This disparate impact results additionally because long prison terms may have more devastating effects upon prisoners who are racialized or who experience cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, whose prospects of employment will be further crushed by a record of imprisonment. In the case of women, they are more likely to be the primary, often sole parent of children and therefore more likely to experience the loss of their children and the anxiety related to concerns about their well-being. Further, the conditions of women’s imprisonment have often been condemned for their failure to provide appropriate services for women. Finally, the isolation of women’s prisons from the larger community will also differentially affect racialized women, particularly Aboriginal women. It should be emphasized here that the s. 15 violation of women’s equality rights posed by the imprisonment of Aboriginal women in the Kingston Prison for Women was recognized by the Saskatchewan Queen’s Bench in the Daniels (1990) case.

3. Distortion of Defences

CAEFS believes that mandatory minimum sentences also contribute to systemic discrimination by putting pressure on lawyers to resort to extraordinary measures to avoid conviction and the mandatory sentence for their clients. Many of the problems that have been associated with the defences of self-defence and provocation are in fact distortions caused by the existence of a mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment for murder. Accused persons, lawyers, and judges are pressured to resort to constructs such as “Battered Woman Syndrome”, “Homosexual Advance”, “Homosexual Panic”, “Cultural Defences”, and “Rage” in order to avoid this sentence, even when such uses carry negative social policy consequences and in fact violate the Charter rights of the deceased victims and social groups such as women, lesbians and gays, and racialized people. The more appropriate response is to rid the law of the mandatory minimum sentence of life for murder.

4. Swelling Prison Populations

CAEFS also opposes the use of the mandatory life sentence for murder based on its contribution to the growing population of prisoners in Canada, and particularly women prisoners. We know that women have not suddenly become more violent, yet the numbers of women serving life sentences have risen from 12-14 % in the late 1980s, to approximately 22% a decade later. CAEFS attributes this startling increase in the women’s federal population to the impact of mandatory life sentences for murder. A similar trend has been documented in the United States, where the increased use of mandatory minimum sentences has produced its most dramatic expansion of prisoners in the women’s population: 38 % of the growth in the women’s prison population is attributable to drug offences, as compared with 17 % of the growth of the male inmate population (FAMM-gram, 1999 at 5).