I would recommend that the committee review the Parliamentary Budget Officer's review of Bill C-25, as it then was. We've already had the stats that a third of the women serving federal jail sentences are indigenous. In one of the appendices for that document, the Parliamentary Budget Officer showed what it was costing to keep one of the women on the management protocol. I would encourage you to look at those figures, because Correctional Services has estimated that it costs, on average, a minimum of $185,000 a year to keep a woman in federal custody. When you consider what has brought those women into custody and what that money could be doing in the community to benefit not just those women or their children but the entire community, you can see that $185,000 a year could go a long way.
But let's go much higher than that. We're talking about more than 100 indigenous women held at higher security levels. It's costing up to and more than $500,000 a year to keep them in isolation. They require three to five staff and they're fully shackled everywhere they move. Those are incredible resources that could be used in much more productive ways in the community.
If you think it's just the scheming or dreaming of people who are doing the work and maybe are not able to see the whole picture, I encourage you to look at what the heads of corrections said in the mid-nineties, not what Kim Pate from Elizabeth Fry says or what the University of Ottawa says. The heads of corrections said that if the provincial, territorial, and federal governments came to an agreement, you could probably release up to 75% of the people then serving prison sentences and not increase any risk to public safety.
That's an incredible number. That tells you how many were in for poverty-related and other inequality issues. Have them in the community, paying back and being held accountable. We're not talking about people running off willy-nilly and not being held accountable for their behaviour. They could be in the community in ways that others have already talked about--restorative ways--while paying back, living in the community and contributing to it, and working. There are many examples.
With regard to indigenous women and women in general, I was in Cape Breton two weeks ago testifying on how unequal it is that you still have to take women to central locations, even in a provincial or territorial context. You have to take them out of their homes and disrupt their families and disrupt their employment, even on very minor and short sentences. I think there are lots of examples of other things we could be doing. There are ways we could be spending that money better. We don't have to say, “Get new money”; we have lots of money being spent already.