliating but also additionally punitive in terms of their histories of post-traumatic stress, their histories of abuse. One of the challenges we have had when we've asked Corrections for the data on this is that we've been advised several times over that there are so many strip searches of women—think of it—that they don't keep track of them.
We were trying to determine how much contraband was found. It has been acknowledged privately, although I'm not able to obtain written confirmation, that very little of that contraband is drugs. Sometimes it will be jewellery, sometimes it will be money, sometimes it will be cigarettes, but virtually no drugs and never weapons. So the very issues for which, lawfully, that kind of sexual assault by the state is permitted do not bear out in terms of theory.
I cannot provide you with numbers as to how many strip searches actually happen. The fact that we can't have those numbers means that it is probably far greater than it ever should be, and certainly not seen as necessary, even by those who do the strip searches.
I bring to your attention a policy intervention that was done by all the deputy wardens of the women's prisons, the federal penitentiaries for women, in 2005. The deputy wardens at that time—they are no longer called that now—were responsible for security in the institutions. The deputy wardens determined that strip searching was being used so much that it was actually interfering with things like private family visits. The intervention that is seen as most likely to create successful reintegration later is contact with family and communities of support. In fact, women were refusing to have their children brought in for fear they might be strip searched, even though the official policy is no strip searching. If you're asked to take clothes off and reveal the diaper, that is a strip search, and those sorts of things do happen in the prisons from time to time. The risk of strip search, the threat of strip search, meant that many women asked their families not to attend and some family members refused to attend.
Those who did would go through things like bleaching their children's hands. With social assistance at rates on which they could ill afford their groceries, they would put their clothes through dry cleaning to try to ensure that they wouldn't have false positives.
So the interference with reintegration, the interference with visits, the lack of security need for those kinds of strip searches meant that all the deputy wardens for the women's prisons at that time put forth a suggestion to national headquarters of the Correctional Service of Canada that they cease all routine strip searches and do strip searching only for cause, when they actually have suspicion that someone might be carrying drugs or a weapon, or might be doing something. It makes sense that if you have concern, you have the authority to do it. That was rejected by national headquarters, even though there was no evidence that it would increase any risk to staff or to public safety by changing that policy.
Where are we now? We have a high number of false positives. We have increasing numbers of women in prison. We're now having private family visiting units also being used as living units. We have overcrowding that is limiting the access of women to their communities. And it's all in the name of trying to prevent drug interdiction, when Corrections themselves will acknowledge, probably not here, never publicly, and certainly all prisoners know, that the easiest way to get access to drugs is through staff. I wish that were otherwise; I wish I could tell you something else. But the reality is that when you have the kinds of severe security measures that are being taken now, so that even people like me are being told that I'm ringing off....
Of course, I know the policy, so I'll ask for the risk-threat assessment; I'll ask for all of the appropriate measures. Everybody will agree that they have no concern that after 30 years of coming in, I would actually ever introduce drugs to the institution. Yet I've rung off falsely positive, so much so that at one point we went through a whole little charade of what kind of medication I might have touched in the previous two weeks. In the end, it was assessed that a Dimetapp I had given my child two weeks earlier may have caused it. Now really, I suggest to you, that is stretching it. I know that the staff were trying to be very helpful, and I appreciated their help in ensuring that I could have access to the institution on that visit. But don't think anybody was fooled into thinking that it was in fact what caused me to ring off. It may have been the gas pump I touched earlier. It may have been the money I touched. It may have been anything, or it may have been nothing. We don't know.
I would encourage us to seriously look at this issue, and think, as we've heard and as the Insite decision has encouraged, about looking at harm reduction measures, to look at how in fact current drug policies have driven up the risk of drug use within the prisons, and to try to reverse some of those.
