Status of Women committee  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 embarki

Status of Women committee  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 w

Status of Women committee  It's interesting. In the other part of my research I've been reading prison reports from 1837 onwards. Every year they would release annual reports. When you read the reports from 1837 up until the 1960s, you see that they actually didn't want indigenous people in their prisons,

Status of Women committee  In what way do you mean?

Status of Women committee  I think that's important, and I think bringing culture into prison is important. I think those are the kinds of things that at least alleviate some of these impacts. The reality, from my sense of it, is that there's a culture in prisons. If anyone has ever been in a prison they

Status of Women committee  If it's the only option, I would say yes, but I would definitely look more towards community options.

Status of Women committee  With indigenous people...?

Status of Women committee  This would be where all the great work that Madame Picard does comes in. They would come in and would actually host section 81 or section 84 agreements, through which they have some of the resources in place to facilitate, to see, to host indigenous women.

Status of Women committee  Do you mean women going into prisons?

Status of Women committee  It would be the front-end strategies of basic resources. When we went into communities, there wasn't running water or there wasn't food. How can you expect people to thrive, if they don't even have some of those basic needs?

Status of Women committee  Yes. It's all three areas. First is social determinants. Second is to mitigate it. Third is community options such as those Madame Picard is involved in.

Status of Women committee  I was talking to a friend of mine back in B.C. She is a Carrier Sekani woman. Her sister is in prison for murder right now. I'll walk you through that story. Their history is that the father was abusive. They lived with a fairly abusive family. The mother drank quite a bit. The

Status of Women committee  In the CCRA, they do. I forget the section; I think it's section 33. They have to actually provide cultural sensitivity to indigenous people at the federal level.

Status of Women committee  Yes, it's a good question. “Penal” means “punitive”, and “colonialism” would be the history of European exploitation in other people's countries, like in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. It's a settler colonial region where individuals came, settled, and had to eliminate the

Status of Women committee  To echo what Madame Picard was saying, right now, as far as I know, there's one section 81 for women—a healing lodge for women—and that's in Alberta. Then there's one healing lodge run by CSC, which is in Saskatchewan. Just to go back to the idea of results, it really is differe