Section 88 of the CCRA permits prisoners to participate in "treatment demonstration programs" which have been approved as ethically and clinically sound by a committee independent of the CSC, provided the prisoner voluntarily consents to do so. It has recently come to light that federally sentenced women at Prison for Women participated in experimental drug treatment during the 1960's and 70's, and that some of them continue to suffer adverse effects from that treatment. Because many prisoners serving sentences are suffering from life threatening diseases, such as AIDS and Hepatitis C, some prisoners do wish to be included in treatment demonstration programs Given the profound power imbalance between CSC and prisoners, however, genuine voluntary consent by prisoners is often difficult to assess. Furthermore, such power imbalances are compounded by the additional dependence that tends to be inherent to the doctor-patient relationship. Prisoners might very well believe that their refusal to participate in treatment demonstration programs might have a negative impact upon their relationship with CSC, which, in turn, might negatively impact their access to correctional and pre-release programs. Indeed, this is a current complaint of federally sentenced women who are being recruited for new psychological treatment programs that require a minimum number of participants to be piloted. This concern could be reduced if members of the public were also recruited to participate in the same program(s).
Section 125(3) of the CCRA provides that prisoners serving their first penitentiary sentence, other than those specifically excluded by virtue of the offence of which they were convicted, must be released on full parole unless the National Parole Board (NPB) is satisfied that s/he will commit an offence involving violence prior to the expiration of the sentence. Section 125(3) requires the NPB to base its decision on a number of factors, including the social history of the prisoner. The social history category encompasses such factors as poverty, educational level, work record, cultural background and race. A prisoner's social history cannot be directly linked to the likelihood of the commission of violent offences. Nevertheless, the use of social characteristics to predict violent offending feeds discriminatory stereotypes and mythical assumptions about the disproportionate propensities of marginalized persons to commit criminal offences. Of particular concern to CAEFS is the inclusion of "social history" as a factor which is seen as somehow indicating a propensity for violence. Please refer to Appendix I for further elucidation of this issue. In short, federally sentenced women as a group have experienced greater social disadvantage even than men prisoners. In order to avoid exacerbating that disadvantage, CAEFS believes that s. 125(3) should be amended by deleting social history from the factors to be considered by the NPB.
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