Part I - Introduction

This chapter covers some of the information you’ll need to get started. First, it explains some basics about the law in Canada, and how the law applies to women in prison. Second, the chapter discusses the idea of peer advocacy. In short, there are laws that protect your rights in prison, but prisoner advocates can assist you to take the right steps and to help you keep track of the steps taken, to help try to ensure that the law is actually followed.

The Project
As a woman in prison, you have been stripped of some, but not all, of your rights and freedoms. However, it is important that you clearly understand that – by law – you still have many rights. This booklet is a summary of a much larger manual (still in progress) which explains the rights you have while in prison and, later, while out on conditional release. The manual also discusses, in detail, some of the ways you can exercise your rights and avoid having them restricted any further than they are. These are also summarized here.

The purpose of this booklet is to provide basic information about how the law applies to women in prison, and to aid in the training of prisoner advocates. Prisoner advocates include current prisoners who advocate for themselves and their peers while inside, as well as ex-prisoners and activist allies in the community who also advocate with and for women inside.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission’s report entitled Protecting Their Rights: A Systemic Review of Human Rights in Correctional Services for Federally Sentenced Women found that, across Canada, informational booklets on the law and the rights of women in prison are often inadequate, inaccurate and inaccessible.¹ The goal of the training manual and this booklet is to address that problem – to explain the law in a clear and useful manner.