Perfect.
My name is Mo Korchinski. I live in Maple Ridge, B.C. I'm a non-aboriginal woman, but I follow aboriginal teachings through my elder, Holy Cow. I spent a total of seven years in and out of the B.C. provincial prison, with long sentences where I had the opportunity to watch women coming and going. I've been out for 11 and a half years, and I'm coordinator of unlocking the gates peer health mentoring program, which receives funding through the B.C. First Nations Health Authority.
Most women inside prison are not bad people. They're broken, they're wounded, and they need healing. It goes back to generations of abuse, passed from one generation to another. Somewhere along the line we have to break this cycle.
I had never found a sense of belonging or community until I went inside the prison. It's sad that women like me feel that they don't belong in the outside community. Most helpful for me, while I was inside, was to be able to get in touch with that inner child who was broken, and to know that I can now protect that inner child. I had to let go of a lot of the hurt and abuse that I had experienced. This healing started for me inside prison, through my aboriginal teachings.
I'm very blessed that when I was released, I was able to find a research assistant job working with women being released from prison. In our research, women were saying that they needed somebody to walk beside them as soon as they were released. Women tell us that they lose everything when they go to prison, and they are released with nothing except for their belongings in a clear plastic bag.
We started a health peer mentor program five years ago where we mentor women for the first 72 hours upon their release. The impact of this program on women leaving prison is a feeling of being safe and supported on the day of their release. Approximately 65% of the peer health mentoring program participants are indigenous. Being able to connect women with a peer health mentors who have prison experience themselves gives women hope that they too can beat the cycle of incarceration and addiction.
Women are desperate and vulnerable when they are released from prison. This is a high-risk time for women to go back to using street drugs or buying street pills, with a good chance that these pills will be fentanyl. The fentanyl crisis has caused increased fear among incarcerated women preparing for release. The number of people overdosing is frightening for all addicts, but even more so for incarcerated women being released and having nowhere to go.
Women inside prison reach out to our program because they want to change their lives. Women don't want to come out from prison, use substances, and live on the streets. Why are so many women coming out of prison today and overdosing and dying? Why aren't correctional facilities giving more trauma counselling inside so that women are healthy when they come out? If you really want to understand the women inside prison and what works for them, please read Arresting Hope: Women Taking Action in Prison Health Inside Out, because we wrote it from inside the prison.
Thank you.