Their attempts to survive, their attempts to self-medicate, their attempts to cope with their situations as well as the behavior that then evolves from being in a situation where they are increasingly disenfranchised, have led to their increased criminalization and imprisonment. Once in prison, these women are considered difficult to manage and consequently spend a disproportionate amount of their time classified as maximum-security prisoners. This means that in addition to serving most of their sentence in the segregated maximum-security units in men's prisons, they are also most likely to be placed in segregation. They also tend to attract a number of psychiatric labels, and tend to be characterized by the Correctional Service of Canada as among the most difficult prisoners to manage by Correctional Services Canada.

The reflex of corrections to develop mental health service in prisons, is only serving 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 will be a presumption that there is an ability to access services in prison that are not available in community settings. Prisons are not and can not be treatment or healing centres. Despite laudable attempts to inject supports, rehabilitative and even treatment programs in prisons, they remain, what they were originally designed to be, places designed to punish and hide away from the rest of the community those who we decide are the scapegoats for society’s ills. We pretty them up and take away the obvious bars and put in reinforced concrete and inches thick glass and busy ourselves pretending how nice and unprison-like the new prisons are, but we are not fooling those we allow to be locked up there.

So how are prisons being used to “address” poverty and homelessness? Well back to the 1996 federal removal of most national standards and the preceding as well as the following provincial cuts… 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 criminalizing and jailing the poor for welfare fraud and the like, if we were truly interested in encouraging people to be “pro-social” and “mindful” of others, 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 victims 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.

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 or busy ourselves in the pretext of having no power to change what is wrong…