CAEFS would like to see CSC developing clear action plans designed to ensure that the needs of federally sentenced women are met in the institutional and community release contexts for those women still imprisoned at the Prison for Women, as well as of those in the regional prisons, the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge and the segregated maximum security units in men’s prisons. Much more emphasis is needed on the development of community supports for women prisoners.

INCREASED CRIMINALIZATION OF WOMEN

Women prisoners, especially racialized women prisoners, are the fastest growing prison population world wide. The so- called “War on Drugs”, evisceration of health and other social support services, as well as “gender-neutral” zero tolerance policies have contributed significantly to this phenomenon. It is often the women who have been hired to transport drugs who are detected, prosecuted and imprisoned, as opposed to those who hire them.

Too many of the federally sentenced women who are currently classified as maximum security prisoners are women who have cognitive and/or mental disabilities. Many of them were previously institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals and/or involved in other mental health services. Many are criminalized as a result of their disability-induced behaviour in institutions and/or the community. As a result of funding cutbacks to services over the past decades, we have literally seen these women dumped into the streets and, ultimately, into the wider, deeper and stickier social control net of our criminal justice system. Although the criminal justice system is the likely the least effective and most expensive system that could be used to respond to cognitive and mental disabilities, it is a system that cannot refuse to “service” anyone who is criminalized, regardless of their disability.