Proceeding of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue No. 25 - Evidence - Meeting of February 8, 2018
KITCHENER, Thursday, February 8, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 6:14 p.m. to study on the issues relating to the human rights of prisoners in the correctional system.
Senator Wanda Elaine Thomas Bernard (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good evening, senators and guests. Before we begin, I would like the senators around the table to introduce themselves.
Senator Cordy: I am Jane Cordy, and I am a senator from Nova Scotia. Welcome to you and thank you for coming before us this evening.
Senator Pate: Yes, thank you very much. We look forward to your testimony. My name is Kim Pate, and I am from here in Ontario.
The Chair: I am Wanda Thomas Bernard, senator from Nova Scotia and chair of the Human Rights Committee.
As first item of business, is it agreed, senators, that we allow photos and filming during this hearing?
Senator Cordy: Yes.
The Chair: Agreed.
We are honoured to be in Kitchener tonight. We visited the Keele Community Correctional Centre today, and we will be visiting the Grand Valley Institution tomorrow.
On our first panel tonight we have from the Regional Ethnocultural Advisory Committee, Sophia Brown Ramsay, Vice-Chair and Manager, Community Development, Black Community Action Network of Peel, Ambreen Jamil, Intern, and Tamera Boothe, Intern; and from the Jane-Finch Concerned Citizens Organization and Regional Ethnocultural Advisory Committee, Winston LaRose, President and Member.
Welcome to all of you. We are now ready to hear your testimony.
Sophia Brown Ramsay, Vice-Chair and Manager, Community Development, Black Community Action Network of Peel, Regional Ethnocultural Advisory Committee: My name, as Senator Bernard said, is Sophia Brown Ramsay. I know the senator went through all of our introductions, but I have to say a couple of words because I happen to be with some amazing people.
I will start with Mr. LaRose. I have to say that this man is incredible. He has just celebrated his eightieth birthday. He ran a race for his eightieth birthday. He has done this for the last 15 years. He is recent recipient of the City of Toronto Bob Marley Lifetime Achievement Award for community services. I think his is incredible. I am pleased to have him by our side tonight and sitting in as a member of REAC Ontario.
I also want to make sure that I highlight our two interns because, again, they’re incredible. They’re doing some amazing things. They’re dedicated. They’re bright, and they wanted to come out tonight to accompany us and be here with you, senators. Thank you again, Ambreen Jamil and Tamera Boothe.
I work with BCAN, the Black Community Action Network. BCAN is an organization that represents over 400 organizations, professionals, advocates, residents and allies who are united in the mission to promote equity, focus, system change through advocacy, community development, education and research. This is so important because many of the families that we touch are touched by issues around CSC. This is why tonight is quite incredible for us.
I want to begin by acknowledging the Prime Minister’s words on January 30 as we start to celebrate within our country and literally all over the world Black History Month. From that I will quote what he said on January 30 in Ottawa:
Today is an important day for Canada. Our commitment to the International Decade will help us better address the very real and unique challenges that Black Canadians face, and bring us closer to a more just and inclusive country.
Again, I acknowledge that the Canadian government is committed to build a better and more inclusive country, and that the Prime Minister has said the International Decade for People of African Descent, which started in 2015 and will span to 2024, is an opportunity to highlight and celebrate the important contributions people of African descent have made to Canadian society. It also provides the framework for recognizing justice and development to fight racism, discrimination and the ongoing inequalities that Canadians of African descent face.
The Government of Canada has heard from concerned citizens and organizations across Canada, including the Federation of Black Canadians, that we need to do more to work with and support Canadians of African descent. In recognizing the international decade, the Government of Canada commits to a better future for all Black Canadians, and in doing so it’s a better future for all Canadians.
I want to thank the government and I want to thank you, senators, for this declaration and this commitment to the work ahead of us. As the government decides that this is a very important piece, it occurs to me that any time you want to move anything one has to do it in collaboration. It cannot be done separately.
I want you guys to indulge me for a second, if you don’t mind. “Indulge me” is an old African saying. I know you’re senators and I love you for this, but I know you guys will play with me, with this, because it helps us to understand where we’re coming from.
Try to speak without moving your tongue. Can you do it? If you can’t move your tongue, you can’t do it. The reason I ask you to do this is because I want to make sure that all of us in this room understand that any time you’re going to do any kind of very difficult thing, you need to be able to do it with more than one person. You need to be able to make this movement, and this is what we’re going to talk about tonight. You must get to that place where collaborative collaboration comes in contact.
I want to talk to you tonight a little bit about NEAC/REAC. The mandate of NEAC/REAC is guided by three priority areas conceived by the recently retired Commissioner Don Head, for whom we must pause to publicly thank him for his vision and his steadfast commitment to public safety and the social determinant of health for all Canadians.
NEAC focuses on three areas: housing, mental health and employment. NEAC advocates, including this gentleman here, look at these different levels. We’re looking at policies, change, program issues and engagement when we go into the institutions because at that point is when we have opportunities to speak to the inmates and speak to the staff to inform us as to what can be different and what the needs are.
Not only are the NEAC members themselves diverse but they come from different geographic areas. They bring forward a variety of proposals and projects, some of which were recently funded and one of which you will see in the GVI.
When you went to Keele today, I don’t know if they spoke to you about a very new pilot project called resilience and mental health toughness for African Canadian inmates. We can certainly send you some information on that. It will be done in Keele, GVI, BCI, and Warkworth. There is another project, again very new, in Ottawa that focuses on mental health because we’re hearing a lot from offenders that there are issues around mental health.
In front of you, senators, you have a position paper or policy paper authored by Senator Bernard, before she was senator. At the time I loved calling her doctor but now I love it even more calling her senator. It was on ethnocultural offenders in Canada and creating a culturally responsive policy. What you have in your hands, senators, is unique and extremely important as we move forward looking at how we can best deal with ethnocultural, particularly Black, offenders. I am going to move backward and give you some facts, many of which I know you already know but I want to throw out at you anyway.
African Canadians face a unique context of systemic anti-Black racism reflected by a history of enslavement, racial stagnation, marginalization, and the biggest one here is the over-representation of African Canadians in the justice system. It’s not just the justice system. We look at employment, education, housing and other domains of well-being.
Let’s just go over a couple of data. Black inmates comprise 8.6 per cent of the total incarceration population, and they are only 3.5 per cent of the general population. Some 70 per cent more Blacks were imprisoned over the last 10 years. They’re the fastest growing inmate population in federal prison. We can compare that to the 50 per cent or more Aboriginals imprisoned over the last 10 years, even though Aboriginals do make up 24 per cent of the prison population and 4.9 per cent of the general population. Black inmates continue to be over-represented in admission and in segregation with 10.5 per cent for admission and 10.6 per cent for segregation. Those are just a small percentage.
I want to highlight the overrepresented piece because this paper, which we, NEAC, at the time asked the Dr. Bernard to do for us, is centred around what we can do about the over-representation. We’re looking at best practices. When you go through this paper, you will realize that one thing the paper tells us is that we have an opportunity here to use the best practices of what has been done for the Aboriginals in Canada to help the over-representation of the ethnocultural, particularly Black, population.
I am going to stop talking for a while because I know that my colleague has a few things to say. I will come back and finish up on this paper for you.
Winston LaRose, President and Member, Jane-Finch Concerned Citizens Organization and Regional Ethnocultural Advisory Committee: Let me defer to this great lady here who has been a leader as vice-chair of this organization. She has done a remarkable job over the years in working with her chair. I have a lot of respect for her.
I want to acknowledge the senators’ presence here tonight and certainly my professor, doctor, now senator who I met a few years ago in Nova Scotia. I thank you for all the good things you have done for me as you became the new head of the department there.
Having been involved now with corrections for the last little while, I am seeing a different side of Canada. We’re talking about representation, over-representation. It is an international phenomenon as far as Black people are concerned. You will find them in prisons in high numbers in European countries, in Americas, and in many places over the world, so it’s not unusual to Canada; but we take for granted that it is a matter of fact.
No one sees an issue with it or a problem with it. We have to do something to change the kind of cultural mindset that permits such a thing to happen. It shouldn’t be happening in the first place, certainly not in an advanced country in the world. We are leading the way, as we said to everyone, in democracy and civilization, but as a civilized country we have a great body of Black people incarcerated, many of them young. I have seen them with my own eyes. Many of them come through what I refer to as a school-to-prison pipeline.
I met with the director of education with the TDSB, Dr. John Malloy. My first meeting was in December a year ago. At that time we discussed some of these issues, and I have had a continuing relationship with him from that time on. The rate at which young Black males are suspended, expelled or kicked out of school systems, is phenomenal and egregious but continues. It persists. There are no alarm bells ringing anywhere. They go from the school to the prison. They are captured by Children’s Aid Societies in Ontario, particularly in Toronto, in the highest proportions imaginable. The Black family is broken. There are few male heads of households. This is very harmful to family life and to nurturing the role of fatherhood within the family. Many of our boys are not exposed to that experience. They can’t be in those roles.
We have encouraged a system within our country that allows Black children to move from within the educational process into an incarceration state for all kinds of criminal offences, much of it due to the lack of cultural identification or affiliation. There’s a tremendous reference being made to the fact that we are Black people or African Canadians or African something or another, but little attention really being paid to what blackness is.
We passed an Ontario Anti-Racism Act that intends to try to correct some of the injustices, imbalances and inequities. Who, then, are these Black people? Universities seem to have a difficulty acknowledging that there is race because many universities will tell that it’s a social construct; but I can tell you, whatever it is, it’s very real. Those of us who live the Black experience understand what that means. In my 80 years of journeying from colonialism right through to the independent world, I see much the same thing. It troubles me enormously when I see young Black men and women now in larger numbers being moved out of society into institutional streams where there is no opportunity for them and there is not the slightest bit of concern about their welfare.
I might interact a bit more. There are many things I would like to say, but I would like to be able to have this committee recognize and acknowledge the fact that until this statement by our Prime Minister, young Trudeau, no one in Canada paid any attention to the International Decade for People of African Descent. Nothing has been done. There are no projects, no programs. There’s no celebration. Yet the United Nations found it necessary to say internationally that we must acknowledge and appreciate what Black people have done for our world and society. Yet it’s nothing of major concern. This impacts on our prison population, what they’re experiencing, the difficulties around rehabilitations and re-entry back into the society, the over-representation and staffing in terms of Whiteness, male or female. There are hardly any Black members there. The lack of representation of Black people in the parliaments of our country is still a reality. Why is this not so? We have one Black person in Toronto who is a councillor. This is nonsensical, but yet it’s real. We have some real challenges.
I will defer to you, Sister Sophia, and I would like an opportunity to come back.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Absolutely. Thank you for that, Winston. It was wonderful.
I want to continue by looking at some of the statistics, and from there I would like you to reach a conclusion or somewhat of an ask from the senators. We want to look at the 80 per cent of young people in the Roy McMurtry detention in Peel who are African-Canadians. When you look at something like that you recognize, as Winston says, that it feels like nothing is being done. I guess on a larger scale, nothing has been done; but you do have a lot of smaller community organizations that are really trying to work on things but do not have the resources. They just don’t. They recognize that something has to be done because you’re losing your young people. If you lose your young people, you lose your futures and you don’t get the 80-year-old sitting at this table giving you concrete wisdom.
I am a mom and I have learned a lot from the other moms around me. I have learned a lot from the other wisdoms around me. For me, it’s important right now when we are thinking of making these changes that we do look at best practices. There is a best practice, and this paper speaks to it. There is a best practice right there in CSC. That is what has been done with the Aboriginal population.
In 1991, I believe it was then called the Aboriginal Justice Strategy. What we would like to see is something similar for the Black ethnocultural inmates to kind of look at what we can do as a community. They say that the triangle is the strongest figure in the world. Right now I think we need to be a triangle. We need to do this with government, with CSC and with the community. If you want to make those changes, CSC cannot do this on their own. They need to kind of adopt what has been done for the Aboriginals and bring that in for the Black ethnocultural community so that they can work with the communities around them to make these changes.
I guess our ask tonight is to look at sections 81 and 84 of the CCRA, because we’re looking for some legislative changes at this point. We want to also look at sections 75 and 76 of the CCRR. That centres around the foundation of cultural factors and cultural history, anti-racism, anti-oppression and looking specifically at system change. I think we’re past the place where we’re going to piecemeal these changes. We are now into where we, as a society, as a community, must work with government to make these changes. We want to work with government. We’re open to that.
The fact that the senators are here tonight and the fact that you have been going around looking at the different organizations and institutions says to us that our government wants to do something and recognizes that there are some issues around human rights that are ineffective in our jails and in our penal system.
Like I said, I am a mom. Whenever I want to make certain changes and I may not have the resources, I have to find the resources. I guess it comes back down to that. If we are going to look at these changes, we need to find the resources to do this because our young people, Black, White or otherwise, demand it for their future.
When we’re looking at legislation, I recognize, senators, that it’s not easy. I recognize that there’s going to be ongoing conversations, openness, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that there is a problem. Our Prime Minister has done that. He has opened the door for that at this point. We’re here to have a conversation with you to find out what your thoughts are, to have you hear us and we hear you, and to definitely look into making some changes around legislation. Thank you for now.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your testimony tonight. I will ask Senator Ataullahjan to introduce herself.
Senator Ataullahjan: I am Salma Ataullahjan from Toronto, Ontario. I apologize for being late but there were reasons behind it.
The Chair: We’re now open for senators to ask questions.
Senator Cordy: This has been very powerful testimony from you both, so thank you very much for that. When you say that you need the resources, I am reminded that the Social Affairs Committee that I was on a number of years ago did a report on autism. The title of the report was Pay Now or Pay Later. Basically that is what you’re saying.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Yes.
Senator Cordy: Is it better to pay for education and programs and early childhood, or to pay prison costs? I know where I’d want my tax dollars to go, and it’s with young children.
You said that we should follow the example of what the federal government has done with our Aboriginal people. When you say that 80 per cent in Peel detention are Black, that is a problem for society. It’s not a problem for Blacks; it’s a problem for society.
How do we start? Where do we start? You did speak about some small programs, but are there programs within communities that could be expanded starting early on?
I used to be an elementary school teacher. I know in one of the communities, Senator Bernard’s community, that they started up a Head Start daycare program, which did tremendous things for the community and for the students before they started school. Again, being a teacher, if you get to school and you don’t have some of the skills, then what do you do? You try to get attention in a negative way.
Mr. LaRose, you spoke about going through the school-to-prison pipeline, you called it. Where do we start? Could the programs you see out there that are working well in small communities be expanded?
Mr. LaRose: Certainly, we have to start with the schools. Dr. John Malloy recently took that position, saying we have to start at our elementary school levels. We cannot wait until they get to high school because Black boys don’t even get to high school, let alone get into university.
It is critically important that we get back to teaching our children self-respect within the school system. Families that are broken down don’t have an opportunity to deal with those issues. A lot of children today are very disrespectful. They grow up into disrespectful adults as well. Consequently, without the skills of discipline and respect, but also in terms of intellectual and academic skills, many of these Black children, particularly Black boys that are dropping out, have no affiliation with their culture, all the things that Black people have accomplished from music to performing arts to scientific things. We need special programs in the community on Black Inventions Museum and things like that, just so they can have an education about the reality and their existence within the larger society.
This is something that should come into the school system as a matter of fact, not as an incidental situation. Our former premier here in Ontario, when we tried to start an Afrocentric school, Dalton McGuinty said it would create racism. He made front-page news. That’s how strongly society feels about Black kids being educated in an Afrocentric way. Everyone else, whether you’re Asiatic or Caucasian, is educated in their historical traditions and legacy. We are imitating that as much as possible in order to be credible and to be validated as human beings.
We have to have an individual course of action if we are to be part of this larger diversity. You cannot be diverse unless you’re different. We have to acknowledge, appreciate and recognize all the differences in our society. One is racial differences. I see them when I go to prisons, when I go to Children’s Aid Societies and foster care homes. I see Black people there. I know what they look like and I know what others look like.
We must start with the school system, make it mandatory that Black history or African history, whatever you need to call it, be recognized as a fundamental part of the human rights provision within the school educational system so we can keep Black children involved, invested and in some way educated about their role, their responsibilities, not just from slavery and whether they were good or bad slaves, but prior to that. We became captured, but we had history preceding that. None of our modern children know that, whether it’s in university, college or elementary school. It’s not being taught and it’s essential.
Over to you.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: I have some good news. Minister Coteau, as the senators will absolutely know, has put forth $47 million to support Black youth. That has been done in the last few months. Programs have started because of that, so there is some funding available.
I’ll have to back up to the United Way. Some two or three years ago, I was chair at that point for the Black Advisory Committee. We authored a paper called The F.A.C.E.S. Report - Facilitating Access, Change and Equity in Systems. It was very difficult because what we did with that report was we spoke with a number of Black children around how they felt about their school and how they felt about being in school. What we heard from that was that they felt isolated. They didn’t feel a part of anything. Many children, mostly boys, were dropping out. We needed to figure out what we could do. In that report, we looked at all of the different systems, so justice, the education system and mental health.
The school system, the Peel board, took that report and then did their own report. They have done this report and they now do a project initiative called the We Rise report. From that, the focus is on Black boys in Peel.
I guess I want to make sure that there is an understanding. I know there are people out there who know there is an issue and we want to do something. At this point, we’re looking at how we can come together to continue this. You’ll hear $47 million . It’s a start. It is innovative. It has never happened. However, in order for a lot of the smaller organizations out there to get these types of funding, they themselves do not have the resources to be eligible for the funding. Oftentimes what has happened before is that the funding would go to the larger organizations, the more mainstream organizations. The intention was good to work, to aid and help. Whether it was the Black youth or Black community doesn’t matter. The fact is, as Winston says, when you look at somebody who looks like you, it puts you in another place. I can be a senator. I, Sophia Brown Ramsay, can be a senator because I am sitting here looking at a senator that looks like me.
As a young person, these are some of the things they need to see. It doesn’t happen all the time. These larger organizations were looking for the very best that they could do, but they needed to bring in people that look like these young folks to help them along, to move along to do the things they needed to do. It didn’t happen.
Now we need to figure out a way. You asked: How can we help? What can we do?” We might have to start with this very small organization by helping them to get the resources they need to get to that place where they could actually access this type of funding and be able to help the community.
Does that make sense, senators?
The Chair: Yes.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: That’s one thing. I know you probably have another question, and I’ll let you ask a question, if you would, because I could talk about this forever.
The Chair: I am just mindful of the time, and we do have two other panels.
Senator Cordy: I’ll go on the second round.
The Chair: We’ll do a second round.
Senator Cordy: Or we can talk later.
The Chair: Yes.
Senator Pate: Thank you for your testimony. We actually did have a copy already of Dr./Senator Bernard’s paper. I am very glad you raised sections 81 and 84. I would like to ask you some specifics around those.
Has your committee, NEAC/REAC, been briefed on sections 81 and 84 and what the legislative intent was?
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Yes.
Senator Pate: It sounds like, though, that you think it requires legislative change to apply this to Black prisoners.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: I may not know as much as I would like to know, but I think there is a section in there that perhaps we haven’t fully utilized. At the end of the day, you have a foundation piece. I need to say this in a way that is meaningful and helpful. When something is legislated, everybody needs to listen to it and they do. If it’s not and it is well intended, it just doesn’t get the same type of understanding when you go into institutions.
I don’t know if I am articulating this properly. At the end of the day, I guess we feel that if you want to have particular changes done it is about who is in power, what political party is in power or who is heading the commission at this point. If it’s legislated, this is what has to happen, so help me.
Senator Pate: Sure. When sections 81 and 84 were put in place, one of the challenges was that Indigenous communities weren’t told about it so there were hardly any applications for it.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Right.
Senator Pate: To my knowledge, and I think you’re confirming it, Black communities, trans communities and many other communities have not been advised that the sub right under 81(1) is 81(2) that says that notwithstanding that it can apply to other groups and non-Indigenous prisoners.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Exactly.
Senator Pate: It strikes me there has not been an education of any of the groups, Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal, Black, trans or any of the groups such as mental health groups that might benefit that in fact those provisions could be applied for right now.
My question was: Did you know that? My guess is, from your answer, that you didn’t know that. In fact, what has happened is that corrections have created policies that have made these provisions more exclusionary than the legislation was ever intended to be. We have had witness testimony before the committee of the legislative intent going back.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Right.
Senator Pate: I would encourage you to encourage communities to actually apply. I am not from your community, but if I could be so bold as to say if Kim Pate is from your community and is in Grand Valley Institution and you want me in your community, you could write to the Minister of Public Safety and say, “We would like to have Kim Pate in the community under a section 81 agreement. This is the support we’re prepared to provide. Let’s engage in a discussion now about how we fund that.” That is possible right now.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: That is good to know.
Senator Pate: People aren’t being told about it.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: That’s right.
Senator Pate: Were you told about that? My guess is that I know your answer.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: I read about it but I understood that it was not being used. It has also been our experience that sometimes when you ask for certain things, it just doesn’t happen. I am taking away what you’re saying. I have written it down. I am going to talk to our committee about that and have some education around it.
Senator Pate: Just to say you may very well be told no. Then I would encourage you to get in touch with our office because there are a number of lawyers ready to do the constitutional challenge that will undoubtedly be successful.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Well, look at you. Thank you.
Senator Pate: Not as my role as a senator. Just to advise and support.
Mr. LaRose: If I might, I would like to follow up on a response because it goes to the foundation of the challenges. We had the civil rights act passed, and yet it took years before we even started to get to implement it in the ways that it became effective in terms of what it was intended to do.
Similarly, and I agree with Sophia here, I was not even aware of that section as well. With this issue of Black people not having an identified category of self that is really recognized or appreciated, we fall into such categories as people of colour, visible minorities and a whole range of other names, and Black people are always at the bottom of that. It doesn’t matter who it includes.
It’s essentially important within the prison system. Constantly, when I go in there in, Black people or Black inmates, who are in some cases the highest proportion in there, can’t get things like cultural products or cultural activities. Resources are non-existent for them in terms of how they experience their incarceration. It’s fundamentally important that there is an intervention within the correctional system to ensure that Black inmates are acknowledged and recognized as such, because when I meet people in the ethnoracial communities there are some Black people who don’t want to identify as being Black and they’re called all kinds of different names.
When you pass legislation such as the Ontario Anti-Racism Act, which says that these provisions are for Black people, are Black people getting them? We have all the people who are profiting and getting the monies for teaching Black people how to be Black people. These things have become fundamental problems over the years. I’ve seen it repeated time and time again over the last 53 years I’ve been here. I am saying we can pass the legislation, but intent or the spirit of it must be more than just spirit.
To respond to what you’re saying, we need to go back and try to submit something to you that could at a later date identify some of those challenges. It is the resources. That’s the scarcity, they tell us. The prison system is saying, “We don’t have the money; we don’t have the resources.” When we are bringing people from the outside to come in, they want people like myself. I know some people who go in and do a range of services in the prison system that the inmates require. They are telling them, “We can’t pay your transportation, no meals, nothing.” How could that be? We’re going in for free. We’ve travelled a hundred miles or more to provide something for inmates so they can remain connected to their community. It is the biggest sore spot. They’re far removed from the local community. They can’t communicate with them. The family travels up there. There is a shutdown. They have to go back home.
How do they get rehabilitated to come back and be reintegrated into the community? It’s a whole process. Apart from the prevention, what we’re talking about in terms of the educational processes and the systems that are preparing them for incarceration, you have to change that. We have to change how they experienced incarceration as well.
Senator Pate: I have a comment and not really a question. These provisions would allow many groups, when they start advocating in this area, to start by trying to change and improve what happens inside. The policy decisions not to fund are just that, policy decisions.
Now that you know the information, I would urge you to perhaps consider thinking about how do you make the policy decision one that you’re encouraging communities not to go into the prisons to provide services only. I am not suggesting you leave people, of course, but that you actually apply to get resources to develop them yourselves in the community and the kinds of supports and services you want in your community.
Those are policy decisions. There is funding available. You’re absolutely right, but that funding needs to be triggered by those processes. Certainly, if you have recommendations about what kinds of services you could provide, I would like to ask, if I could as a member of the committee, to have those submitted. What kinds of initiatives could you develop in your community to bring some of those prisoners out so that they could be held accountable in the community and contribute to the community at the same time?
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Wonderful.
Senator Ataullahjan: Mine is more of a comment. I missed most of the testimony.
As someone with two young children I was very involved in the school system. I felt that we needed to educate the educators too. Sometimes as a visible minority person I would go into the classrooms and I would see certain kids being isolated. Both of my daughters went through the school system. I was there for something like 16 years, and I could see the change in the children.
Another big step we can take is to make sure the educators are educated on how to treat everyone. You know now how children are. My daughter would come home and she’d say, “There’s a new kid in class.” I would say, “What ethnicity is the kid?” She would say, “Oh, wait, I have to think.” I would love it if we could have that where everyone has to say, “Let me think.”
I just had to respond to that. We do need a big change within the school systems.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: I have a good news story for you. The Peel District School Board, with the We Rise report, are doing just that. They are training the teachers and the administrators. Because it is primarily around Black youth, they’re teaching them some Black histories and how to look at the social historical fact that affects Black people. They’re doing that in the school. It just started so I can’t really give you examples of what that looks like at this point or any results from that, but I am happy that this has started. Peel is trying.
Senator Ataullahjan: What about the rest of the GTA?
Mr. LaRose: Peel, as you know, is secondary to the TDSB. This is where the problem is. The teachers are predominantly White, of course, with different cultural orientation and sensitivity and a different historical perspective. It goes back to their families, their history, their traditions and their relationships with Black people. It’s very hard for them to really be able to appreciate that Black people are part of the social spectrum on an equal basis. That is a fundamental problem.
That education process has to be one which is almost like an indoctrination. I remember when Chris Spence first became the school board director. They brought all the teachers together from all over, thousands of them, and we were discussing the issue of race. The teachers at the table where I was sitting, Black teachers included, were saying, “Race is a social construct. It’s not really even a problem, right?” This is a challenge for Black children who have literally validated their sense of self on the basis of what Whiteness is to be acceptable. This is real and it’s very true.
My children were born here. The oldest would have been 53 if he were alive. My daughter turned 52 just recently. They went through the whole educational system, and it’s the same challenges. Black people have been in this country for a long time, but yet we’re not considered. There are new migrants who have been coming in that are better off than Black people are. They’re treated differently. They’re treated better. We’re always fighting to get a place.
We have to find a way not only of legislating this but of ensuring that it becomes part of the fabric of what cultural sensitivities and national pride is all about. In 53 years in this country, I have been very loyal. I have been very productive. I ran many businesses. I’ve been a very successful person. I spend 72 hours a week, every week without fail, giving free service for the last 25 years in the community.
What I am saying is that we have made our contributions respectively, but we want to see equal respect and acceptability. I think the Aboriginal people are doing just exactly the right thing. They are reaffirming their sense of identity and self and their place. Black people need to be able to be permitted to do that within the educational systems, be it university, college, elementary schools or whatever it is. Until that happens, we’re going to be talking about this in the next 20 years again the same way. After all, this is the 21st century and look at what we’re discussing today. It is the same thing. Not much has changed.
The Chair: Are there any other questions?
Senator Cordy: Mr. LaRose, you spoke a few times about the Black family, and we’re generalizing here, being broken and that there were often no male father figures in the family. You also talked about the pride. How do we go about establishing the pride of the Black culture?
Mr. LaRose: I am so glad you asked that, senator. It’s easy, really. We have to have incentives in legislatures all over the world. When I lived in England, it was the same thing. If you wanted more children, you gave incentives within the budgetary system to create the motivation within families or individuals. We do not encourage family life here. We are, for me, experimenting with all kinds of families, and the traditional family has disappeared. Mother, father, children, grandparents, extended family, that’s the family. When you don’t have that, you have got some real challenges in raising children.
I have travelled quite a bit around the world. I see these families and they are very intact. They love each other. They give therapy to each other within the family. We call it psychotherapy here, but it’s social therapy, social conditioning. We need to bring that back.
I started successful family awards where I was giving awards to families that were staying together. I didn’t get government support. I had to find the money to do it. When you put these things out, particularly for the Black family, it’s not appealing to the other sensitivities out there. If you check all of the respective families, whether it’s Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Arab or Italian families by and large, or whatever it is, they have families that are relatively intact. I am saying that for the Black family this has been broken for hundreds of years, ever since the enslavement when the master could come and take your wife and you couldn’t say a thing about it.
That legacy continues where Black males are removed from their homes. They’re not encouraged to be there. There’s no incentive. There is a culture around that now in which they talk about baby fathers rather than a father, but the Black man is living outside of his family structure. When I first arrived here, it wasn’t like that. We came as integrated families. When I came, I came with my wife. We had our children there and we were together.
It is really important that we put responsibilities back into the family homes and into the hands of the parents, not Children’s Aid workers. I worked in the mental health system for at least 53 years as a psychiatric trade nurse. I have had many professions but that is one. I worked until I was retired. I have seen it all in terms of broken homes. I represent many of these families at the welfare offices, at the social services offices and with the directors of Children’s Aid Societies. We get the same negative response, but it’s a real problem.
When you break up the family, you take away these children. It’s always about the safety of the children, and who cares about them more? Society or the family? We need to put incentive back into the families so that mother and father stay together, husbands and wives are together, and children can have parenthood that builds strength and capacity within them. They can learn from that model to do the same as we perpetuate social functions in a responsible way.
There would be no need for jails to the extent that we’re building them. We’re building a lot of jails and putting a lot of money into them. They might as well give that money to the Jane-Finch community, which I represent, where many of our victim prisoners are coming from. They’re victimized by society, quite frankly. That’s my honest opinion.
I have seen it, and that’s where I’ve been working non-stop for the last 50-odd years, with disadvantaged families. Whether it’s police, whether it’s the justice system, whether it’s the sentencing process, whether it’s bail conditions that keep them in jail longer than others, or whether it’s deportation that sends them back to countries where they don’t know anybody, all the Black people are being pushed out, even after they have lived there for 20, 30 or 40 years. I don’t think those things are sending the right kind of symbolic messages and real messages. We have to get back to taking care of every member of our society with the same degree of respect and validation.
The Chair: You have given us some good takeaways this evening as a part of our study. Certainly you have made really clear your position that the acknowledgement of the place of Black people in this country is an important first step. The statement that Black prisoners that you have worked with over the years have been victimized by society is probably a very profound statement for us to hear from you.
Thank you very much for being here. I invite you to stay and join the audience there. If there is time at the end, we may be able to come back and bring all of the panellists together.
We welcome our second panel this evening from Community Justice Initiatives, Chris Cowie, Executive Director, and from the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Savannah Gentile, Director, Advocacy and Legal Issues.
We will hear from each of you, and then we will open it up for questions.
Chris Cowie, Executive Director, Community Justice Initiatives: I didn’t know exactly how to begin talking about the things that I wanted to talk about. First of all, I want to express appreciation for being able to have the opportunity to talk about these things. The work that we do at Community Justice Initiatives, a lot of the other work that I am involved in, and some of the teaching that I do, centre me on many of the issues existent within our prisons that have aggravated me, that bother me. I know we can do much better in our justice system in that regard. These things are very close to my heart.
I want to focus primarily on the issue of reintegration and why reintegration is so important. It starts off with a conversation about some things that we don’t really like to talk about. The first prison we had in Canada started in 1835. That was Kingston Penitentiary. It wasn’t until a number of years later that it was adopted by the federal system and became the centrepiece for our federal correctional system.
At that time, the policy established was clear that the purpose of our prison was that we were to take people in because they had done things that clearly were wrong that we didn’t like and that it was to return people back into our communities in a better condition than when they went in. Our prison system has never done that.
In 1930 was the first royal commission on prisons and that is exactly what was determined then. Not only were we returning people in worse condition, we were returning them in a much worse condition. That report generated all kinds of information about how we should be changing our system from a more retributive to a more rehabilitative approach.
Those ideas really didn’t gain traction until around the late 1940s. Even as the system began to sort of change into something that it called more rehabilitative, unfortunately we didn’t seem to have the same kinds of results that we would have expected, or those ones that we would really want. We still end up continuing to do a lot of damage. I think our system today does the exact same thing.
One of our programs at Community Justice Initiatives is an initiative that we have been involved in for the last 20 years at Grand Valley Institution, the STRIDE program. A number of years ago, I brought one of our clients into one of my classes to tea because she had a rather interesting story. She had spent time in a prison in Panama and through a variety of circumstances came to be in Grand Valley Institution in Canada. She spent about an equal amount of time in their prison system and in ours. As part of her presentation, she showed pictures from inside the Panama prison that she was in. The conditions were absolutely horrific: bad food, I mean bad everything. There were small curtains hanging between little areas where multiple women had to bunk together and live together. They were the worst kind of conditions. It was a very underfunded kind of place. Staff, for the most part,they had more or less checked out.
It was very interesting as she talked about her experience coming into an environment here. I know you will hear lots about how conditions here are still quite problematic. Comparatively speaking, there is no comparison in terms of having better overall kinds of conditions. Just a snapshot of the inside of the building would tell you that it’s clean, people are taken care of and they’re eating food on a regular basis. They’re not starving all the time and relying on families to bring their food.
Then she’d say something really stunning to my class. Inside that prison in Panama, the way they actually had relationships with each other was functional. They actually got along. They cared for each other. It was an environment of caring. There were no specific rehabilitative programs, but the relationships themselves brought them to a place that actually prepared them for living with the kind of relationships we assume people will want to have once they are released into the community.
When she got to our prison, that was not the case. It corroborates a lot of what I’ve seen and a lot of what I’ve heard for many years. We put people in an environment where it is impossible to negotiate relationships the way we actually want them negotiated. One of the preconditions of people going in, one of the things that often affects those people who find themselves in criminal activity and find their way into our prisons, is that they have difficulty negotiating relationships in their lives. I mean we just heard all of the stuff about race and how we want to erase certain lines. Canadian values are trying to get us to the place where we recognize that we are all equal, but we put them in an environment where unless you are willing to live along those racial lines you are going to get hurt.
We reinforce the very type of stereotypes we are trying to erase. Then, on some magic day when they step out of prison, we assume that they will somehow now negotiate relationships properly because they have learned their lesson. It is an atmosphere of violence and fear and all of those types of things. We take away any ability for them to accept responsibility for a lot of the things they do on a day-to-day basis.
In fact, in our women’s prison, about 78 per cent of them were unemployment at the time that they entered into the facility. It tells me about employment skills. I am not talking about the raw skills you need to be able to operate a cash register or do customer service. Usually the things that keep people from being employed chronically are not being able to get yourself up at the right time, not being to act responsibly with your money, and not being able to drag yourself out of bed and get into a job at the right time.
These things are difficult. We put them in an environment where we now tend to breed a kind of dependency, but when they leave we expect that now they will be responsible. We create a system that absolutely requires supports for people to be able to reintegrate because we have taken away from their ability to actually function in a normal kind of way, in a way that we want them to in our communities, so we require these types of reintegration programs like the one that we operate.
I want to say about STRIDE, for a moment, that we’re talking about a program where we utilize over 50 volunteers. We’re serving 260 women on a regular basis and our program is very unique in that the work we do begins in the prison, but it’s the very same people that become that circle of support for those women as they reintegrate. This circle of support becomes their primary support network as they actually move into the community. These are programs that we have to fight and scratch and claw for every single penny to try and operate. I have heard over and over again that the mandate of Public Safety comes to an end as soon as the people walk out the door.
If I can say one thing more clearly than anything else, the mandate of Public Safety has to be expanded to include reintegration. If we really care about these people living safely in the community and we care about the community that they will live in, then that mandate must be expanded. It is equally important that the programs for reintegration be community-based and community driven, not a stamped out cookie-cutter program from coast to coast.
We need to tap into the energy in individual communities. There are always organizations and groups of people who care deeply for these people. We don’t have difficulty recruiting volunteers to do this good work and to be really, truly supportive of these women. I could read you testimony after testimony of the women who will tell you that it’s an absolutely essential part of their lives going forward.
The latest little pieces of funding that we have had will come to an end in 2019. We have been working as hard as possible to try to find the next place. It’s a constant fight. The funding over the last 20 years has come and gone from different places, from lots of individuals and whatever. These things must absolutely be supported in that way and, again, they need to be supported in the community.
Savannah Gentile, Director, Advocacy and Legal Issues, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies: CAEFS is a volunteer-driven organization with 24 member societies across the country that provide direct services and programs to criminalized women and girls. We also have regional advocates who go into the federal prisons for women to observe the conditions of confinement and assist women in their advocacy efforts, whether that’s through grievance writing or follow-up letters to upper management at CSC. All of the work we do is driven by and informed by the experiences of federally sentenced women or criminalized women generally.
Women are the fastest growing prison population in our country. That is especially true for Indigenous women and racialized women. Once women enter into our prison system, they face an added layer of discrimination. That is in the form of CSC’s classification scheme.
CSC’s classification scheme is discriminatory. This was reported by the Auditor General’s report tabled on November 29, 2016. CSC operates based on an initial classification tool created over 25 years ago for White men. It was also validated on a population of White men. Dr. Kelly Blanchette has reported that this tool has never been validated on women actually. This has also been reported in a number of other systems. It’s not news. It has been reported dating back to 2003. The Canadian Human Rights Commission released a report that indicated that CSC’s classification scheme discriminates on the grounds of sex, race, Indigenous status and disability. This was also furthered in the recent Supreme Court challenge, Ewert v. Canada and has been reported for numerous years by the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
As soon as women are classified it will impact every step they move through the correctional system. It will impact where they land in the prison system. In terms of maximum security or segregation placements we know, for instance, Indigenous women are significantly over-represented in maximum security and segregation placements. Their placements in maximum security mean that they will have less access to culturally appropriate programming and services to which they are entitled under the law.
The recent decision on segregation out of the B.C. Superior Court talked about the conditions and the permanent harm that can come out of being placed in solitary confinement. For a minute, I want to talk about and extend that window to maximum security. The reality for women in prison under maximum security classifications is that they are also similarly restricted in their access to programming, services and meaningful employment.
The judgment talked about the permanent harm that women in solitary confinement experience in trying to adjust to general population or to the broader community after being placed in solitary confinement. I want to put it to you today that women in maximum security also suffer that permanent harm. I am personally aware of a number of cases of women being released from maximum security into the general population, only to be returned back to maximum security, sometimes first through a segregation placement because of issues they have had in adjusting to the general population and the stimulus that comes with that.
Women in maximum security are also subject to an additional illegal classification system which is known as the level system. This is a system of 1, 2 or 3. This system is unique to women as it does not exist in the men’s system. The Office of the Correctional Investigator reported on this just this year.
A number of tools were built into our legislation that were meant to address the issue of over-representation, but these tools are severely underutilized and underfunded. For instance, there’s section 81 of the CCRA which allows for communities to sponsor Indigenous prisoners to serve their sentences in community. There are two lodges right now for women. One is CSC driven and the other is community-based. There is a huge funding disparity between CSC-driven healing lodges and community-driven options under section 81. In fact, the legislation doesn’t require that a healing lodge or an institution be created to provide for Indigenous prisoners to serve their sentences in communities. In fact, what is needed is individualized community-based options.
However, there is a lack of information provided on these options. Communities aren’t aware of them or, when they are, they aren’t able to engage in them because CSC drives the mentality that they have to be a healing lodge and institutional structures. This creates a number of barriers for Indigenous communities. It also prevents individualized options from coming to fruition.
There is also a section 29 of the CCRA which enables CSC to release women into the psychiatric or forensic facilities in communities where there are mental health issues. Currently, CSC’s most common approach with women with mental health is to put them under suicide watch or under mental health monitoring. This means that they will place those women, women who are at risk of self-injury or self-harm in segregation cells, essentially. However, CSC says that segregation is a status and not a place. I put it to you that it is both a status and a place.
Being put in a segregation cell and calling it mental health watch does nothing to change the conditions women experience. In fact, it can be very harmful. It can increase the risk of self-injury or self-harm and increase combative behaviour for which women are punished in turn and can receive institutional charges or outside charges as a result of behaviours driven by those very restrictive punitive conditions of confinement.
The issues prevalent in the women’s prisons across Canada are not news to us. The classification scheme has been known. The tool they are using is over 25 years old. It has been reported on numerous times in numerous ways. Time and time again, CSC has resisted recommendations from the time of the Arbour report to the inquest into the death of Ashley Smith.
This resistance to change points to a need for judicial oversight and the elimination of all forms of segregation in prisons. That extends to maximum security for women. CSC has a track record of failing or refusing to implement recommendations or to correct itself accordingly. Without this oversight, nothing will change. There have been a number of engagements with prison reform. This serves, really, to just drive the conditions underground.
When you walk into the Grand Valley prison tomorrow, it will be clean. I was there today. The women were cleaning. They will be up early tomorrow morning cleaning. It looks good. It looks nice. You will see houses. However, the reality is much different. What is really important to keep in mind are the dynamics created by this punitive and restrictive environment.
What Mr. Cowie mentioned today about the Panama prison reflected what I hear from women all the time who have been in prison for years, from the time of the Prison for Women in Kingston. I hear all the time from women who were in the Prison for Women from Kingston that they miss it because they did have relationships at least to fall back on.
The environment created by the regional facilities, the regional prisons for women, is combative. It turns women on each other. It puts duties on women that women shouldn’t have put on them. They’re not meant to police each other as the house reps of their houses. They’re not meant to do that. Frankly, it puts them in very bad positions and creates a lot of hostility and issues. There are huge gaps in dynamic security that can’t address the issues created.
I encourage you to review the Moira A. Law report. One of its key recommendations was that all women begin at minimum security. The idea was to give them something to lose. Women are not a security risk, by and large. In fact, the majority of women in prison are there for non-violent property-related and poverty-related offences. They are not a risk to the community and they are, even by CSC’s own tools, largely classified as such.
The women who are put in maximum security and segregation are those with the highest, most complex needs. Those facilities, maximum security and segregation, are the most ill-equipped to deal with those complex needs. They don’t have the infrastructure for it. They don’t have the tools. The level system in fact prevents those women from even getting off of the max unit to go to the rest of the prison for health care, programming, education or work.
Without judicial oversight of decisions relating to Indigenous prisoner segregation placements, CSC will continue to engage in the same behaviour that it has always engaged in. Women will continue to be discriminated against. In fact, CSC’s policies are restrictive. They create restriction. Section 81 is largely unsuccessful because the majority of Indigenous women are in maximum security. Some 90 per cent of Indigenous women don’t qualify to go to healing lodges because of their security ratings, which are the result of a discriminatory system that CSC has been aware of for decades but has failed to change.
Senator Ataullahjan: You said that you were at the prison where we’re going tomorrow and that it was being cleaned up.
What are the important questions that we should ask those women? Just to have it as a matter of record, what could we get from them? What would be those important questions?
Ms. Gentile: It is tricky when you go in, which is something I have learned as a regional advocate. I have gone in for close to two years now to the prisons for women. Women won’t bring up very big issues because they accept them as a normal part of the institutional structure. Women tend to accept and not fight for more rights or better conditions.
I will give you an example. They do mandatory strip searches at GVI after all escorted temporary absences or work releases. This means that when a woman who goes out for a visit, for a work release or to go to church comes back into the prison, she will be strip searched. At first, women raised mandatory strip searches as an issue because under the legislation they’re random. In its search plan, GVI has restricted that further to make them mandatory. Women really raised this as an issue, but over time they have stopped raising it as an issue. They have accepted it as a part of the reality of being criminalized. They have accepted it as a part of their punishment. It’s problematic, given that the majority of women in prison have histories of physical and sexual abuse. It’s a continuation of their traumas.
They won’t raise it. They will raise minimal issues, things that they think they can get changed. They will raise issues around food and around the conditions of their living units. Sometimes it takes a lot of prodding to get down to the real issues of the conditions of confinement, strip searches and searches of their units. It takes an amount of trust as well to a degree.
Senator Ataullahjan: We’re there for a limited time. We won’t have the time to build up that trust. We might not even have the time to do a line a questioning in such a way where we can probe what is happening there.
What is one, two or three things we can ask? You say they accept these things. Being women, they’re treated differently. Women tend to accept what is happening and keep quiet more. Things are changing, but it seems these women, because of the circumstances they faced earlier, have been beaten down and have continued along that path. How do we change that?
Ms. Gentile: You have to give them the permission to ask a different question and open the options up to them. They don’t have to accept that strip searching will be the thing, so how do we limit it? How do we protect? You have to open it up to the possibility that maybe, because of that trauma, women shouldn’t be strip searched at all. Open up the possibilities of what is possible to them and they will answer questions in a more open way.
Senator Ataullahjan: Would you like to address that, Mr. Cowie? What do you think are the most important skills to help them to reintegrate into society?
Mr. Cowie: First of all, to corroborate some of the things that Ms. Gentile has said, I would agree. If you go into a prison environment like that and simply ask what they think needs to change, you will generally get a fairly superficial answer.
Senator Ataullahjan: Exactly.
Mr. Cowie: I mean, it is designed to be safe. They have to feel safe that way. You will get a lot further if you have a very open-ended conversation about what they have done in the last week. If you meet somebody who has made a trip to the max unit or if you have somebody that has done a work release, ask them what happens when they come back. Then you can ask how that makes them feel and if it happens every time. That is when people might start to open up, but it is not three questions and get an answer. It will not really work like that.
Our experience in the Circles program is that the volunteers get to know them when they’re isolated and they’re able to talk like that. That is when these things begin to come out. Most of it tends to come out after they’ve been released and they’re reintegrating. That is when that circle becomes so important as they debrief the entirety of their incarceration.
It is kind of hard to say one skill. It is a constellation of skills that has to do with understanding social norms now on the outside. Those are the things I am speaking to. The ability to be able to relate to others in a meaningful kind of way erodes slowly over time. The fact is that most people that go into prison have deficiencies in those areas anyway. They have lived a history of things like trauma and all kinds of other things that make it difficult to have those relationships. The prison environment exacerbates that.
The way to do that is not to sit in a classroom and teach how to enter into a relationship. It’s actually to be in functional, helpful and meaningful relationships with the women. It also makes sense that many of the relationships women are involved in that find their way into prison were probably not that healthy to begin with.
One of the beauties of the STRIDE program is that the volunteers who go in and begin to build rapport and get to know them well are stable women themselves who care about things. They can actually model what it is like to be in that kind of meaningful type of relationship. That’s why those relationships become incredibly important once they’re reintegrating.
One of the very unique things about the STRIDE program is that the relationship begins and takes root while they’re inside the institution but, as they are released, it follows them into the community. That is the true power of that. It’s not a matter of teaching the skill. It’s a matter of living that way. Those skills rub off and they end up knowing how to be in relationships with others. They are even able to repair some of the other damaged relationships that no doubt they have.
Senator Cordy: This is very interesting.
Mr. Cowie, the information sheet you gave us talks about the vulnerability of women before they get to prison. Some 86 per cent have experienced physical abused, 68 per cent have experienced sexual abuse, 79 per cent don’t have a high school diploma, 78 per cent were unemployed at the time of their admission, and 66 per cent are mothers struggling with being separated from their children.
You mentioned earlier that most of them have not been in very healthy relationships when they get in there. They get into a system that promotes combativeness, violence and fear. It’s a pretty big struggle to get to what we would talk about as being normal relationships with other human beings.
You talked about modelling. That would work, but one of the things you mentioned in your presentation that strikes me most is zero money being provided for reintegration within the system. I forget how you phrased it. It has to include reintegration financially.
What should we have? The system is certainly not providing the skills for reintegration.
Mr. Cowie: No. I can name programs in most communities all over the place that are designed specifically to assist them.
The reason I emphasize the community is that it is important to have a certain amount of organic life within the community. We can replicate our STRIDE program. There are non-negotiables. You could put that program in any prison. You could recruit volunteers in the same way. You could do certain things exactly the same way. It must be owned by a community agency able to take on some of the unique flavour of that organization. We have a STRIDE program that has been replicated in another organization in Winnipeg. It is entirely serving an Aboriginal community. Obviously, the nuts and bolts of the STRIDE program are there, but they adapt the program to suit their needs in those unique ways.
Again, it is another organization that struggles to bring in every last penny. It underpays people. The program has to shut down for certain periods of time because we can’t get bridge funding from one community association to another. We need stable funding for these types of programs.
There has been an emphasis over the last number of years on the term public safety, and I would say a lot of fearmongering that we need to keep people in prisons to keep our communities safe. Of course, we recognize how ridiculously superficial that is because our system is designed so that everyone is coming back into the community. When they come back into the community and they are disadvantaged in that way, the likelihood of their recidivating is very high. To somehow say that the public safety is served well but we don’t provide any funding for reintegration support makes no sense to me. If we are to do a lot of the damage here, we should do some of the help where it is really necessary at this end of the equation as well so that people can integrate properly.
Senator Cordy: I know what you’re saying about fearmongering, having been in Parliament for a few years. If you were against mandatory minimums, which I stood up and spoke against because I don’t think they work, then you’re told you’re soft on crime.
Mr. Cowie: Yes.
Senator Cordy: It is like the labelling.
Mr. Cowie: That brings up another point. The reality of mandatory minimums is that one of the consequences is that you erase any incentive to do anything while you’re inside. I am not going to praise a lot of the programs inside because I don’t think they’re that effective; but they do tend to orient someone around what it means to be involved in a program and to accept responsibility for certain things. Those people who used to move into halfway houses would readily accept the kinds of program options in the community.
When someone who has spent a protracted period of time with none of that and with no incentive to do anything is released, we say you may need some programs to deal with your propensity to offend sexually or to deal with an addiction problem or whatever. There is nothing that has taught them that in any way could be meaningful for them. What we’re actually doing is causing a huge risk to public safety.
Senator Cordy: When I look at the women who are particularly vulnerable going in, building self-esteem would be pretty high up on the list too.
Mr. Cowie: Yes. Let me mention another thing that is a little unique to women who are incarcerated. When males move into prison, let’s say they are somebody in a family, and oftentimes they are, whatever is over here in terms of family and whatever is not great but more or less stays intact. When he comes out at some other point in time, again, it is not great. He has to deal with all of the issues that have happened to him and his reduced ability to be able to get along. However, it’s there. It’s there to reintegrate back into.
When you put a woman out of that equation, the whole thing explodes. You end up with children that go oftentimes to multiple places. Sometimes the siblings themselves are split up, and one of them is with grandma and another one is with an aunt or an uncle. Sometimes they’re in child welfare. Whatever man she happened to be with usually exits the scene. There are other things with family breakup.
When she comes out, she has to find a place to live, but it has to be a place, if she hopes to get her kids back, is actually going to satisfy child welfare. Now she has this reduced ability to actually negotiate relationships, which also means that she has a reduced ability to actually negotiate systems and to actually talk within those systems to get the things that are needed to put that back together.
You can see now how a circle of two or three solid women volunteers, who have known this woman now for maybe a year or two and care about her deeply, becomes those who assist here in this. Again, this is not a service delivered by a paid employee. This is somebody who is a friend. We have manufactured a real kind of friendship and it actually starts to help them. As they’re putting those pieces back together, all that stuff that has exploded, there is something meaningful that is happening.
I could read you testimony after testimony of the women who have been a part of this and attest to how important it is. Incidentally, it was reviewed. It was researched rather rigorously at the University of Waterloo. An evaluation tool was designed specifically for it. Absolutely, it contributes to increasing people’s social capital and their ability to negotiate relationships properly. All the things we were hoping for are confirmed.
Senator Pate: With your indulgence, I would like to correct some issues. It’s striking to me that many witnesses come before this committee who have been advised of what is the law when they’re actually policy decisions. We just heard it again with this panel.
For instance, the fact that the mandate of corrections doesn’t include reintegration is actually not true. The law says it does, but policy decisions and funding decisions have rendered the reality that you have spoken about.
I am picking up some of the highlights. I won’t go through everything because I want to ask a question too. Ms. Gentile mentioned that section 81 requires people not to be in maximum security. That is actually not true. The legislation and the intent of the legislation was that it would be available to everybody regardless of security classification. One of the reasons section 77 was there, and for our Indigenous prisoners, section 80, was to recognize, particularly for women, that there needed to be focus on those options for under-represented groups. As we heard from the previous panel, the same sorts of things are supposed to be available for other ethnocultural groups and certainly Black prisoners.
It also strikes me that maybe one of the realities Mr. Cowie was talking about hasn’t been squarely put on the table before now. We have before us in some of the background material the fact that the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, when it tabled its report in 1990, recommended community-based options. All of the programs being talked about that are now offered in the prisons were supposed to be offered in the community. Only those prisoners who because of their sentence could not go into the community were supposed to have programs in the community and the community was supposed to come in. As Mr. Cowie has identified, most of those are actually provided in house now.
I want to come to a question for both of you. You talked about combativeness, violence and fear in the prisons. That is the rhetoric I am going to ask you about. If you think I am wrong, I certainly want to correct it. In my experience a storyline has been developed over the last 20 years for all prisoners that particularly women and racialized prisoners are becoming more combative and violent.
I would like your comments on this. What we have actually seen is less interaction of staff in a positive way with individuals. We have seen more overcrowding and less access to programs. What we know about people, human beings not just from prison environments but from others, is that when you take away hope you first start to see people implode. In the Ashley Smith inquest it was well documented. They start to harm themselves and feel more and more desperate. Then, if they still are feeling desperate and lose all hope but see one person get a bit or are told someone else got something, they’re induced to believe that someone else is getting something they’re not, which promotes tension.
In my experience that is more of what we have seen happening. People are putting it out there as an end result as opposed to contextualizing it in terms of something that has developed over time. It’s unlikely to be the environment you saw at GVI when either of you first went in, I would suggest. If I’m wrong then I would like you to correct me on the record.
Could you talk a bit about the types of changes that have happened? We’ve seen more and more overcrowding, more and more staff being more absent, less dynamic security, more static security in the institution and more tension between staff. We know that is certainly happening but neither of you mentioned that. I am just curious if you could.
With a specific focus, Ms. Gentile, you talked about the issue of segregation as a status and not a place. Maybe you could explain what we will see when we go into the prison because maximum security units for women in the country are segregated units. Most Canadians and none of the senators here have been in that environment yet, so can you explain how they are segregated? What do women not have access to when they’re in maximum security that they would if they were in general population, i.e., not segregated?
Ms. Gentile: The segregation and maximum security units are all housed in the same secure unit. It is separated from the general population through secure doors. When you go in, essentially it’s like a cellblock. The maximum security pods, they’re called, are like cellblocks. There is a block of different cells. Then there is maybe a wide hallway in which there’s a couch, a TV, a fridge and a sink. There is also a shower but it is locked.
They’re highly restrictive. You can have up to five or six women and sometimes. If there’s double-bunking, even more. We have seen more women in a very tiny pod for 24 hours a day or 23 hours a day if they’re allowed to go into the yard.
Senator Pate, I want to address what you said about women’s combative behaviour. Absolutely, when I talked about that, I meant it as a result of their conditions of confinement. What we see, especially in the max, is that security-driven responses serve to escalate women’s behaviour when they are experiencing distress as a result of their conditions of confinement. This could be a result of what Mr. Cowie was talking about. Women tend to be the primary caregivers. Their imprisonment means their separation from their children, and often their children are then brought into state care. This can cause a great deal of anxiety for women and can exacerbate the distress they’re experiencing.
Senator Pate: When Diana Majury, President of CAEFS, appeared before this committee, she talked about having offered corrections the opportunity or a pilot to work with the regional advocacy teams you have described to basically release all women from segregated conditions. Has that been picked up by corrections at all?
Ms. Gentile: No, it hasn’t. We’re still open to segregation pilot. We would love to engage with CSC to see all women in segregation released from segregation.
Senator Pate: Is that including maximum security?
Ms. Gentile: Including maximum security women, absolutely.
Mr. Cowie: It is very hard to get a handle on some of what you’re asking or the origins of where this comes from. I began working in the young offenders system and operated custody facilities for young offenders. I was quite shocked that in 25-bed facilities, with 14, 15 or 16-year-old boys, young guys would have the language. They would have the look. They would have the understanding of a prison expectation that you would expect in an adult kind of facility. They would have that expectation of everyone else. Everyone had to conform to the same kinds of language and the same kinds of code that were happening, even with young people.
That is part of it. You’re expected to act in a certain way, even if it cuts against the grain. It’s not your natural propensity to act in certain ways, but it becomes an expectation that’s there. It’s like trying to grab a handful of water. What are origins of it? How would you actually start to untangle it?
I can say that our experience in the Prison for Women is quite fascinating. On a STRIDE Night, we will go in there typically with 20 or 25 volunteers. We will be in one space with upward of 100 women participating and sometimes many more. There’s no presence of staff whatsoever usually. They disappear because they have never had an incident in 20 years, never. When the women begin to interact with each other, nobody is scolding them, telling them what to do or saying the rules are different. We don’t have rules for STRIDE Night on how they have to talk. Somehow they self-regulate and they’re aware of it.
They can even articulate that we treat each other differently because of the presence of your being here because you’re real people. You’ve actually brought the community in. It’s like a community night and we interact differently. As soon as we leave that and things go back, those very same tensions tend to visit. It is hard to actually untangle the exact origins of that, but it’s very much a part of what goes on in there. It tells us that the environment is creating that.
You talked about some of the violence. We can feel the tension that happens when overcrowding is a factor. We know when things are going on in the prison that are impacting people. The environment becomes a bit more highly charged and violent that way.
In men’s prisons, you have more of the typical kinds of things. When you come in, you’re expected to actually be strong, fight the guy that you need to fight, and divide it along racial divides the way that they have created. Those kinds of codes just get perpetuated. There is never an effort to actually start taking this apart. Those codes are very real. We don’t like to talk about them. There is an inmate code and there is a correctional officer code. They keep an environment of tension and violence all the time.
The Chair: I have a couple of questions.
Ms. Gentile, you mentioned in your testimony that you’ve heard some women over the years say they preferred the old Kingston institution. Can you say a bit more about what women are saying was different about Kingston? What did they have there that they’re not getting now in these regional prisons?
Ms. Gentile: It was specific to the relationships. Women speak about a sisterhood. They were in it together, at least. That has been complicated by a number of factors which would be really hard to flesh out, but some of those are the dynamic created by the influx of women into prisons.
As I said earlier, women are one of the fastest growing prison populations. This complicates things. There is overcrowding. There is also a real sense of divide and conquer. We hear time and time again that some staff will release what is confidential information to one woman in an effort to undermine or create tension among those women in a particular living unit.
There is simply a favouring one unit over another unit. There’s a number of ways that it happens. I can’t speak to them all, but what I can say is that it is a common theme in the issues reported to our regional advocates by the women inside. To divide and conquer means that women aren’t working together any longer. One of the biggest issues we face, actually, is regional advocates going in. How do we overcome this and bring women together so that they can advocate for their rights uniformly?
Senator Pate: PFW is closed now, but in my experience I presume there will be women there tomorrow who have been at PFW. I think that’s a very good question to ask. In my experience they’ll usually say is they weren’t kept segregated. There weren’t segregated max units like we have now. People were allowed to visit among themselves. They might be separated if they were in one of two or three living units, but they were actually able to band together to support each other. They weren’t as overcrowded. They had access to training programs. They had access to university education for a period of time until it was stopped. They actually had, in some ways, more access to the community because more community groups came in and provided supports than actually do now, including the Black Inmates & Friends Assembly that used to come in on a very regular basis. It would be interesting to look at that.
I would like to ask if we are going to the whole group next. I am not sure.
The Chair: We have one more.
Senator Pate: I meant to ask the previous panel if they knew about the Hugo case.
The Chair: Maybe we will have time at the end.
The Chair: I think we will stop here. Thank you both very much for your testimony this evening. We appreciate that. We invite you to stay.
We now welcome Halina Haag, Ph.D Student, Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University and Researcher, Acquired Brain Injury Research Lab, University of Toronto.
Halina (Lin) Haag, PhD Student, Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University and Researcher, Acquired Brain Injury Research Lab, University of Toronto, as an individual: I thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about what I think is a very significant problem that has often been overlooked.
The easy way to remember how to pronounce my name is that it is like Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Unfortunately, no relation. Dr. Angela Colantonio and I have been working together for about five years at the University of Toronto. Our specialty is looking at traumatic brain injury in vulnerable populations, which is why I am here this evening.
Traumatic brain injury is a much talked about occurrence in the media these days, but usually it’s looking at things like sports personalities or talking about car accidents and things like that. Vulnerable populations are often overlooked and yet we expect it to be the main cause of death and handicap in the world by the year 2020. Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society, has said it’s the great sleeper issue in criminology and good corrections policy.
It seemed to me that what I could do that might be useful was to give you a bit of background about TBI, what it looks like and why it is relevant to the discussion this evening, and then just let you ask what you need to know.
Traumatic brain injury is a subset of acquired brain injury, which strictly means it’s not at birth. It’s something that is acquired later in life. It’s defined as an alteration in brain function or other evidence of brain pathology caused by an external force. A non-traumatic brain injury could be achieved through medical circumstances, lack of oxygen, drowning or stroke. All those sorts of things would cause a non-traumatic acquired brain injury.
It is a major cause of death and disability globally. It is actually more common than breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis combined and yet it is an often overlooked discussion. The major causes would be falls, motor vehicle crashes and being struck by an object or a person. There are three common categories: mild, moderate and severe. Those categories actually have to do with the mechanism of injury, not the outcome of the injury itself.
There is language shifting back and forth right now in terms of concussion. What I like to tell people is that all concussions are a form of mild brain injury, but not all mild brain injury is a concussion. It’s more common in youth and young adults and then again in older adults, particularly women, often because women live longer than men and are more likely to fall for a variety of reasons. It can happen to absolutely anyone at any time.
On some of the main consequences of TBI, we noticed challenges with cognition, concentration, attention, memory, the ability to make good judgments, communication challenges, challenges with information processing and multitasking.
Another main category of consequences would be an emotion, so instability and impulsivity are quite common. Depression is highly prevalent in the TBI population. Also there are challenges with sleep, both in terms of the pattern of sleep and the requirement for the amount of sleep. It has an impact on people’s ability to work. It is associated with much higher rates of unemployment and underemployment. It has a major impact on families, both on family members and on caregivers.
There was an interesting comment, actually, earlier by Mr. Cowie on the previous panel about family structures remaining intact for men in prison systems but not for women. I noted that it was the same situation as what we find in traumatic brain injury. There are much higher rates of divorce in traumatic brain injury than in a non-brain injured populations across the board, and those skyrocket for women in particular. We say that women stay with their men and men leave their women. That is what it comes down to. It is interesting to note that he is recognizing that problem in the prison system as well.
TBI is an invisibility disability. It’s very rare that you would be able to look at somebody and know that was what they were living with, or even spend time talking to them and have an understanding that was a piece of the puzzle for them. There’s a lot of stigma associated with it, particularly when it runs concurrent with a mental health challenge or with behavioural challenges. It can be lifelong and considered a chronic condition. It’s a heterogeneous population, so one of the things that we know about brain injury is that no two injuries look alike. It can be a risk factor for other conditions, for example, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. There’s a lot of discussion right now in the media about CTE. There is a component to this particular problem of degenerative challenges over the long term.
We do know is that TBI affects a wide range of individuals in the general population. Approximately 2 per cent or lower is what you would expect as a prevalence rate. However, in four particular vulnerable populations, we see much, much higher rates of prevalence.Women exposed to domestic violence, homeless populations, populations that have challenges with substance use, and the forensic and incarcerated populations experience over 50 per cent.
It is important to recognize that these categories are often not discrete, but rather that they frequently overlap and intersect. Somebody who is homeless may well have been involved in the criminal justice system. A woman who is experiencing violence in the home may well find herself in an incarceration situation. These things often have an impact and a conversation with each other.
Specifically in criminalized populations we know that TBI is more prevalent among males than females, which is not unexpected to us. That is true in the general TBI population as well. Quite significantly, we expect 70 per cent of the TBI population to be male and 30 per cent to be female.
The majority of the incarcerated samples we have looked at had a TBI prior to their first criminal offence. Probably one of the most important pieces of information I can give you is that people are getting brain injured before they’re engaging in criminal activity. It’s at that point that we can intervene and change the trajectory of outcome. Some 95 per cent of female inmates indicated that they had neurologic histories predating crime.
Thinking back a bit to the very quick and brief list that I gave you in terms of what kinds of impacts, we might expect to see, I want to put that specifically in an inmate context so that you might understand what that would look like and why it is relevant to you.
In terms of attention deficits, you might find someone who has difficulty in focusing on a task or responding to directions. In terms of memory deficits, it could affect their understanding or remembering of rules or directions. In terms of impulse control, they may engage in negative behaviours as a result of the injury rather than an active choice to act out or be violent. Misinterpretation on the part of questioning staff is quite possible. Behaviours that they might see as being difficult or deliberately defiant may just be a brain injury being a brain injury. There is an increased difficulty with community reintegration upon release. I thought a lot of what Mr. Cowie spoke about that I thought really resonated with the kinds of things we are facing in this population as well.
We’ve done a couple of studies where we’ve looked specifically at this population. I thought I would give you the basic information on what we found. We were piggybacking with another study that was talking with criminalized populations. We looked for a reported history of TBI and found that 43 per cent of 234 participants reported a history of traumatic brain injury. Again, we supported the existing evidence. It was more common among males than females.
We were also looking at early adverse life experiences and what kind of correlation there might be there. We noticed that women were more likely to be associated with early adverse life experiences than men, both in the TBI population and in the non-TBI population that we spoke with. However, we did notice that there were significantly more adverse experiences among persons with TBI overall than non-TBI.
The average age of first TBI was 19.6 years for men and 21.9 years for women inmates. Some 55 per cent of women reported TBI prior to their first crime and 41 per cent of men reported TBI prior to their first crime. A significant piece of the TBI population is experiencing injury before criminal activity.
The Chair: Can I ask a quick question?
Ms. Haag: Absolutely.
The Chair: Of the 234 participants, could you do the gender breakdown of that, please?
Ms. Haag: Yes, but not right at this moment. I don’t have that information. I had to choose which pieces to put into seven minutes; but I can get you that information if you’d like because we do have that.
The Chair: Thank you.
Ms. Haag: We did find, again, that females with TBI had significantly higher rates of abuse than both females and males without TBI across the board in terms of physical and sexual abuse, neglect, family alcohol abuse, family drug abuse and witness to family violence. There seems to be a correlation in that sense that needs further exploration as well.
Based on all of that, what can I offer to you in terms of recommendations? I thought that was equally important this evening. We feel that it is important to educate staff working in the correctional system. We have begun the process on our own in enabling them to identify persons most at risk, as well as best practices for effective support. TBI specific vocational evaluation, rehabilitation programs, targeted drug and alcohol abuse supports would be most useful, as would inmate referrals to various TBI support organizations. We recognize that this is not something that Corrections Canada specializes in. Nor should they necessarily do so. However, there should be an opportunity for inmates to seek services elsewhere then.
The issue of screening is usually one that people like to ask about. Screening tools exist. Some of them have been tested in this particular population and found to be both reliable and valid. The most well-known one in the particular circumstance would be the Ohio State University TBI model. One thing that makes it very valuable is that it doesn’t need to be administered by someone who is knowledgeable about TBI. Absolutely anybody can do it. It’s a series of about five questions. If you tick enough boxes, you hit a threshold of likelihood. Once you hit that threshold then referral can take place for a more accurate diagnosis and support structures to be put in place.
Part of what we’re dealing with in more than one vulnerable population is the question of whether or not screening is valuable to the individuals themselves when we can’t offer adequate support. What good is it if we go and diagnose, or at least identify likelihood, when we can’t properly support the population?
This is particularly true for women over men in the sense that there are many ways for the diagnosis of traumatic brain injury to be used against them, particularly when they are already vulnerable. This is something we’re exploring in particular in the domestic violence context. If partners can use this information against them in the criminal justice system or use it against them in the family court system, then it becomes really questionable as to whether or not we’re helping or harming through a screening model.
We also need to think about whether or not changes needs to be a broader focus. It’s fine to expect the correctional systems to change and accommodate these challenges, but I think it needs to be broader than that. We need to look at the justice system itself, the judiciary body and the legal representative body. A broader understanding of the implications of traumatic brain injury and how that can play out for somebody over their lifetime would be very valuable. I wonder about the inclusion of specific information within the mental health courts, for instance.
That goes beyond what we have already done and brings me to the end, basically. I welcome your questions. I didn’t want to overwhelm you with statistics and data. I think you’re much better able to identify what it is that you need to know from me.
It is important that you know that I can speak to both an academic understanding of TBI as a researcher and an educator and to lived experience. I have a traumatic brain injury. I have lived with it for 15 years. I am quite open about that because it is a valuable learning opportunity for people who don’t know much about it to be able to ask questions. You’re welcome to ask me from either an academic perspective or a personal one, and I’ll do my best to answer as well as I can.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your testimony.
Ms. Haag: You’re welcome.
Senator Pate: In the information you provided, in addition to the breakdown of gender that Senator Bernard asked you to provide, have you looked at the correlation between women with traumatic brain injury and their convictions and their history of experiencing violence? We know the stats are extremely high, particularly for Indigenous women.
Have you looked at the correlation between their conviction for a violent offence, often a reaction to violence they’re experiencing, and their experiences of violence themselves and the traumatic brain injury?
Related to that, what information do you have, if any, that you could share with us about the ability of women to actually form criminal intent? You gave a whole list of impacts it can have on impulsivity, decision-making, planning and following rules. In light of all of that, there are similar issues. I would think about criminal intent and whether you have looked at that, and about looking at the correlation between those and whether there has been any discussion about the current remedies that exist right now in the corrections legislation.
Section 29 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act allows for people to be transferred out of prisons into appropriate health facilities or other facilities, but particularly health facilities. That’s the place where they should be. The obvious ones that are usually used are when someone has a heart attack or has some physical health. Certainly it is within the purview of corrections to use it for mental health issues, as well as traumatic brain injury. What kind of resources would need to be set up to provide those options for people who are currently incarcerated so they could be in a more appropriate health setting?
That is a bunch of questions. I think I did my second round too.
Ms. Haag: This would lead me to your first learning experience: Don’t ask so many questions at once of someone who has a brain injury because they haven’t got a hope of remembering what your first one was.
Senator Pate: Good point.
Ms. Haag: However, I have learned in 15 years to make quick notes, so I think we can work with this. Please just put me back on point if I am not answering your question clearly.
In response to the question about the correlation to type of crime, I have a slide. My full deck is 54 slides. I had to pick 15 of them and I didn’t want to overwhelm with data. I am happy to provide that material for you as well.
We have information stratified by sex, so we have both male and female, in relation to a variety of about 10 or 15 different types of criminal activity. You can see where TBI is showing up within all of them. We also have information that would show correlation to mental health challenges and specific types of diagnosis under those challenges. I can provide them if they are of use to you as well.
Senator Pate: That would be very helpful. Thank you.
Ms. Haag: Perhaps it would be valuable if I just sent you the 54 slides. I can do that.
As to criminal intent and the ability to form it, that is a very interesting question. My previous career prior to my injury was in fact in the law. That sparks thinking for me on a variety of different levels. The shortest answer I can give is that I don’t have an answer. I don’t know of anybody who has looked at that. I am not aware of any literature looking at that. It doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist, though. I just haven’t gone looking for it.
I think that is an incredibly insightful question. I am going straight back to the lab to put it to the table to see whether or not we have something on that and, if not, how quickly we can start working on it. It’s absolutely relevant to the situation at hand for many of these people.
It links back to the question of screening, though, which I see as integral to your third point about transfer. This would absolutely be a medical diagnosis. I would agree it would probably fall under the classification that you’re talking about, but they’d need to be diagnosed order for that to happen.
Currently, the gold standard for diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury is a neuropsychological exam. Particularly in mild to moderate injury, the current screening tools that we have for neuro-imaging are not very effective. We’re exploring functional MRI to see whether or not that can give us more information in terms of a diagnostic tool. The standard to date has been CT scans, as well as MRI scans. Those are not particularly effective at picking up mild to moderate levels of injury, the kind of thing that would happen from a series of concussive events, three or four barroom brawls and exposure to domestic violence for a few years. Those kinds of things might well produce mild to moderate injury level. They would not show up on a scan, strictly because of the type of damage pattern in the brain itself and the grid system and the scanning system on that technology.
In order to get a diagnosis, we’re looking at neuropsychological testing, which generally costs between $4,000 to $6,000 per test and is not covered by our provincial health care system. You’re talking about a population that is highly unlikely to have access to that kind of diagnostic process without significant funding and support from I would expect a government body. We haven’t seen discussion of that changing to date.
Does that answer your questions?
Senator Pate: It does.
The Ohio State University tool could be a way to flag, though.
Ms. Haag: It certainly would.
Senator Pate: That could be done by almost anybody. Is that correct?
Ms. Haag: Yes. The beauty of the particular test is that it can be done by anyone. It’s fairly quick. It’s a series of five questions. If you have enough of them that are yes, it raises your likelihood of possibility, at which point you can be shifted through the system and into a more effective screening mechanism, yes.
Senator Pate: That could be something done routinely when someone comes into the prison system.
Ms. Haag: Yes.
One of the slides that I did give you has three different screening models on it. The HELPS tool is another one that is very similar to the Ohio one. The BISQ tool is quite widely used. What I like about the Ohio tool is that it has been tested in this particular population.
Senator Cordy: This is really interesting. I will not even say understanding, but at least we are talking about traumatic brain injury. When you start taking it more seriously in sports, it will funnel down because that’s where the big dollars and big salaries are. Nobody wanted to lose their star players, so they were off the ice or on the bench for 24 hours and then back, or maybe not even out for the whole game. We saw that in years gone by, so it’s good that it’s starting to change.
You talked about brain injury in vulnerable populations and you said that many imprisoned women have been exposed to violence, homelessness, substance abuse, and forensic incarceration.
Ms. Haag: Yes.
Senator Cordy: The same population.
Ms. Haag: Yes.
Senator Cordy: Is there a correlation or did you just simply gather the data and say that this is a fact? Did you see a correlation in these vulnerable populations that seemed to have traumatic brain injuries? Is there a reason? I guess I am not explaining my question very well.
You have the data that it’s more prevalent in these vulnerable populations, but what is the correlation? You know that it happens, but was there a reason? Or, did you look into that?
Ms. Haag: Just so I can clarify that, can I tell you why these women are being brain injured in the first place?
Senator Cordy: Yes.
Ms. Haag: Is there a correlation that drills right down to the bottom of that?
Senator Cordy: Yes.
Ms. Haag: No is the short answer. Think about domestic violence. One of the insidious things about its nature is that it’s absolutely across the spectrum in terms of the socioeconomic categories of education, race, marital status, whether or not women have children and whether or not they’re financially independent. It can strike anywhere.
We do know that 92 per cent of violent encounters in the home include hits to the head, face and neck. One of those can cause a traumatic brain injury. Women don’t experience one. It’s far more common that they are hit 20 or 30 times before they are able to leave that environment. They will attempt to leave five or six times before they’re successful. The likelihood of increased exposure causing ongoing and exponential damage I find to be quite plausible.
What I find very interesting about all three of the other categories is that the injury predates the category. The injury predates the criminal behaviour. It predates the substance use. It predates the homeless condition. It’s what happens to people who get brain injured.
Senator Cordy: That makes sense, actually, yes.
Ms. Haag: You’re welcome.
Senator Cordy: You certainly have done a study of it, but is the general public starting to understand traumatic brain injury and the effect it can have on poor decision-making and, for that matter, criminality because of poor decision-making?
Ms. Haag: I don’t think the general public has reached that stage of awareness. I am not sure professionals who are in direct contact have reached that state of awareness.
I think we’re still thinking about it as a hockey player’s disease.
Senator Cordy: I was going to ask about the justice system recognizing it. Again, would that be not yet or not very much or not at all?
Ms. Haag: Yes, not very much or not at all, in my experience speaking with people who have experienced both conditions, yes.
Senator Ataullahjan: Senator Cordy’s second question was the question I was going to ask. Let’s take it a bit further. What can we do to encourage this conversation? Are people in the corrections system aware that this might be a factor in the justice system like Senator Cordy said? What about children who experience abuse? How does it affect their behaviour? Has anyone looked at that?
Ms. Haag: Yes. We have John Corrigan’s work out of Ohio State University. He’s one of the leading researchers in the area of childhood traumatic brain injury and the projected outcome over time up until the age of 21. You might find his research very interesting in terms of increased likelihood of substance use and increased likelihood of criminal activity, leading to increased likelihood of incarceration by the age of 21, with probability statistics that may make you want to weep. I mean I work with adults for a reason in that sense. I find that information to be overwhelming myself. It certainly is explored and it is significant. That is the moment of intervention. That is the valuable piece we can take out of that.
It’s not difficult to support people with brain injury. It’s just that you have to understand, first, that the brain injury is probably there and, second, how to intervene and how to support them through an educational system, support their families in coping with the unique challenges to brain injury.
Education to the general public about what is brain injury is needed. What does it look like? What does it talk like? What would I expect to see in my child if they fell on the playground? That’s often what we’re talking about. It’s easy to think about children who are exposed to violent homes and are disadvantaged through social status and economics being more likely to encounter violence in their childhood. However it can be as simple as a child falling off a playground apparatus and in that moment shifting their outcome for a very long time.
We’re beginning this discussion. We have an Ontario concussion protocols in place that we did not have five years ago. The public is becoming more aware but not when it comes to these kinds of vulnerable, marginalized populations. We don’t talk about them in a sense of need or victimhood to begin with. They’re the perpetrators. They’re the ones that we punish. They’re not the ones that we view from a position of empathy and support. What needs to happen is a shift on a social level, much like a previous speaker spoke about in terms of race. Our society has to rethink, but I am not sure that is helpful to you. Nor is it likely to happen in the near future.
In the meantime, education is critical. What I find frustrating is that we identified that in the traumatic brain injury research world 20 years ago. You can read studies from 20 years ago looking at these populations. We have been talking about education and the need for it for years. It doesn’t seem to change.
I often think about making a big banner that says, “God, thank the hockey players” because without the Sidney Crosbys of the world this conversation would still not be happening and I still wouldn’t be here to speak to you about it. Their sacrifices and their notoriety have made space for us to talk about this in these circles, and I think that is very important.
Senator Ataullahjan: Do you have any statistics that the people who have TBI are aware that they have this injury?
Ms. Haag: A common side effect of traumatic brain injury is that it tends to increase depending on the level of the initial classification of mild, moderate or severe, as well as the level of challenges that they deal with across the board.
I can tell you from my experience or from my position that I am aware it is a side effect. I am aware that it is quite possibly happening in my world. It makes me very nervous about what do I know about what don’t I know?
Lots of people I’ve worked with over the years in a supportive capacity as a social worker are completely unaware that they would deny having a brain injury at all, although medical documentation clearly shows that it is a significant part of who they are. It can range from being self-aware about the problem to being completely unaware.
The Chair: Thank you very much. With the evidence that you have given us this evening, the issue is certainly coming to the attention of a great many people.
We have two people from the audience who want to make very brief presentations. I also invite the other witnesses who appeared tonight to join us as we wrap up and if there are any other questions that come to mind.
We will hear from Rod Friesen, the Mennonite Central Committee, and Julie Thompson, the STRIDE program. Then, if any other questions have emerged for the witnesses that appeared previously, we’ll hear them.
Rod Friesen, Coordinator, Restorative Justice Program, Mennonite Central Committee Canada: Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening and thank you for coming to Kitchener to hear what the community has to say.
I have been struck. I am really reflecting and taking a lot of notes tonight. I hadn’t planned on speaking, but I was thinking about MCC’s role in three programs that I wanted to share, and then I wanted to make one comment about where I think we could go with an idea.
There are three programs that we run in restorative justice in Ontario. One is Circles of Support and Accountability. It’s a program where we work with individuals who have had a history of sexual offending. We also work with support and accountability in the community so that when they return there are no more victims and they’re also not disposable in the process.
We have learned about this program over the years is that it is not only statistically successful in that 70 per cent of those in a circle don’t reoffend. The value of community around these offenders and what that does to change the volunteers that come into contact with people who have had a history of sexual offence is quite transformative.
Another program is funded by CSC is a faith community reintegration program. This is a program in which we support ex-offender reintegration into the community in GTA and in London. This is particularly important as volunteers of faith communities, not just Christian, but Muslim and all kinds of groups, work with us to support the reintegration of offenders into the community, which we feel is critical.
The other program that hopefully you will see tomorrow when you go to GVI is their blanket-making program. We have a number of women in both the minimum and the main units that make blankets. They are also making some upcycled projects, we call them, to learn sewing skills to have something to do while they’re in the institution. These women get an amazing feeling when they can contribute to MCC’s international work where we send blankets overseas. Since they have been doing this, I think about 12 years now, they have sewn over 1,200 blankets within GVI to send to international aid in places like Ukraine and Jordan. What strikes me about the comments that these women make when they have an opportunity to contribute to the community is that they’re not just doing time. They’re actually able to contribute to something larger in the world that makes an impact.
When a crime occurs, one of the biggest challenges is the state takes over and victims, offenders and communities don’t really have an opportunity to do anything about it. What is interesting in restorative practice, values and principles, particularly, is that we look at how we can restore the broken web of relationships that people have when a crime occurs. Crime affects everyone and harm affects everyone in that way.
I come from a background of many years of working in Community Corrections at the federal community level on housing supports, homelessness, issues with race relations, issues with acquired brain injury, FASD and adverse childhood experience. In all of my 25 years of working in this field, I can concur with all of the people here tonight that there are many challenges and problems. The hope I would like to bring is to the concept of restorative practices, principles and values becoming embedded within all of our systems, within the systems of early childhood education, all the way up through school, prison systems, the CAS and those types of systems.
For half of my career I have been a human resources professional, having to manage change in social agencies. If there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that it’s really hard to get people to change when they’re in a system. The way to do that is to begin to inspire people to see a different way. I think we have heard a lot tonight about how we change within the correctional system.
I can see it in a small way when I go into GVI and I make blankets with the women, just to learn. I’ve learned more about blanket-making than I ever thought I would, but what is amazing is being able to take the time to learn and begin to observe. In my experience, it’s an intractable problem that systems will not change unless they start to think restoratively from prior to incarceration and backing that up with restorative principles during the criminal justice path. I think somebody referred to it as the digestive system. I kind of like that because we have to back it up. When a crime occurs, we have to start thinking restoratively then as opposed to doing it when underfunded community-based agencies have to pick up the pieces to try and heal these individuals when they come back into the community.
I wanted to share that with you tonight. Certainly feel free to ask questions. We’re open for dialogue.
Julie Thompson, Director, Community Relations, Community Justice Initiatives: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Some 20 years ago yesterday I was hired by CJI to start the STRIDE program. I have been involved with women at Grand Valley Institution for 20 years. It has been an honour and a privilege. I feel a lot of pressure right now to get this right because this feels like a really neat opportunity to be able to express what I see as being some of the pieces that need to be addressed.
First of all, our agency is also a restorative justice agency. I really feel like there’s a lot of ways of managing people involved in crime, in conflict and in the system so that they don’t go to prison in the first place. Many of the women I work with certainly don’t feel like they should belong in prison. There are a lot of other ways of addressing the harms that they have caused and doing so in a way that is less damaging to them and their family and that brings some healing to the people they have caused harm to.
Most of the women I have had the privilege of working with want to change their lives. They don’t ever want to go back to prison. Yet, for those women, the idea of where to start once you get into the community is overwhelming. The emphasis is on women who are already marginalized and who are stigmatized by our system to make these huge changes. When they get out into the community, they find that the community doesn’t feel as safe as prison. That tells me there is a lot we need to do in communities to support women to make the changes they want to make. A lot of the work we do is not only to support the women in their change, but also to develop a more informed, more responsive and more supportive community for women to move back into if they are to be successful.
A lot has happened in the last 20 years that has contributed to further isolation of women inside a system that has become further isolated from the community. Originally, with Creating Choices the idea was that community played a valuable role in women’s lives daily inside the institution. They were there to develop and support programming that was happening.
The substance abuse programming, sexual abuse programming and all sorts of other programming that happened for women inside were supposed to be delivered by members of the community, by organizations in the community. That was part of the idea of Creating Choices. Systematically, over the last 20 years, that has all but disappeared. We have correctional staff facilitating those programs, which does a lot to reduce their impact. Also it causes isolation. There’s a lot that happens in that isolation that is not something to be proud of. It creates a system where the worst is expected of women. When people are treated to the worst, then some people respond by behaving to that worst.
Mr. Cowie talked about it a bit. We do a program called STRIDE Night. It’s a simple recreation program that happens weekly inside the institution. Women are free to choose whether they would like to participate and how they want to participate. In the 20 years that we have run that program we all are equipped with our PPAs designed to ring an alarm if something happens. For some reason, I am not sure why, staff of the prison don’t attend that program. In 20 years we have never had an incident where we have had to ring that alarm.
The women are the ones that create that safe place. They talk about how they behave differently to each other because of the presence of community. They also are eternally grateful to people who choose to come in on a weekly basis and to share their lives with them. They’re not going to do anything that ruins that. There can be violence outside but there is never violence inside. I think that speaks to creating a place where it is not about what you have done or a label. It’s about connecting with human beings and talking about something outside of the daily grind of prison life. The isolation from community can make women’s behaviour worse, but I also think it can make the system’s behaviour worse. I am not going to say too much more about that. Ms. Gentile will do that for me.
Huge barriers have happened to community participation in prison. I will just speak to one that happened fairly recently. It is the need for any volunteer going into the prison to do a reliability clearance. This is a Public Safety thing. It used to be that you had a criminal record check to go into the institution. It took about 20 minutes to two weeks to get facilitated. Reliability clearances are hugely onerous on the organization that’s supporting the volunteer and on the volunteer. It is hugely personal and invasive for volunteers to fill out. They not only have to fill out this very lengthy form and make no errors, because that produces another two-month waiting list, but they have to submit to fingerprinting. They have to pay for that and, recently, they have to submit to a credit check.
You can think about the barrier that causes organizations that want volunteers to go into the prison. They’re having to engage people around the idea of spending time with people who have committed crimes and deal with some of the very real fears that come up with that. On top of that, you have to lay on this very intrusive set of screening. It’s hugely onerous on any of the organizations that have to facilitate these screenings.
The Chair: We have about two minutes left of allotted time. If people are okay staying for a few extra minutes, we will invite each senator to ask one question.
Senator Ataullahjan: What is the idea behind the liability test? How does it help?
Ms. Thompson: I think it is Public Safety’s screening tool for everything to do with government security testing. It has recently been applied to volunteer organizations inside of Grand Valley Institution. It has been around for the last two or three years. It takes about eight months to a year for an organization to be able to provide their own reliability clearances.
Senator Ataullahjan: If you haven’t had any negative experiences, what is the need for this, then?
Ms. Thompson: You would have to ask Public Safety. I think it’s a huge barrier and I think it’s really unnecessary.
The Chair: Does anyone else want to speak to that?
Ms. Gentile: I would just add to that, they’re beginning to apply that same added security to the regional advocates across Canada. We’re seeing that at the Nova Institution for Women. They’re asking for a higher standard of reliability clearance for our advocates, despite the fact that there have not been any issues noted from our regional advocates either.
It’s a hindrance more than a help, I would say, because it makes it difficult for volunteers to get in and do the important work that they are doing.
Senator Pate: Thank you for yet another example of where policy has been in place that hinders.
I know, Ms. Thompson, that you have been around for 20 years, but just to go back, the first change or policy decision was that everybody was supposed to go out to the community. The next policy change was the community coming in, and then the next policy change was CSC providing the programs. Is that your understanding, too?
Ms. Thompson: Yes.
Senator Pate: I was very pleased to hear you both talk about restorative justice. Historically restorative justice was talked about as a way of really rearranging the deck chairs within the prison system and within the criminal justice system. I am very interested in how you see that.
I know there have been challenges for the restorative justice folks in the past about guaranteed livable incomes, for instance, as a way to restoratively deal with poverty, homelessness and those things. I am just curious what other avenues you are looking at in terms of restorative justice in a preventative way and not in terms of healthy communities, healthy people, and people being entitled not to be homeless, not to be hungry and not to be living in abject poverty.
Mr. Friesen: I would say implementing restorative practice first so that people can understand some of the basics of what restorative principles are about. We live in the community and we need to connect and relate to one another in the community. It takes a level of skill building to do that at the educational level within schools so that school systems have restorative practices within classrooms. Some of my last work was involved with section 23 classrooms and trying to come up with solutions for staff who are getting injured by children.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful in those situations if we could start to look at how the harm is occurring early, as an early prevention, and bring in restorative concepts such as restorative circle keeping in classrooms? That’s a very simple concept that could be used as a tool for individuals, children and staff, to unpack harm that is happening in the classroom and so that there are processes in place. They’re not hard to learn and they’re easier to live when you’re in the community and you have to be accountable to other people.
Senator Cordy: This has been, for me personally, a very productive evening with the information that all the witnesses have given. We had our visit this afternoon, and we will have more visits and be speaking to those in custody tomorrow. It has all been very helpful for us in writing our report.
The common theme we heard throughout the evening was reintegration and the importance of reintegration. Yet, when we hear what is happening, it seems the most productive thing is STRIDE, which we heard a lot about from Ms. Thompson and from another witness earlier. There seems to be policies coming into place. Nobody is saying that you just allow anybody into the system, but I think this appears to be overkill. We have STRIDE, but I know a friend whose church group in Nova Scotia goes into the prisons to play music and entertain people in the system. All of that will be stopped because volunteers are unlikely to pay the amount of money and use the amount of time. By the time you would be approved, you may not want to do it anymore.
Senator Pate: It is the relevance of a credit check.
Senator Cordy: Yes, that is true, too. I hadn’t thought about it in that light, yes.
We’re all saying we’re here from government and we’re here to help. Anyway, we are writing a report. How do we instill in our report the idea of the integration? It was supposed to be community-based, as Senator Pate said earlier. It’s now in the institution, which isn’t working, because they’re not prepared to go out.
What kinds of recommendations do we make to ensure that the focus should be reintegration so that people aren’t coming back into the system again and again and again?
Ms. Thompson: There is a lot to answer to that. Again, the resources people keep talking about resources, but I think you have organizations that are working with people who themselves are marginalized because of unstable, unreliable funding sources.
I have been involved in the STRIDE program. At one point I was working 15 hours a week. I was the only person working 15 hours a week just trying to keep it going. When you do that, you have been working with people that you have taken time to build trust and relationships with. If you constantly fail that relationship because your funding is lost or you have lost staff because you have had to do layoffs, I think you end up almost doing more harm than good. I think you need a better funding model that really invests in the long-term stability of community-based organizations to be able to provide services in the long haul for women over time or for anybody over time.
Ms. Gentile: If I could add, a really crucial aspect to reintegration is desegregation. I touched on a bit how maximum security and segregation units prevent women from working their correctional plans. It limits their access to programs. It limits their access to visits. At GVI only two women can have visits at a time in the maximum security unit because of the level system and different justifications around policy. It also means that they can’t access escorted temporary absences. They can’t access opportunities to go out into the community to receive meaningful programs and family contact out in the community. It lowers their chances of getting parole. It lowers their chances of successfully reintegration. We find that Indigenous women are frequently revoked and often for administrative breaches, such as breaches of a condition that are set on their parole.
The Chair: I have a question I would like to ask as well. This is for any of you. Are there any mentorship support programs that involve women who were previously prisoners in the system? If so, how are they working?
Ms. Brown Ramsay: They’re not working anymore. Again, it is a lack of resources. I don’t know if you’re aware but Audmax had worked with CSC for some time, actually. They did work in GVI and funding became an issue. They are no longer going in there, but I do know that Audmax went in and they volunteered even after because the women were asking for that. They dealt primarily, of course, with women of colour, with Black women.
As we spoke about before, that cultural piece, that historical factor piece, is important. The women really miss that.
The Chair: Could you just say what Audmax is? Some people may not know.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Audmax is an organization that works with women in prison. It does a number of different types of programming. The basic pieces are life skills and team building. It really helps women especially to kind of understand themselves and to look at reintegration. They couple these women with organizations outside of the institution for when they come out that they can they rely on. It is very much in terms of putting community and the women in institutions, together.
It was unbelievable. The women absolutely loved it because they felt that they were being heard. They felt that they had someone that understood some of the issues they were facing and could connect them with community people to help them become more integrated back into society. Frankly, if some of the women were to go back to their churches, and we have had this conversation, the churches wouldn’t want them. They had to find other places for them to go. Audmax was on the ground doing this day in and day out.
Ms. Thompson: If I could just add something, Lifeline was a really effective and amazing program that lost its funding. I don’t think any Lifeline programs are happening anymore. I can’t even believe that.
Even when we have people who want to volunteer for us, we no longer are able to get them into the prison because of the reliability clearance. That has become a huge hindrance. It used to be that we would have a warden’s permission to bring somebody who formerly had a criminal record into the institution. We’re not allowed to do that anymore.
Ms. Haag: Can I add one piece to that?
The Chair: Yes.
Ms. Haag: It’s not a peer support necessarily, but at the Faculty of Social Work in Waterloo we have a program called Walls to Bridges. I am unsure whether or not you’re familiar with it or if you have had a chance to speak with our faculty, but we offer courses toward our master’s degree in social work that are held both inside and outside of Grand Valley. The student complement is made up of both criminalized women and non-criminalized women.
Within those groups, we also have students from the master’s program who are connected to the Walls to Bridges program that have lived experience of criminalization. There is some overlap happening there. That program has been very successful and seems to be expanding rather than shrinking.
Senator Pate: I think Dr. Shoshana Pollack or the social work faculty wrote to us, or maybe not.
Ms. Gentile: I want to mention that CAEFS, our regional advocates, has created advocacy worker positions inside the prisons. We provide advocacy training and then there are paid positions that result from that training. We find that women who are able to advocate for their rights inside of prisons have more success once they’re on the outside because of the skills and tools that they developed.
Senator Pate: Can we get the names of the advocates for tomorrow? Do you know if they are to meet with us tomorrow?
Ms. Gentile: Yes. We have had some changeover because there have been some transfers recently. We’re doing training, actually, next week to develop new advocacy workers. Actually, our advocacy workers in the minimum unit are now out.
We have one advocacy worker on the main compound. I can provide you her information or her name. At the moment, that’s it. We have lost some advocacy workers in the max unit, and one of our advocacy workers on the main compound has been transferred to another prison.
Senator Pate: My understanding is some of the advocacy workers, the women who had been in prison and were working with your team outside, are being reviewed under the credit or enhanced security checks now. There were women peers who were going back in as part of the advocacy teams at one point.
Ms. Gentile: Yes. We have a regional advocate in B.C. who has been unable to gain access to the prison, actually. She has hit a lot of roadblocks in trying to get clearance. She’s a tremendous advocate.
Unfortunately, we don’t really have a team. We’re in the process of trying to build up a regional advocacy team in B.C. right now. One of our regional advocates has experience inside. She has been out for quite some time and has been doing tremendously well, but she can’t gain access to the prison.
The Chair: Mr. LaRose, do you have a comment or a question?
Mr. LaRose: I have a question and I wanted to offer a solution. For the Grand Valley Institution, what proportion of the inmate population is Black? Would you say it’s 50 per cent, more or less?
Ms. Thompson: No, less.
Ms. Gentile: It’s less than that.
Mr. LaRose: In terms of the community and restorative programs and reintegration programs, there’s a total disconnect between the community and the institutions, whether it’s school or otherwise. Schools have become parochialized and isolated. They’ve locked the communities out of the schools. The doors are locked. Symbolisms are great. Police officers are in the school. The whole system created an essence of having a jail environment as the children come into the school system and end up in prisons ultimately.
How can we form a strong basis upon which the community can play an active role in the restorative practice, as well as the reintegration practice? My understanding is that in Cuba there’s no real disconnection. Once the person is incarcerated, the family is encouraged to continue to maintain linkage and correction. Once that chain is broken, the population becomes isolated. Distance disconnects them. Family connections are lost.
Here is a community that is existing on their own. From what I hear, when they’re in there they’re behaving better than when they’re back in the general population in terms of how they relate to each other. That is what I understood in terms of the women in prison and how they’re relating within that system.
Something is flawed culturally in terms of where the emphasis is on how we socialize people into dealing with institutions that isolate them, remove them, and then still want them back in there. Perhaps a great focus might be on how we can work better to reintegrate using community resources.
We’ve been doing this for years. I worked with a lot of inmates. In the few that I’ve had, we got them back into jobs. We got the stigmatization reduced considerably. Once they come back, they’re actively engaged. Nobody knows they’re a prisoner anymore.
Senator Pate: Mr. LaRose, just for your information, 17.9 per cent of the women at Grand Valley are Black. The highest proportion of Black women in the federal prison system. It used to be in Joliette but now it is in Grand Valley.
Mr. LaRose: There is a trend here. We have Black women and Black men imprisoned in rates disproportionate to their presence in the population. I don’t hear any emphasis being made in terms of how we are to deal with that? What is putting them in the prisons and who is? For what purpose?
This is true around the world, but particularly true in Canada, United States and United Kingdom. Is there a universal problem to incarcerate Black people? I am just throwing it out there. Let’s start looking at what we’re doing wrong in the society that gets Black people locked up, wherever they are, and there’s no rehab to get them back out.
The Chair: We are getting to the root causes.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: This is incredible. I thank the senators and everyone in this room and everyone for their stories. I want to leave you with one thing.
Some 25 years ago, one of my first jobs was working with Elizabeth Fry. I worked with young offenders in an open custody facility. I had the opportunity as I moved to kind of speak with parents on a regular basis. They didn’t see me because many of the young people we dealt with came from out of town.
There were parents that I would speak to quite frequently who actually came to visit. Our staff was busy. I answered the door. I answered the door and one parent said to me, “Can I speak with the staff?” I said, “I am staff. I can help you.” The husband said, “Oh, okay. Where is your supervisor? Can I speak to your supervisor?” I said, “I can help you with that.” They wouldn’t speak to me, so I brought them back to my office. At the time I was acting manager for the institution. I went and sat behind my desk and then said, “Can I help you? I can help you.” To that they said, “I didn’t know you were Jamaican.” Now how did they even know I am Jamaican? Do you know what I mean?
When Mr. LaRose goes back to this, there is a systemic issue we have to look at when we’re dealing with ethnocultural, particularly Black, offenders. That situation at any time could have been handled very differently depending on the people. That could have been a really bad situation. You have to understand what that means for a person who happens to be Black, to feel as if you don’t count. How could I ever have that type of job? Why could I be a manager? I am helping your child and this is how you feel about me.
If that is happening to me and I am in that role, what do you think? I know everybody in this room understands this, but what must that be like for that young person, for that young woman and for that father who feel like nobody hears them?
That is why we go back to why we ask today for some consideration for us to look at making certain changes so that Black and Brown get the same equity. It’s equity. You cannot expect it will happen if I am trying to reach the same level. We can’t reach the same level playing field. It doesn’t happen, not anymore. I might need a bigger ladder for you and me to be on the same level. There is some work that has to be done. I love the fact that we’re here tonight. I am convinced that each of us can do something together.
The Chair: On that note, as a reminder, we need to consider this work with that race equity lens.
Ms. Brown Ramsay: Yes.
The Chair: That is the note that we will end on this evening. I thank all of you very much, for coming, for being here and for giving your testimony, and I thank my colleagues for being here.
It is almost 9:30, so we have gone well past our time. Obviously the conversation could continue, but we have to bring this to a close.
(The committee adjourned.)