Great. Thank you for having me. My name is Savannah Gentile. I'm the director of advocacy and legal issues with the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. I want to thank you for giving your time to these really important and pressing issues.
In order to talk about indigenous peoples in corrections, I feel it's first very important to provide a context for these issues. I want to talk about the institutional trauma that is experienced by indigenous communities, and in particular by indigenous women. This trauma begins long before a federal sentence. It begins with residential schools, with the sixties scoop, and with the continued, ongoing apprehension of indigenous kids into the child welfare system.
I want to quote Dr. Cindy Blackstock directly because I think it's a powerful statement. Just this month, she reiterated the fact that there are more first nations kids in child welfare today than at the height of residential schools. What is the most common reason for apprehension? It is issues related to poverty.
It should come as no surprise then that 80% of women who are criminalized in this country are criminalized for poverty-related offences. Indigenous women and girls are overrepresented at every level of the correctional system— youth, provincial, and federal. They are in fact one of the fastest-growing prison populations today in Canada.
Once in prison, there's added inequality and discrimination, as indigenous women are overrepresented as well in maximum security and segregation placements, where they have limited access to culturally sensitive programming and mental health supports. In light of the federal government's commitment to reconciliation, to recommendation number 30 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the facts I've just stated, and to the number of reports verifying the systemic nature of these issues, our efforts as a country must be focused on getting indigenous women prisoners out of prisons.
I know the mandate of the committee is to look at programming within prisons. I want to talk a bit about why programming in prisons is not really one of the solutions, and it's actually a part of the problem. In fact, substantive equality demands that we do things differently, that we move women outside of the prison system. Really what it requires is a major paradigm shift, one which CSC has frequently and demonstrably resisted.
I want to talk about section 81 agreements. Section 81 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act offers the opportunity for indigenous communities to sponsor indigenous prisoners to serve their sentences in the community. This offers the opportunity for much-needed resources to be redirected from prisons into indigenous communities that are in need.
However, section 81 has been around as long as the CCRA, but it's severely underutilized. There are a number of reasons for this. These reasons have actually been documented extensively by the Office of the Correctional Investigator in the report “Spirit Matters”.
I want to talk a bit about how CSC has frustrated the purpose of section 81, in one way by diverting funding from section 81, that is, agreements based in community, to prison-based interventions like pathways units that currently exist within many of the prisons—in five of the regional facilities across this country, I think.
Diverting funding, again, is documented by the Office of the Correctional Investigator. Much of the funding meant to be allocated to section 81 agreements was at a point diverted by CSC into prison-based interventions. This is actually quite contrary to the purpose of section 81. The purpose of section 81 was meant to address concern over the growing number of indigenous people in our prisons. Obviously, by diverting funds to prison-based interventions, you're not accomplishing that goal.
One of the major impediments, in fact, to the development and maintenance of section 81 agreements is funding inequity and insecurity. They operate on five-year funding cycles. The funding difference between CSC healing lodges and section 81 community agreements is quite substantial. This means that there is a lot of turnover when it comes to employees. In fact, it is known that section 81 healing lodges have become a training ground for CSC.
One of the major barriers created by this funding inequity speaks to the inadequacy of providing indigenous programming inside prisons. Again, this is recorded in “Spirit Matters”. What some of the existing section 81 agreements speak to—there are not many, especially for women prisoners—is the pressure put on them by insurance companies to follow CSC security-related procedures, which these indigenous organizations feel are inconsistent with an indigenous approach to healing.
When you have indigenous programming within a CSC facility, you are already.... It's a bad starting point, because it is a colonial structure. We have to acknowledge the reality of that. Indigenous ways and practices cannot be seen to their end in this kind of structure.
I was formerly a regional advocate. I went to Grand Valley Institution for Women on a regular basis for over a year. They have a pathways unit. I can say from experience hearing from women that there are a number of ways those units don't adhere to indigenous culture. For instance, the elders are on CSC contract, so this creates a distrust between the women in the pathways unit and the elders.
In addition, there are limited spaces for indigenous women in the pathways unit, which means that a number of women have no access to pathways. At the same time, culturally based ETAs, escorted temporary absences, are often limited to the women in pathways. Other indigenous women in the prison miss out on those opportunities because they are not in the pathways unit or because they've been kicked out of the pathways unit for behaviour that is the result of dealing with trauma, which is the point of those units. That's another way in which CSC has frustrated the purpose of section 81 agreements.
I just want to emphasize again that substantive equality calls for a different approach to these issues. We've tried it in the prison for a number of years. There has been an erosion of the “Creating Choices” principles that the regional facilities in our country were founded on. That erosion began before the foundation was even firmly set.
The lack of section 81 agreements and the erosion of “Creating Choices” speak to the fact that CSC is not able to readily implement substantive equality approaches within its facilities. It's not going to happen. We need a different approach, one that moves women outside of the prison system.