Let me provide you a brief overview. I'll go through the slides fairly quickly.
There are approximately 700 women incarcerated in federal corrections facilities and another 700 who are serving their remaining federal sentences in the community. That's a fifty-fifty split, which is better than male split of about sixty-forty. I will highlight, however, that with respect to indigenous women, the split is actually 60% incarcerated and 40% serving the remaining of their sentence in the community. The overrepresentation of indigenous women now reaches 38.7%.
The average cost of maintaining a woman incarcerated in Canada at the federal level is $220,000, according to the Correctional Service of Canada, and about $190,000 according to the Office of the Auditor General.
In terms of their profile, compared to men federally sentenced women are more likely to have a mental health diagnosis, to have drug-related offences, and to serve shorter sentences. They are also more likely to be supporting dependants on the outside. Actually, most women in federal custody are mothers of children under the age of 18.
In terms of their mental health profiles, 80% of incarcerated women meet the criteria for mental health disorders. These include the most prevalent ones: alcohol/substance abuse disorder, anxiety disorder, and anti-social personality disorder. A third have post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, eating disorders, and psychotic disorders. I'll also mention that nearly half of them are on some sort of psychotropic medication. Finally, 18% have intellectual challenges.
With respect to reintegration challenges facing women, financial and housing challenges are the top two, followed by other issues such as having difficulty accessing a family physician, not having proper identification, or not having a history of employment.
I'll come back later to the financial and housing issue.
In terms of work, there are two types of work in Corrections. There is institutional work and prison industry work. In terms of institutional work, most of it is a menial type of job, the most common being cleaning. With respect to prison industry, most women who are engaged in prison industry are almost exclusively engaged in gender-stereotyped work such as textiles, laundry, and sewing.
We conducted a review of the secure units, the maximum security units for women. We interviewed two-thirds of those women, 41 out of 62 of them. Here are some of our findings.
The infrastructure is very stark, very restrictive, and inappropriate, in our view. The secure units are also used to manage a few women who have serious mental health issues, and that is quite disruptive for the other women. That breaks down in terms of there being many lockdowns and breaks in routines, and it's very difficult for those women to sometimes witness interventions with use of force. There is a lot of drama. These offenders are too often brought into segregation.
The impact of segregation is also something that we've identified. The great majority of the women incarcerated in secure units have experienced segregation. There's also a gender-based classification system, which requires that some inmates who are seen as higher risk are handcuffed and sometimes shackled to go off the unit, which creates all sorts of problems for those women.
Finally, there also is a lack of meaningful employment, which is more chronic and problematic in the secure unit as opposed to the rest of the institution.
We made many recommendations in our last annual report. One of them was to reduce the use of those secure units and to use them solely for women who would otherwise have been sent to administrative segregation. In that sense, we are looking at simply separating the women instead of isolating them. We think that those who are significantly mentally ill should be transferred to outside hospitals and that Correctional Service Canada should expand its MOUs with other outside resources. We identified that 12 beds would probably do it.
The service should also expand its structured living environments, which are more therapeutic environments, and cascade those women who are in secure units to those medium-security structured living environments. Also, things like trauma-informed approaches are lacking, and when you have at least a third of the women who have PTSD, I think it's pretty obvious.
Let me now talk to you specifically about indigenous women. Here's the breakdown across Canada. There are 265 women now representing 38.7%. I should also mention that among those 265 women, there are six Inuit women. That brings in some level of difficulty because there are small numbers in terms of providing them with programming and services that are tailored to their specific needs, which is legally required of the service.
In terms of the indigenous women in federal custody, I would say that every indicator is worse for them. Compared to non-indigenous women, they tend to be younger, more violent, and more gang affiliated. They also tend to have lower levels of education upon admission. In terms of their social history, half attended or had a family member attend a residential school. Nearly half were removed from their family home. Almost all indicated or reported past traumatic experiences and substance abuse. There were high rates of involvement in prostitution at an early age, and almost half indicated they had a history of injection drug use, compared to 24% for non-indigenous women.
In terms of correctional outcome, there is more self-injury, more segregation, more use of force, and more placement in maximum security for indigenous women. They are also typically assessed at a higher level of risk and are less frequently granted day parole or full parole. They are released later in their sentences, likely at statutory release, which is at two-thirds of their sentence.
Finally, in terms of the direction for reforms, we believe that Correctional Services Canada should rethink the way it does women corrections and go back to the blueprint that was developed when P4W, a prison for women in Kingston, was scheduled to be closed and when the five regional centres were opened. We have witnessed great erosion in that philosophy over the years.
We believe a deputy commissioner for indigenous people should be appointed. We have been advocating for this for a decade now. We believe there should be greater use of aboriginal-specific provisions in sections 81 and 84 of the act, which shift the accountability and responsibility to some aboriginal communities. I'm more than happy to talk to you about that.
There should be more culturally appropriate and trauma-informed models of care. We should also enhance the participation of elders in decision-making, review the classification scales—this has been validated by the Office of the Auditor General—and do more Gladue sentencing and vocational training.
Thank you.
