Aboriginal women account for most of the increase in the Prairies and Black women and women with cognitive and mental disabilities account for the explosion in the east. Although First Nations women account for approximately 1% of the population overall, they are approximately 20% of federally sentenced women. In Canada, correctional jurisdiction is split between the federal and provincial governments based upon the length of a prisoner’s sentence. Prisoners serving two years or more are subject to federal jurisdiction and are therefore referred to as federally sentenced prisoners. Those serving prison sentences of less than two years come under provincial jurisdiction and are therefore referred to a provincially sentenced prisoners.

b) Identifying the Factors

The so-called “War on Drugs”, evisceration of health and other social support services, “gender- neutral” zero tolerance policies, and mandatory minimum sentences have contributed significantly to this phenomenon. Furthermore, as we have also witnessed in Canada, too many women prisoners are over-classified in terms of their security risks to the general public. Again, around the world, we are seeing women who have cognitive and/or mental disabilities being more likely to be classified as maximum security prisoners. Many of them were previously institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals and/or involved in other mental health services. Many are criminalized as a result of their disability-induced behaviour in institutions and/or the community.

In Canada, and internationally, we are seeing the feminization and criminalization of poverty. Most single parents are women, the majority of whom live below the poverty line. As social programs have been dismantled, women, especially sole support moms, have been faced with the reality of having to make ends meet within the context of a shrinking social welfare system.

In order to survive and support their families with insufficient resources, many have either worked under the table, prostituted themselves, and, occasionally, some have even carried packages across international borders for money. Such survival approaches all too often, and increasingly so, have resulted in the criminalization of too many women, for fraud, soliciting for the purposes of prostitution, trafficking and/or importation charges. Think of the comparitive savings in terms of both human and fiscal costs if the monies required to jail such women as well as the expenses of state-provided child welfare services and support for their children was invested in their communities, our communities. Such re-investment of ever-shrinking resources would undoubtedly benefit the women who are now being criminalized, as well as their children and many others who are marginalized in their communities; and ultimatley, as a result of the resulting community development, all of us collectively.

Another result of funding cutbacks to services over the past decades, has been the obliteration of progressive policy developments to de-institutionalize mentally handicapped and ill has been seriously soured by funding cuts. The result is that we have literally seen these women dumped into the streets and, ultimately, into the wider, deeper and stickier social control net of our criminal justice system. Although the criminal justice system is the likely the least effective and most expensive system that could be used to respond to cognitive and mental disabilities, it is a system that cannot refuse to “service” anyone who is criminalized, regardless of their disability.