EX-CONS GIVE HOPE TO THOSE IN NEED

Former Prisoners Join Project To Help Others Not Make The Same
Mistakes

Jen McMillan wants to send a message to female prisoners and women
living on the streets: there is hope.

"I was the shoeless crazy person on the corner," she says, candidly.
"I was scabbed up and gross."

Now she is clean and sober, and working hard on a project that may
help others make the same journey.

McMillan has been in Alouette Correctional Centre for Women too many
times for her to recall, all during a troubled period in her life made
hazy by her history with drugs.

She was a poster girl for B.C.'s astonishing recidivism rates for
female inmates: 40 per cent reoffend within one year of being released
and 70 per cent within two years, the most recent data show.

Now 30 and clean for eight months, McMillan hopes to change the
message on that poster. She and other former convicts have teamed with
Alouette's family physician, Dr. Ruth Martin, who has received funding
for a first-of-its-kind research project.

"ACCW alumni" will interview prisoners as they are released from the
Maple Ridge-based provincial jail to determine what tools and
information they need to make their integration into society more successful.

"The women have repeatedly said this over the years: it is so hard for
them to leave prison and then find their way into society. There are
so many barriers in their way," said Martin, who is also a clinical
professor in the University of B.C.'s faculty of medicine.

"They need community support because otherwise they're really, really
isolated.

"They get out and try to go back to their home community and they're
marked. They are [criminals]. And it's really, really hard to move
past that."

The unique "participatory research" recognizes the priosners
themselves as the experts on the topic, Martin said.

"This study will be the first to involve incarcerated women as
research partners and as active participants in developing a long-term
health strategy," she said.

McMillan knows all too well the challenges facing women when the metal
doors clang shut behind them when they have served their time.

"You're handed the clothes you went in with, which are dirty, and you
get a welfare cheque and a bus ticket to where you came from. In most
cases that's the Downtown Eastside," said McMillan, a former hard-core
addict who was in and out of Alouette mainly on trafficking and
breach-of-parole convictions.

"That's not okay."

Amber Christie, who relapsed twice after her release from Alouette in
October 2005 and has fought to remain clean ever since, agrees.

"There needs to be more support when you leave those gates," said
Christie, a former addict who became ensnared in the Downtown Eastside
in 1999 when she was 18. "A lot of us, when we come out, don't have
that support."

It can be difficult, Christie said, to go from living in an
institution where you are told when to get up and what to do all day,
to suddenly having to make all your decisions for yourself.

"I didn't know what I was supposed to eat, because your schedule is so
set," Christie said.

The project, funded by the federal government's Canadian Institute of
Health Research, will see McMillan, Christie and other peer
researchers interviewing Alouette prisoners as they are released.

After that they'll contact the women every three months for a year, so
the research can track what community resources they were able -- or
unable -- to use to meet their health and social goals.

The benefits of having former prisoners doing the interviews, McMillan
and Christie argue, is that they can speak the same "street lingo" as
the offenders and should be able to get straight answers from the
women about housing, addiction, jobs and family support.

"You can't bullshit a bullshitter," laughed McMillan, whose last stay
in Alouette ended in June 2007 and who, except for one relapse, has
been clean since.

Christie, 26, agrees: "When women see other women from prison doing
it, then they know it can be done. It's doable."

The petite, soft-spoken blond woman was convicted in June 2005 of
assault with a weapon. She says when two people threw a chain at her
in a Downtown Eastside alley, breaking the heroin needle in her arm,
she picked up the chain and beat them with it.

The chaotic scene she describes is far removed from the sun-drenched
cafe patio in Mission where The Vancouver Sun interviewed Christie
this week as she sipped a decaf coffee. Like McMillan, Christie says
her criminal record reflects the desperate need she had to sustain her
old drug habit.

Before the assault charge, Christie says she had been through a
revolving door of court dates, remand centres and brief jail terms for
trafficking offences.

When she entered Alouette for her first substantial jail term, she was
5-foot-4 and weighed 78 pounds, but during her four-month
incarceration she dried out and gained weight, and Martin helped her
get healthy.

But she can vividly remember her six years on the streets, and can
relate to what's facing newly released prisoners if they don't stay
clean -- an absolute inability to pull themselves out of the turmoil
once they're addicted again.

She recalls not caring that she was using dirty needles, because all
she wanted was the heroin; being indifferent to rats scurrying by as
she lay in an alley; and refusing to go to a shelter because doing
drugs was more important -- and because avoiding sleep meant avoiding
waking up with dreadful dope sickness.

The questions asked of the prisoners will be based on another
participatory research project Martin oversaw in Alouette from 2005 to
2007, when inmates identified a list of nine goals they said they
needed to meet to improve their health.

That process, Martin said, was enlightening because, as a doctor, she
had anticipated the goals would narrowly focus on accessing health
care for illnesses such as Hep C or HIV. What she learned from the
women was that their health issues -- albeit serious diseases and/or
drug addictions -- had their root causes in systemic social issues
such as poverty, abuse and poor family relations.

Therefore, the nine health goals compiled by the prisoners included
better relationships with relatives, increased community support, job
skills training, improved exercise and nutrition, and access to safe
and stable housing.

"How can you say to a woman, who, say, has HEP C and HIV, 'You have to
take these meds and you have to eat well,' when they don't have a
place to live?" said Martin, Alouette's family physician since 1994.

"They really, really want to get their act together for their
children, but they have no hope, they have no place to live, no way of
re-contacting with their kids. So they just sort of give up."

When asked what questions are important to include in the survey,
McMillan says their access to housing and income are key. "Without
some stability, we can't maintain going to doctors appointments or
getting a job."

Another important query is whether the women know about the dental
resources available to them. "I had no teeth in the front for quite a
while. I'm sorry, no one's going to hire me without any teeth,"
McMillan said.

Do the women have a doctor who can deal with infectious diseases? With
medical help, Christie said, people can live with something like AIDS
for a long time, but without assistance the diagnosis can make women
feel like they have been dealt "a death sentence."

The questions should also probe about basic life skills, which many
prisoners are missing after being raised in dysfunctional homes and/or
living on the streets. "Some of those women don't know how to clean
their hands after going to the washroom," Christie said bluntly.

The interviewers would like to hand out information pamphlets printed
in "simple, easy-to-understand language" geared to those offenders who
are nearly illiterate because their lives were too unstable for school.

Perhaps most important, McMillan said, is to give recently released
prisoners a message that they have paid their debt, and now should
strive to make their lives better -- even if they feel bad about what
they have done in the past.

McMillan said she has asked herself: "'Do I deserve this life? Look at
the crap I pulled.' There's some guilt in there."

Martin hopes the data collected can be used to develop a predictive
model for recidivism for female offenders, but is hesitant to say this
early into the project that it could ultimately reduce high
reoffending rates.

(She said a 2004 provincial government report indicated that 1,500
women are put in jail in B.C. every year. Forty per cent are
reincarcerated within one year of release, and 70 per cent within two
years.)

As the CIHR funding was just approved, Martin hopes McMillan, Christie
and other interviewers will start surveying newly released prisoners
next May. The women can also be involved in the analysis of the
information collected and come up with recommendations, which Martin
hopes will be acted on by health authorities, politicians and prison
officials. Martin also strongly believes the women involved in
participatory research gain personally from the experience.

In her first project inside Alouette, the health research from 2005 to
2007, Martin said 208 women got involved, creating 60 presentations on
topics important to them. The forums they held were attended by other
prisoners and prison staff, as well as guests from government and
community agencies, and universities and colleges.

Besides learning about computer skills and public speaking, the
participants wrote to resource organizations and government agencies
about their concerns -- and were buoyed by people listening to them.

"It gives them hope, then there's this optimism that it is possible
for things to change," said Martin, who also has a five-year contract
with the province to research the health needs of women inside Alouette.

The prisoners involved in the health research have created created a
web page with links to housing, employment and other resources that
they can use after their release.

McMillan attended one of those health forums while inside Alouette,
and recalled the feeling that women who had been marginalized because
of their addictions were finally defining their own health obstacles.

"There was a lot of excitement in the air at the time, a real sense of
women being heard," she said. "It's a really empowering thing."

McMillan and Christie's personal stories illustrate the need for women
who have led vulnerable lives to get access to information about
healthy living.

McMillan, who grew up in Nanaimo, smoked her first joint at age 11,
was selling drugs at 14, and hooked on heroin by 17. Today she lives
in supportive housing in Abbotsford on disability, and in addition to
doing this research is finishing her Grade 12 diploma and taking a
health care facilitation course online.

Christie, who grew up in Victoria and Mission, said she was a ward of
the province when her baby was seized when she was 18. She had been
somewhat involved in drug use at that point, but after the child was
taken she became hooked on heroin.

Today she is filled with hope because she is pregnant again. She is
also living on disability and finishing her Grade 12 diploma, while
running volunteer forums for other former addicts. McMillan and
Christie met through a Facebook website for former ACCW prisoners, and
in December -- before Martin got her funding for the research project
they are now engaged in -- they began going with other recently
released women to the Downtown Eastside to hand out supplies and words
of comfort.

They could see evidence of what happens to women who can't get
clean.

They distributed 250 handmade Christmas cards, 100 pairs of socks, and
about 50 hats and scarves knit by current Alouette prisoners to people
living on the streets.

On another trip, they handed out 94 slices of pizza. "We could relate
to that hunger," McMillan said.

She said she saw six women on the street with whom she had done
time.

"Two of those six women said they just wanted to go to jail again,"
McMillan said, adding it isn't right that women should be turning to
jail to get help.

"We're society's dirty little secret."

There is hope that the answers to the questions gathered from women
leaving Alouette will highlight what's missing in society to keep
women safe in the future.

"It's all progressive little pieces to a puzzle that makes someone a
healthy person. Some of us are missing more of those pieces than
others," McMillan said.

IT'S A MAJOR HEALTH ISSUE

Prisoners of Alouette Correctional Centre for Women said homelessness
was a major health issue.

They polled 90 fellow inmates and discovered:

- - 60 per cent said homelessness was a problem following previous
releases from jail. Of the 60 per cent, 78 per cent said having no
home contributed to their return to crime.

A priority for the type of housing they wanted included a
place:

- - That was exclusively for ex-prisoners (82 per cent).

- - Kept them clean and sober (63 per cent).

- - Offered job skills and education (48 per cent).

- - Had access to recreation, sports or crafts (49 per
cent).

- - Accommodated pets and children (44 per cent).

- - Offered on-site counselling (35 per cent).