Lisa Neve and Lessons Learned

In Canada and the United States, we are also facing another backlash. Every time women take one step forward, efforts to shove us backwards abound. With respect to women's involvement in the youth justice and adult corrections system, an excellent, albeit odious, example of this trend is the treatment received by a young First Nations woman, diagnosed as suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. In November 1994, Lisa Neve became the second woman in Canada to be labelled a dangerous offender and sentenced to an indeterminate sentence.

Although the designation was ultimately overturned on appeal, as a result of that designation, Lisa Neve was classified as a maximum security prisoner and spent six years in prison, most of it in segregated, maximum security units in two different men's prisons.

I first met Lisa when she was twelve years old. She had been dragged into secure "treatment," followed fairly quickly by secure custody. The system was not impressed by her assertive and confident manner. Unlike so many other young women her age, she was clearly a respected and undisputed leader. These qualities are not ones that are generally accepted, much less encouraged or nurtured, in our social control systems-be they child welfare or criminal justice in orientation. They are seen as particularly unacceptable when embodied by a young woman. Sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class biases intersect to provide an incredibly discriminatory lens through which women like Lisa are viewed and judged.

As a result, it did not take long for the adults in authority to label Lisa as a "problem" in need of "correction." Once the labels were applied, they not only stuck, but they also attracted other labels that built upon and expanded those prior. Consequently, although Lisa had started out as "mischievous," or "a brat," she was later labelled an instigator, negative, and eventually, aggressive, sociopathic and finally, a dangerous offender. Largely based upon accounts of her institutional behaviour in young offender centres, as well as her "unfeminine" renegade behaviour while working the street, Lisa was characterized as the most dangerous woman in Canada by Justice Murray in 1994 and then as a maximum security prisoner by the Correctional Service of Canada for more than four years.

Including her pre-trial detention, Lisa spent approximately six years in jail for an offence which the Court of Appeal eventually determined warranted a three-year sentence, as opposed to the indeterminate one that had been imposed. To make matters worse, she spent most of her time living in some of the most severe and limiting prison conditions in Canada. Nobody should ever have to face the tortuous ordeal that Lisa was forced to endure.

Our hope was that the Court of Appeal's decision would result in broader systemic changes to the administration of justice for women across Canada. Unfortunately, although the court challenged such sexist interpretations of the law as acceptance in the lower courts of a psychological assessment of Lisa that "effectively implies ... that a woman's thoughts about murder can somehow be equated with a man's commission of a murder," it stopped short of calling for the much needed broader systemic reforms that Lisa's case exemplified.

The court did note, however, the typical nature of this young woman's "violent" offences, in that "every offence which Neve committed was entangled in some way with her life as a prostitute." They also pointed out that while it was not to be condoned, Lisa's violent offences were generally characterized as attempts to avenge wrongs done to others. Furthermore, they characterized Lisa as "a young woman with a relatively short criminal record for violence, [who was] disposed to telling shocking stories of violence."