Many of these women carry such labels as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) or Effect (FAE), as well as the borderline personality label. The result of this trend is that women are entering federal prisons with significant needs, while the Correctional Service of Canada is ill-equipped to meet their needs. The result is that women with mental and cognitive disabilities are difficult for the prisons to manage, so they tend to be confined in the most isolated conditions, often in segregation. Such conditions of confinement only serve to exacerbate pre-existing mental health issues. Moreover, the levels of isolation and consequent sensory deprivation tend to create additional mental health issues.

Ironically, the odious reflex of CSC to develop mental health services in prisons, only serves to exacerbate the trend to increasingly criminalize women with mental and cognitive disabilities. Developing such services in prisons, at a time when they are increasingly non-existent in the community, is resulting in more women receiving federal sentences because there is a presumption that there is an ability to access services in prison that are not available in community settings. Prisons are not and cannot be treatment centres.

In addition, we are seeing the so called "war on drugs" really becoming a war on the most dispossessed, especially women, as we see increased numbers of women resorting to using, selling, or otherwise dealing in legal or illegal drugs, in order to cope with everyday life and/or to allow them to gain extra financial resources in order to survive.

We are also seeing the increased feminization and criminalization of poverty. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most tragic, exemplification of the intersection of federal and regional, economic, social, financial, health, and education issues, occurred in the death of Kim Rogers, a 40 year old woman we knew well, a woman who was set up to fail in the first place.

Kim was criminalized because of "welfare fraud". This label and resulting punishment were applied because Kim attempted to get an education while still on welfare. As part of the process, she also sought and received student loans. Although everyone knows that it is impossible to live on welfare anywhere in Canada without some supplemental income/support, to be caught doing so means an almost certainty of criminal prosecution.

Because Kim received student loans while she was receiving social assistance (misnomer of course), the same province that created the criminally irresponsible welfare rates, chose to prosecute her for receiving welfare payments. She entered a guilty plea, and was consequently convicted of welfare fraud. She was then sentenced to a 6 month conditional sentence [which is supposed to have been an alternative to imprisonment -- and we should all continue to question why a jail sentence should be attached to this "offence" in the first place] and a restitution order to repay the provincial government the full $13,300 in welfare that she had received.