Before I begin, I would actually like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land on this unceded territory of the Anishinabe people. It's an honour and privilege for me.
I also want to thank the members of this standing committee for their time and energy in embarking on such important work.
As noted, I am Vicki Chartrand. I am currently associate professor at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Previous to this, I was the executive director of a women's transition house in the northern interior of British Columbia. I also worked at the national office of the Elizabeth Fry Societies. Prior to that, I worked at Correctional Service Canada in the voluntary sector in the parole office.
You may know that in 2016 Macleans magazine published an article entitled “Canada’s prisons are the 'new residential schools'”. The statement builds on a substantial body of research that explores how Canada's criminal justice system works against indigenous people at every level: police checks and arrests, bail denial and detention, sentencing miscarriages and disparities, and of course, the high rates of imprisonment. These trends are also well documented throughout other settler colonial regions, such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
It's clear that the problem is systemic to settler regions like Canada. While the prison is not a residential school per se, we have to keep in mind that it was born of the same modern logics of segregation and reformation of the individual. I don't think it's a coincidence that in the 1950s and 1960s, as we started to see Indian assimilation policies begin to recede, we also started to see the prison and the child welfare systems silently take their place in the lives of indigenous people. In fact, prior to the 1960s, there was only 1% to 2% of indigenous prisoners. Since the 1960s, that number has increased consistently every year after.
As you have likely heard, indigenous women represent 2% of the general population and somewhere between 36% and 39% of the federal prison population. This reality is woven into a backdrop of colonialism, where indigenous women are more often criminalized and then imprisoned for what are referred to as “crimes of survival” that are linked to poverty, lack of educational and employment opportunities, lifestyles of substance abuse, mental health concerns, and histories of sexual abuse, violence, and trauma. In your study, it's important for the committee to consider how the prison system often parallels and reinforces the same realities of repression, abuse, and violence experienced by indigenous women from the onset of colonialism.
I've visited prisons all across Canada, in Australia, and I've even been in a prison in Cambodia. Prisons are characterized by authoritarianism, marked power imbalance, violence, enforced restriction of movement and activities, isolation, lack of freedom of association, and enforcement of arbitrary and trivial demands. This is also very characteristic of colonialism itself.
Indigenous women end up on the deepest end of the system, and continue to be subject to some of the most restrictive levels of penal practices, such as maximum-security classifications, segregation, involuntary transfers, physical restraints, strip searches, lockdowns, use of force, dry cells, institutional charges, lack of medical attention, and also with higher rates of self-harm and suicide. When you end up on the deep end of the system—and I don't mean to be macabre—you often don't come out alive.
Adaptive or coping strategies commonly exhibited by women in prison, such as angry outbursts, substance use, or self-injury, are often cultivated in response to the prison environment and compounded by their histories of abuse, violence, and trauma. Women's resistance to the institutional order, or their inability to adjust or cope, is often interpreted as non-compliance, perceived as a security threat, and met with intensive control, which also results in more time in prison.
For example, there are two cases in the media that I'm sure you're familiar with.
Kinew James, who died of a heart attack after her sentence after her emergency button call in her cell was routinely ignored, was initially serving a six-year sentence for manslaughter but accumulated dozens of charges while in prison, which resulted in a 15-year sentence.
Renee Acoby has also been in the media. She accumulated an additional 21 years of charges in prison, spent more than half her time in segregation, and was eventually given a dangerous offender designation, which, effectively, keeps her in prison for life. This is particularly germane for indigenous women whose resistance to control or violence is a part of their survival in their communities or on reserve, whatever the case may be.
Since 1848, from the Brown commission, we've been looking at the systemic repression and brutality in the prisons.
Since the 1960s we've been looking at remedies to address the rates of incarceration of indigenous people in Canada that have included more penal interventions, and clearly to no avail. It is a mistake for us to continue to make the prisons part of a remedy to the rates of indigenous incarceration when that reality is arguably endemic to its character.
I have solutions that I want to build on that echo the significant work others have been doing in this area already.
First, front-end strategies that are indigenous-led are more long-term. There's a bill on the table, Bill C-262, that outlines the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I want to commend the current government for supporting this bill. It's in line with the TRC recommendations.
We need to make sure that basic rights of indigenous people are being met. There are basic national standards of clean water, electricity, employment and educational opportunities, social service support, health care, and the like.
Second, we have to minimize and mitigate the harmful impacts of the prisons, such as, for example, by abolishing segregation, at the very least, for women. My understanding is that the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies has a pilot project in place that looks at dynamic security measures, rather than more restrictive ones, such as force measures. We can also accomplish this through external, independent oversight and accountability. That can happen by way of judicial review, as outlined in the Arbour report, or through parliamentary oversight in the intermediary, as outlined by Senator Kim Pate.
Finally, we need decarceration strategies and community options. There are existing remedies in the legislation that include, in the CCRA, section 29 agreements in the community for people with mental health concerns, and sections 81 and 84, whereby indigenous and non-indigenous prisoners can serve their sentence and parole in a supported way in the community.
In implementing these remedies, we obviously need the necessary resources. We have to build on the internal strengths and capacities of indigenous communities—I could talk more about that—as well as be creative in our options.
I just want to remind you that prisons don't disappear problems; they only disappear people.
Thank you so much for listening.
