PRESS Release
May 14, 2003

Strength In SISterhood Society
Womyn 4 Justice

At midnight on February 23^rd, 2003, three federal women native prisoners being held in Springhill men's penitentiary in Nova Scotia began a hunger strike. This hunger strike is noteworthy, despite ending after three days, because it is the only public cry for help amongst many that has managed to reach the media from the four women's units contained deep within men's penitentiaries. Since closing the Prison for Women in 2000, maximum security women have been transferred en mass to men's prisons, where there has been a dramatic increase in hostage-takings, suicide attempts and other self- destructive acts as one prisoner, Renee Acoby explained, “women try to find a way out of these inhumane conditions, even through death.”

Although the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) has been busy building maximum security units alongside the five new regional prisons for women, Kim Pate of the Canadian Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) states that "these new units do not represent an improvement in prison conditions for women." In fact the Elizabeth Fry Society is in the final stages of an official complaint launched with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging discrimination against federally sentenced women.

The women in Springhill decided to hunger strike to protest the prison administration's refusal to allow them to attend native sweat lodge ceremonies; the extension of the closure of the women's unit until September 2003 from the original date of March 31, and the lack of programs that would enable women to reduce their security designations.

The hunger strike ended temporarily when one of the women, Tamara Papin, was told she was being transferred to the new maximum security unit at Nova women's prison in Nova Scotia in a matter of days. However this transfer did not resolve her grievances as, once again she was denied access to a native sweat lodge ceremony, spurring on a decision to embark on a second hunger strike that also lasted three days until the administration reversed their decision and allowed her to attend the sweat ceremony.

Despite the CSC's own regulations which guarantee, "for greater certainty, Aboriginal spirituality and Aboriginal spiritual leaders and elders have the same status as other religions and other religious leaders," access to native ceremonies is being denied in two ways. According to Kim Pate, "the women are being told that they have to be at a certain level of security to go to sweats, and when native elders are consulted they can not make informed decisions because they only have access to prison officials."

"When 40-50% of the maximum security women prison population is native in a country where native women only make up 1-2% of the general population, and then you deny those women unconditional access to their religious rights under the Canadian Charter, you have a situation that can only be defined as racist," commented Gayle Horii from Strength in Sisterhood, a national prisoner's advocacy group.