It seems quite ludicrous that we continue to pretend that telling women and girls not to take drugs to dull the pain of abuse, hunger or other devastation, or tell them that they must stop the behaviour that allowed them to survive poverty, abuse, disabilities, et cetera, in the face of no current options, nor future prospects of adequate – if any -- income, housing, medical, educational or other supports. Surely we recognize the folly of releasing women and girls to the street with little more than psycho-social, cognitive-behavioural skills or drug abstinence programming, along with the implicit judgment that they are in control of and therefore responsible for their situations, including their own criminalization. We must reject and resist such notions.

As I mentioned earlier, in Canada, in 1996, the federal government eliminated the Canada Assistance Plan and therefore the essential nature of Canadian standards of social, medical and educational resourcing. We have now experienced the same sorts of cuts and knee-jerk band aid responses as the United States – all of which presume criminality and perpetuate the problems of the past, be they crime prevention, homelessness, restorative justice or other responses.

Imagine the results if we instead decided to ensure that every prisoner learned about the history of the use of criminal law to colonize Aboriginal peoples to separate them from their land and culture, the criminalization of the indigent and homeless through laws prohibiting vagrancy and night walking, while simultaneously failing to condemn the abuse of power and force by police and prison personnel, the neglect of institutionalized persons, the allowance of certain people to hoard essential goods, make excess profits, irresponsibly and negligently handle toxic cargo, crimes against social harmony, economic and/or even governmental order. What would the system look like if we prosecuted and sentenced people for lying while running for office, wrongful use or access to government power and public resources?

Imagine further if we truly empowered women by providing them with access to community resources and partnerships that would increase their opportunities to take responsibility for advocating for themselves and for resisting their continued subjugation. For those of you not familiar with those values, they are the ones deemed fundamental to the future of women’s corrections in Canada and articulated in Creating Choices, the Report of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women. How much more helpful would it be if we encouraged women to develop advocacy skills and practice the resistance strategies that will increasingly determine their survival?! Certainly this has been our experience with women in Canada. Especially since the human rights review, we are directly experiencing the benefits of sharing resources and authority with women in and from prison.

Prisons are not and can not be treatment or healing centres. Despite 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.