We have no choice but to challenge our pre-conceptions and therefore our approaches, responsibilities, language – in short, everything, about how we are working and envisioning the future.

Women are the fastest growing prison population world wide and this is not accidental. In Canada, we recognize that our links to the United States has meant that we were amongst the first countries to be impacted by the now globalized capitalist lunges for cash and products, which are occasioning the destruction of social safety nets – from social and health services to economic and education standards and availability. The result, as we have recognized very concretely by the change of our mission to recognize the reality that laws and policies are increasingly in conflict with peoples’ lives, resulting in the virtual inevitability of criminalization.

For example, by creating criminally low welfare rates and even bans on receipt of state resources, many poor people are immediately relegated to the criminalized underclass. Rather than resulting in the criminalization of poor women for welfare fraud, prostitution, drug trafficking or whatever other survival strategies are employed, if we are truly interested in addressing fraudulent transactions that harm others, then criminally low welfare rates should result in the criminalization of those who craft, those who pass, and those who enforce the laws and policies, not those subjected to them.

Query the value of enabling the creation of laws and policies that effectively criminalize poverty, disabilities and the resisters of colonization, and then developing classification, assessment and correction tools that pretend that the individual members of those very groups of people who are grabbed, sucked or thrown into the criminal and correctional systems are there because of their planned, voluntary and criminally intended actions.

They are not the cause of the greatest real or perceived risks to others yet we continue to perpetuate the myth by focusing on risk assessments and correctional programs, when it is those responsible for and/or complicit in the destruction of our social safety net who are in the greatest need of correction. Just as the people had to examine their own actions and inaction following the genocidal results of German policies and practices in the 1920s and 1930s, those who fail to address these matters will be faced with the reality that they too could be directly impacted implicitly and possibly explicitly, depending upon their personal, economical and professional circumstances. It is simply not acceptable to merely hide our heads in the sand and wallow in despair, nor is it acceptable to set up new and improved versions of the same old flawed system. Really, whom do we think we are fooling as we re-arrange the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic as the system becomes more and more overwhelmed, veering into proverbial icebergs with political winds providing seemingly rudderless direction. Well, we all know what happened to the Titanic.