Thank you.
I want to correct this right away, because someone thinks a criminologist has arrived; it's my second career. I don't think I'm here in my criminology capacity, although I am teaching in areas related to the subject matter we're talking about today.
I think it's my experience...33 years with the criminal justice system, and my volunteer work now, both with the residential schools dispute resolution process and as a member of the Keepers of the Vision for the healing lodge for Corrections Canada and Okimaw Ohci in southwest Saskatchewan. The main files I looked after with CSC were related to aboriginal women, women in the corrections system, victims, and restorative justice.
That's just by way of background so that she doesn't hit me with the criminologist questions. I'm not self-identifying as an academic. I try to bring to my students the real-life experiences I've had in 33 years in this type of work, just to balance some of the academic. Of course the academic is important, but it's probably not my strength area.
Unexpectedly last year on January 3, my 60th birthday, an aboriginal woman who I knew in prison and had reconnected with in the community showed up on my doorstep with her young baby. She asked if my husband and I would take her young child while she sought in-patient treatment.
I have to start there, because my year has been about on-the-ground experiencing what I felt I knew, and did know, in many ways, through the work I've done over the years as a volunteer and as a paid employee of the government. But the last year has just affirmed for me the state that we are in, the brokenness of our system.
I don't want to imply that there are not good people working in the system. I was one of those people who tried hard, who tried my best, when I was in federal government. And I've seen over the last year.... We're now on our fourth worker. She's as lovely as the other three, and trying her best, but there are many, many struggles.
We did take this young child in so that this mom could try to rebuild from an addiction problem. Her history, if I were to describe it, would be familiar to you, probably, from what you've been hearing as you've travelled the country. My fellow witnesses today would probably say that her story sounds much like the stories that we know are tied up with the complex situation of violence against aboriginal women. Her background was violent as a child. She then inflicted violence on others, and she hurt herself as well. She spent most of her life in provincial, juvenile, and federal facilities. She's been crime-free since she got out a few years ago, but has struggled with the challenges of re-entry.
That's why I've decided to focus just a few recommendations around re-entry, because it's such a big topic that you're tackling, and I know that we're one of your last stops. You've heard it. You've heard from experts that have far more experience and expertise than I, so I just wanted to focus a little bit out of that lived experience this year and also my experience at the back end of the criminal justice system.
Recently I came across an aboriginal model called Circle of Courage, whose principles on native American child development became the basis for a book called Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future, written by a native American called Martin Brokenleg and others. It began a movement that's showing success in working with young aboriginal youth at risk. I'd like to use its principles to frame a few recommendations that I'm just going to make about the back end of the system and aboriginal women coming out of the prison system.
The four principles are belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity. Belonging is the organizing principle in partnership cultures such as first nations. Mr. Brokenleg says that in an aboriginal culture, one feels significant by belonging, whereas in dominating cultures, one often gains significance by standing out from others, often seen as the hyper-individualism of our western society.
That makes me think of how when aboriginal women are returning to the community, they need the chance to create a sense of belonging to their culture and to the larger society that, through long incarceration, has become unfamiliar and unfriendly to them. They can't create places of belonging unless the larger society is welcoming. This means to me that a public that understands that a system of graduated release from prison is a key component of successful re-entry is important, as is a public that can shed its fear and its us/them mentality.
Collectively as citizens we need to have the courage to be more hospitable. As we do that, we will strengthen our bonds of community and our confidence to prevent crime in the first place.
Education programs are essential to this end. The media should be a major target of such campaigns so that they can educate others.
I can remember being on the planning committee for a conference called “Prison, Parole and the Media”. One of the aboriginal women prisoners we invited to be part of the planning committee said to one of the journalists, also a planning committee member, “I'm getting out on parole in a few weeks. Can you tell me if it's really as bad out there as your headlines suggest?”
One of the key ideas of the task force on federally sentenced women was that every woman should have a community support worker from the beginning of her sentence to the end of her sentence.