WOMEN PRISONERS PAYING STEEP PRICE FOR 'LAW AND ORDER'

Following is the opinion of the writer, the past president of the
Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies and a professor with
the Saskatoon campus of the University of Regina's faculty of social
work.

Ashley Smith was 19 years old when she died in a segregation cell in
prison on Oct. 19. She had been in segregation in Ontario's Grand
Valley Prison for Women for almost 30 days.

She was placed in the cell with no clothes, no mattress, no blanket,
no books or writing material, just a sheet of cloth with three holes
in it -- one for her head and two for her arms. Its purpose was to
provide her with some covering, as she was otherwise naked and being
monitored by a camera.

Three guards and a supervisor face criminal charges in connection with
her death and others have been suspended.

According to news reports, Ashley's first involvement with the justice
system came as a result of her throwing crab apples at a postal
worker. She was 15 at the time. Eventually she was placed in a youth
custody facility.

When she turned 18, a hearing determined that she be transferred into
the adult system to serve a a cumulative sentence of six years and one
month -- the result of a series of institutional offences. At the time
of her death, she had been in the adult system for 11 months and
transferred 10 times to prisons across Canada, including the Regional
Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon. A correctional supervisor is charged
with assaulting Ashley while she was incarcerated at the RPC.

Approximately three weeks before Ashley died, an Elizabeth Fry worker
visited her. The visit coincided with the 10-year anniversary of the
opening of the Grand Valley Institute. Our worker implored the
visiting government officials to intervene. They apparently did
nothing to alleviate the conditions that remained the same until
Ashley's death.

Her heartbreaking story is one of many that illustrate the destruction
of lives caused by one of the biggest risk factors associated with the
justice system -- the prisons themselves.

It is against this fractured backdrop that we are asked to consider
the Conservative government's "law and order" agenda. Currently, Prime
Minister Stephen Harper and his colleagues are pushing through Bill
C-2, which is proudly and somewhat seductively named the "Tackling
Violent Crime Act."

Apart from the fact that Bill C-2 is an omnibus bill and thus always
suspect, it will have the effect of increasing our prison population
and the cost of maintaining the prison system and, perhaps most
disturbing of all, doing so with absolutely no concrete proof that any
of these measures are necessary or will improve the lives of Canadian
families.

On the other hand, what we do know is that increasing the prison
population will neither improve nor better the lives of those we
imprison or the lives of their families.

The cornerstone in this omnibus bill and in other "law and order"
legislation introduced and passed with alarming alacrity by the
majority of MPs is the extension of the use of mandatory minimum
sentences. These restrict the use of alternatives to prison, and
results in an increased prison population.

In a recent report on American incarceration rates, it was found that
even though the crime rate in the United States (as in Canada) is
declining, incarceration rates have soared due to longer sentences
emanating from mandatory minimum sentences.

Statistics Canada this month reported an increase in Canada's
incarceration rates for the first time in a decade. The cost of
imprisoning someone ranges from $75,000 to more than $250,000. It is
even higher for women prisoners. These costs will be compounded by the
need to build the additional prisons required to house the increasing
prison population.

Bill C-2 is the poster child for the unreflective "law and order"
agenda that governments use to appease unfounded public fears that
crime is on the increase -- a fear instilled in large part by
parasitic politicians eager to live off these fears to demonstrate
their own "effectiveness." It is a cheap appeal to public sentiment.
Those who are criminalized garner little public sympathy and are an
especially easy target for such politicians.

All of these measures direct our attention and resources away from the
factors that lead to criminalized behaviour. It is not surprising to
those of us who work with women prisoners that the increase in their
numbers came about after the cuts to social welfare programs and the
weakening of social support systems.

Since 1997, women's custody rate increased by 22 per cent while men's
custody rate decreased by 12 per cent (but that's projected to
increase by two per cent in the next five years). In 2004, the
Canadian Human Rights Commission found that the prison system
discriminates against women prisoners on the basis of sex, race and
disability.

The results can be deadly.

As the family of Ashley Smith poignantly stated, the justice system
"took us away from (Ashley) at 15, they returned her to us at 19 in a
body bag."