Thank you, honourable senators, for inviting me here today. Since the early 1980s, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, or CAEFS, has maintained a strong presence in Canada’s penitentiaries designated for women. We conduct monthly visits inside each one and produce detailed records which document prison conditions and demonstrate widespread contradictions between the written rules regulating this system and its realities.

Canada’s prison system is indeed intensely regulated — but without effective accountability structures. The result is evident in the outcomes: a population hovering under 13,000 people federally incarcerated at any given time, but which requires approximately $2.5 billion in direct annual costs to be maintained and which produces a host of known adverse impacts.

We ask what the purpose is of laws that are not subject to oversight and redress. The prison system itself exists to ensure that the rule of law is upheld, yet ongoing calls from the Office of the Correctional Investigator, from CAEFS, from many of my colleagues before you, and from every major commission and inquiry which looked at this system have concluded that it needs many changes, such as those provided in this bill, including pathways from prison for the many people who do not need to be there, moving them into systems capable of responding to their needs.

The question ought not to be, “should we pass this bill,” but “why have we not done so sooner?” If the system were not so overwhelmed responding to poverty, addiction and mental health, it could more meaningfully respond to the very small percentage of people who pose an ongoing risk.

Importantly, this bill pronounces existing legislative priorities. Section 4(c.2) of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act requires that every decision made by the Correctional Service of Canada is done with a view to alternatives to custody. In its very limited uptake, we see success. I nod to the transfers of federally sentenced people into community-based addiction treatment facilities; this is what works, this is what returns people to the community in safe ways for everyone.

Unfortunately, most decisions are not made with this view. Most decisions are overly restrictive, and much of what happens in Canadian penitentiaries should shock the public. This is why allowing persons to apply for a remedy, if there has been a demonstrated unfairness in the administration of their sentence, constitutes a much-needed tool in our justice system.

Our institutions need to demonstrate the fairness and accountability they expect of individuals. This provision will increase the public’s faith in and trust of the justice system, and reduce the reactionary costliness of future lawsuits. I point to the $28 million recently awarded to individuals who have experienced segregation in Canada.

We applaud the bill’s oversight mechanism in relation to segregation. Structured Intervention Unit implementation, or SIU’s, as a member rightly noted, was “well-intended but poorly executed.”

Well-intended but poorly executed is the modus operandi of the prison system. All is well on paper, but flawed in practice.

On paper, SIUs respect the Mandela rules. In practice, they are failing. On paper, people get out of their cell confinement and get meaningful human contact up to four hours per day. In practice, people refuse; they are depressed because it’s not meaningful to spend those hours on camera only interacting with staff in positions of power over them who are writing down and scrutinizing everything they say and do. And it is not meaningful to sit alone in a small cold yard with only concrete and chain-link fences to look at.

There’s an individual currently in SIU in a prison designated for women, who, as of today, has been there for 49 days. We know that segregation for any length of time is traumatizing, but there are emergent patterns of “long stayers” in the SIUs, and among these long stayers are predominantly Indigenous women and gender-diverse people and those with significant mental health needs upon admission. As the independent advisory panel finds, the SIUs are producing mental illness. These patterns are just the same as they were in the previous administrative segregation and management protocol regimes.

This individual is awaiting transfer to a different institution, which will not occur for at least another week, and we have no indication whether she will be readmitted into a new SIU when she arrives. Unlike the men’s sector, all of the prisons designated for women, except the healing lodge, have SIUs. This has resulted in placements becoming a relatively easy population management strategy with dangerous implications. In prisons for women, at least, SIUs are used primarily as a mental health response.

We should not accept conditions that harm people and release individuals in worse shape than when they arrived. It’s due time we transfer health needs to health systems.

Thank you, and I look forward to any questions you may have.

Thank you for your excellent question. I do think it’s an important first step. Certainly, right now, restrictive conditions and segregation in all its forms are primarily used as a population management strategy. They’re not resolving the problems they intend to, so yes, I do think it is reasonable. I think that it will push the system to innovate and find different and more meaningful responses, especially, if this bill is to pass, in its capacity for people with identified mental health conditions to be moved out of such systems and into health care systems.

We do a lot of work on the ground hosting workshops and bringing in productive conflict resolution tools. The evidence is clear that in incarceration systems designated for women, as Ms. Latimer noted, the realities and contexts are very different than in the men’s sector. We believe that in the existing structure, there are more than enough tools available for Correctional Service Canada to keep people safe in ways that don’t place them in such restrictive conditions. We, as a partner, are committed to continuing to bring in community experts and to support the population to have the skills required to do so without being kept in small cages.

We see the problem as being kind of dual-ended. One, all of the people who provide therapeutic and health services within the Correctional Service of Canada are trained in a risk and securities framework. For example, with the recent influx of behavioural counsellors, incarcerated women and gender-diverse people see these individuals as a therapeutic relationship and are often shocked when the same individuals lay disciplinary charges against them. As long as there are lateral and strong relationships between health care providers and the Correctional Service of Canada, we’re going to see mental health integrated into risk frameworks, and duly, from the end of incarcerated people, we see people being afraid to say they’re not okay because historically and persistently, when an individual who is incarcerated indicates that they’re unwell, this is often responded to by reducing their access to everything in prison and then treating their suffering as risk.

I agree with Ms. Latimer. Certainly, from our experience, it is most individuals who are admitted to structured intervention units who have a diagnosed pre-existing mental health considerations. Upon admission, they become so much worse, for so many individuals. Women and gender-diverse people are in distress for so many reasons in prison and more so in restrictive and segregated conditions.

We don’t only interact with people in prison, but once they’re released, and the long-term impact of this type of treatment is really important to underscore because we see people five to ten years later in the community who really struggle to participate economically and to have relationships and who then isolate — the patterns continue post-incarceration, in really troubling ways.

I think there’s not, and hopefully, quite intentionally so, because what we know from what’s happened is that the provision of programs and services in the penitentiary, although they all have to be done toward re-entry and reintegration in ways that are responsive to all the populations that are in there, they become integrated into the security frameworks that flaw them. From the perspective of supporting women and gender diverse people since the Creating Choices philosophy, it’s been recognized that the best way for people to get access to a program or to receive any kind of therapy or care is in the community where the standards of care and the goals of the training are the priority and not the goals of security. I’m sorry if that was convoluted.

I mean, not to any greater extent than there was, the very limited beds at the psychiatric centres.

What works, and speaking to the burden and the infrastructure, I know of three treatment centres in B.C. — and all addictions treatment centres respond to mental health because they are conflating in our experience — where federally incarcerated people are successfully transferred into treatment centres in the community from a custodial perspective and quite differently from the regional psychiatric centres. They are community-based and care-based, and the results are wonderful. So I recommend looking into what’s working and then building from there.

Sometimes on condition of release, sometimes earlier. At the Fraser Valley institution, the penitentiary for women, there were two treatment facilities that were accepting people with certain criteria prior to day parole. I’m not sure if this is being done through the sections that this bill addresses.

In either event, we see when individuals are placed in conditions which cause them harm they deteriorate, and when individuals are placed in conditions which support them, we’re seeing these individuals successfully navigate treatment and have productive and fulfilling lives; whereas people who are experiencing these structured intervention units are irreparably harmed.