Sure.
One of them is that we have to be creative in our solutions. If we just follow the correctional mandate of risk assessments and managing people's risks, we won't come up with an ability to release people into the community. I'll give you an example.
When I worked at the women's transition house, it was a transition house for women who were abused. Oftentimes, they're indigenous women coming from poverty. In fact, a lot of the women were actually coming from prison.
When you're coming from poverty, you can't afford to live in a good place. Often the women would have to stay in an area called the crack shacks and you can imagine what the crack shacks might have entailed. Of course, having worked for parole, you go in to do these community assessments, to see if they're going to be released into an environment that's suitable for their rehabilitation. They can't afford to do that. They can't afford to stay anywhere, other than an environment that's more than likely not going to be suitable for their parole.
A creative idea, for instance, is a transition house. This was on our own backs, in the sense that, we didn't have the resources for it. If we could fund these kinds of resources.... They would stay in these environments, but we would offer them a safety plan, so that if anything ever happened, they would be welcome to stay in our house for the time being—in the interim—so that we could set up something else.
We need to get creative in our solutions. That comes from the communities. It comes from the grassroots work. I'll give you another example.
Right now, I'm doing a project on the missing and murdered indigenous women. You may or may not be familiar with Gladys Radek, but she walked across Canada five times to raise awareness and to bring this issue to light. The communities have been doing this work for years. We're just picking it up.
As there has been so much criminal justice neglect in this area, they have taken on looking for the missing and murdered women themselves. Two summers ago, we went across Canada to talk about all the amazing work that they've been doing. We interviewed people like Bernadette Smith, who started the “Drag the Red” campaign. Are you familiar with this?
Drag the Red, what they did.... The police refused to search the Red River after Tina Fontaine's body was found. The police said it was ineffective and inefficient, so they started dragging the Red. They didn't find very much. I think they found only teeth, but do you know what else they did? Outside of the monofunction of policing, what they also did was they built community. They gave people hope. They brought people together. This is what we call community capacity building. These are exactly the kinds of things that we want to be seeing in indigenous communities. This is led by indigenous people.
I have lots more examples of that and of course, I'm going to be doing research on this and providing those kinds of community capacity examples.