When the Edmonton Institution for Women opened in 1995, it was meant to be a bold experiment in a more gentle, rehabilitative form of corrections. Instead of a fortress full of locked cells, inmates would be housed in an “open campus,” primarily in a series of home-like cottages, where women would cook together, clean together and have considerable freedom to walk the grounds.
The experiment got off to a bumpy start. First, inmate Denise Fayant was murdered. Then seven maximum-security prisoners escaped in an 18-day span. After that, new secure facilities were built for high-risk residents, and new security protocols were adopted. Today the federal institution houses a mix of maximum-, medium- and minimum-security prisoners.
Much else has changed since 1995. Where the prison once stood isolated from the rest of the city, it’s now surrounded by offices, car dealerships and warehouses. The institution is full to capacity, and then some. Those homey cottages haven’t aged well. They’ve been lived in, hard, and need significant repairs. But the institution has neither the budget nor the capacity to fix aging infrastructure. They can’t empty the houses to renovate or rebuild them, because there’s no other place to hold the residents. There’s no room on-site to expand. Meanwhile the inmates themselves have to fix up their own living quarters, with a little basic instruction in carpentry and plumbing.
COVID has made everything harder for staff and inmates alike. The pandemic meant strict isolation and lockdowns for residents, the cancellation of many therapies, programs and family visits, the elimination of many of the services done by volunteers (who were largely barred from entering the facility) and strict limits on transfers to Indigenous healing lodges. Those restrictions are just beginning to ease. Not that the coronavirus has disappeared. When I recently visited the institution, alongside my colleague Senator Kim Pate, a long-time prison-reform advocate, it was still dealing with significant COVID outbreaks.
In 1996, 23 per cent of female offenders in Canada’s federal institutions identified as Aboriginal. At the time, that was considered a troubling overrepresentation. A study released last December by federal correctional investigator Ivan Zinger found that 48 per cent of women prisoners in Canada’s federal penal system now are First Nations, Metis or Inuit. But numbers here are far more shocking. As of this fall, 70 per cent of inmates at the Edmonton Institution for Women are Indigenous—despite the fact that only 6.5 per cent of Albertans identify as Indigenous.
How have we created a system so dysfunctional that 70 per cent of the women we incarcerate are Indigenous?
Prisoners don’t just come from Alberta, of course. The institution serves the whole prairie region, so inmates come from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories too. But that doesn’t explain away the 70 per cent figure. It just underlines the full extent of the crisis across the prairies.
Why is the number so grotesquely disproportionate? It starts, of course, with intergenerational trauma and the dark, echoing legacy of residential schools, with domestic violence, a broken child welfare system, a poor high school completion rate, a lack of reproductive choice. It’s interwoven with poverty, with childhood sexual abuse, with addiction, with the lack of mental health care, with the lack of supportive housing for the homeless, with the lure of gangs that provide a sense of belonging.
But let’s not ignore deep systemic racism, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle and insidious. For example, an Indigenous woman might be charged with a crime, while a white woman who did the same thing might just get a warning or a fine. In many cases, Indigenous women can’t afford or access the help of experienced, well-resourced lawyers. They may be unable to meet bail or parole conditions, and so end up back behind bars. Then there are mandatory minimum sentences, which rob judges of the discretion to consider extenuating conditions and social circumstances. Such one-size-fits-all sentences can mean imprisoning people for longer periods than might be otherwise warranted if all factors were taken into account. The threat of a long mandatory-minimum sentence can also coerce women into pleading guilty to a lesser offence, such as manslaughter, rather than run the risk of getting the mandatory minimum sentence for murder. Even when a woman has a legitimate defence, she may be afraid to fight her case given the threat of a life sentence hanging over her.
We need to find the funds and capacity to retrofit this aging prison, to make it safe and decent for those who live and work there. But we must also ask how we have created a society and a criminal justice system so dysfunctional that 70 per cent of the women we incarcerate here are Indigenous. Until we address that injustice, all the renovations in the world will neither repair nor redeem the true rot at the core of our culture of corrections—a crisis created far outside the prison fence.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.
