Status of Women committee  CSC is flexible about how many women it would need in order to start a program. Normally, they like to hold a program with about eight or 10 women, because they use a sharing approach, but they have been running their programs with four or five. They are flexible in that. In som

Status of Women committee  What these programs do.... They call it a “continuum of care”. It's a holistic approach to healing. The correctional programs for women offenders are co-facilitated by an elder. I think that 50% to 80% of the time the program sessions have an elder with them. They have ceremonies

Status of Women committee  Concerning program delivery?

Status of Women committee  We found that the challenge the Correctional Service has in offering its culturally specific programs, which it has developed and has found to be effective, is the low number of women offenders in some of its institutions. The majority of indigenous offenders are in the prairie p

Status of Women committee  We had looked at how many indigenous women offenders in general overall, over the last three years, were assigned to higher levels of security. We found, in general, that indigenous women offenders were held at higher levels of security on average than non-indigenous women offend

Status of Women committee  We definitely saw that the incidence of physical and sexual abuse was very high among women offenders. They, themselves, have been victims of crime, in some cases at a very early age. We didn't examine that specifically, but we did notice it in the files. That was, in part, to b

Status of Women committee  We didn't meet with offenders as part of our audit, but we did meet with the elders who were working with the indigenous women, and they told us that this is primarily the very first thing they deal with.

Status of Women committee  They use the custody rating scale to assign programs. We found that when they do the security classification, about a half of the women offenders are determined to be low risk, so they're sent to minimum security sections of the penitentiary. If they are low risk, then they would

Status of Women committee  They should be using two separate things.

Status of Women committee  Yes, in our indigenous offenders audit we looked at how they had developed their correctional programs for men and women, and they did a lot of consultation and ensured that the programs were culturally relevant. We met with elders at various penitentiaries and they all spoke ver

Status of Women committee  I'm not aware of one, no.

Status of Women committee  They have specific programs for men and specific programs for women, so they have done a lot in developing correctional programs that meet the unique needs of women offenders. Our concern was that they weren't getting quick enough access to these programs so that they completed t

Status of Women committee  The department uses the custody rating scale, and that tool was designed over 25 years ago based on a sample population of male offenders. It uses that tool to assess women offenders. Its own studies have found problems with the predictive reliability of that tool to ensure that

Status of Women committee  With regard to the effectiveness of these programs, CSC has reviewed its programs for both indigenous and non-indigenous women. The problem it has in evaluating the programs' effectiveness is that women, overall, have very low risks of reoffending, so in taking a program, it's ha

Public Accounts committee  For our audit of women offenders, we looked to see how well the Correctional Service was meeting the unique needs of women offenders. It's been 25 years since the government closed the Kingston Prison for Women, so we looked to see the extent to which the Correctional Service o