*‘We don’t need better prisons for women’:*
An interview with Ex-Prisoner Gayle Horii
Televised images of women, shackled and strip-searched by an all-male “cell extraction” team in 1994, led to public outcry at the degrading treatment of federal women prisoners at the Prison 4 Women (P4W) in Kingston. P4W was closed in 2000 and five regional prisons were built across Canada. Despite hopes that these new prisons would improve the lives of women prisoners, unfortunately there have only been cosmetic improvements. From the architecture, to the Correctional Service of Canada’s (CSC) co-optation of feminist language, these changes serve only to disguise the harsh injustices that women endure in Canadian prisons. The abuses continue behind bars, with little media attention.
Each year women prisoners file grievances against the CSC, and on March 8, 2001 women’s rights groups came together to file a collective complaint of discrimination on behalf of federally sentenced women. Concerns include discrimination based on race, gender and disability and an unjust security classification system. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has issued a report making 19 recommendations supporting the women’s complaints. To date, CSC has not implemented a single recommendation.
Antonia Baker spoke with Gayle Horii, co-founder of Strength in SISterhood, a Vancouver-based organization of women prisoners and ex-prisoners. Gayle rejects the concept that prisons can be reformed or “humanized”. In her eyes, “a prison is a prison is a prison.” Gayle speaks from an experience of seven years in the federal system.
AB: Can you give us some background on the current complaint made on behalf of federally sentenced women?
GH: One of the things we have to do is go back to the very beginning of the history of incarceration of women in Canada. The systemic discrimination goes back to the earliest records, prior to the opening of P4W in 1934. Before it was constructed, women were imprisoned in a section of the Kingston Penitentiary for Men where they suffered floggings and starvation. Since it’s opening, there have been 19 commissions, committees, delegations and task forces that recommended P4W be closed, and that’s all due to the degrading treatment of women. But the irony of women’s incarceration is the fact that prior to P4W, women were housed in men’s penitentiaries. And that’s exactly what the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has returned to doing to women.
In 1995, they began transferring women to men’s prisons. That’s turning the clock back 60 years. While most women have since been transferred to the new regional prisons, women are still being held in two men’s prisons, in Quebec and Nova Scotia. This particular [human rights] complaint is a take off on all the other complaints that have happened, yet never before have so many women’s groups joined together to support federally sentenced women inside.
AB: I find it disturbing how women are over-classified in terms of security. The CSC uses a scale where they look at criteria such as whether a woman has been physically or sexually abused, whether she held a job prior to incarceration, and the more needs the woman has, the higher CSC rates her security classification level. In other words, the more a woman is disadvantaged in society, the more dangerous CSC considers her to be to the public. It’s ludicrous. The result is that the woman is held in maximum-security. Essentially she’s punished for being poor and abused. Can you tell us more about this?
GH: Yes, that’s exactly true. Unfortunately it’s one of the things that backfired when the Task Force members wanted the programming and anything to do with the incarceration of women to be “women-centered.” They said that the way they classify men wasn’t applicable to women because women weren’t normally the same danger or threat as men are. So CSC basically sort of turned that on its ear, and decided to look at the needs of women. In the needs list, [they consider whether] a woman was unemployed prior to incarceration, if she didn’t have a bank account, if she hadn’t gone to the dentist, if she had suffered any sexual or physical abuse, if she had an unstable relationship. All of these things would be considered high needs. And from there the woman became high risk. And now she is determined to be maximum security because of that high risk. And you back that up and the only thing is that she had high needs! Well, how many people today who aren’t even in prison don’t have a stable family relationship? Aren’t employed? Haven’t been to the dentist for a while because they can’t afford it? And so on. It’s a whole different kind of discrimination that they’ve applied in their “Management and Assessment of Women”. And it’s totally wrong.
AB: Can you talk about women who are classified as maximum, what they experience?
GH: Women that were maximum security were transferred into the women’s units in men’s prisons originally and now they’ve been sent to the newly constructed maximum-security units in the regional prisons. What’s happening is that they have four levels of maximum security that they have to go through - men don’t have to do any of this. They’re handcuffed and shackled and accompanied by two guards before they can even leave their “unit” to go to the gym. At the same time the rest of the population is prevented from leaving their units. In other words, they’re locked down.
It’s creating a huge amount of dissention within the prison itself. The maximum-security women don’t want their sisters to be put out. It’s a very unfair situation. The CSC are using maximum-security women to frighten the other women, saying number one, these are dangerous women, and number two, [this is] what we’ll do to you if you don’t do what we want you to do. This is another part of the discrimination that’s going on and this is a new situation, this has just started.
AB: Justice Arbour held a commission of inquiry into the incidents at P4W. Has the Canadian government and CSC implemented any of her recommendations?
GH: Well, it’s a lot of window dressing really. One of the most important recommendations she made was that all Aboriginal women are able to go into the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Saskatchewan [one of the five regional prisons] and CSC has stopped that. They claim that they allow medium-security women, but in fact there’s only minimum-security women going there. Unfortunately, most of the Aboriginal women are classified maximum. So very few are in there. In fact, it’s my understanding that half of the beds there are empty. It’s mostly maximum security that the Aboriginal women are held in. And even though there’s a new program strategy plan where they say they’re going to try and have Aboriginal people delivering “Aboriginal Programs” that’s not the case right now, and I doubt that’s going to be the case.
AB: So a lot of Aboriginal women are classified as maximum, but I’m guessing that it has a lot to do with how CSC assesses their needs and then over-classifies them, interpreting that they pose a risk to the community when really all they need is support.
GH: Exactly, that’s exactly it.
AB: I don’t think that people often realize that women prisoners are still being shackled, handcuffed and strip-searched - that abuses against women prisoners are still going on even after the outcry at what happened at P4W. What are your thoughts on this?
GH: Unfortunately things are still going on. Justice Arbour said that men should never be permitted to strip search women ever again, and the CSC will say that they aren’t, but you will see in their own directives that men are not permitted to strip search women unless it’s an emergency. So we have all of these qualifications that the CSC uses in order to justify or claim that they’re following the laws. We’re advocating that an outside advocacy council be formed so that at least women’s organizations could go into the prison and try to intervene prior to any use of force.
Women are constantly under threat of men actually violating them. Men are still going onto women’s units and catching them when they’re coming out of the shower naked. At least in P4W, if a man were coming on the range, there’d be a noise because the end gate’s going to open, and everybody would yell out, “Man on the Range”. But in these small units the male guards can just walk right in the door and the women don’t even know they’re coming. Things are worse now than they were when I was in Kingston.
AB: When a woman is finally released from prison, what options, if any, are available to help her reintegrate into larger society?
GH: Here’s another serious problem. There is nothing going on in the community for federally sentenced women when they’re released. And it’s basically if the woman has family, she’s lucky to have some support and some resources.
The women inside are not receiving any kind of training or education that they can actually use when they get outside. There are one or two satellite apartments in Canada, and they’re starting to have what they’re calling home placements where women on day parole can possibly live with a family that qualifies. For the majority of women this is not the case, and so women end up doing a lot more time. In fact, CSC’s own statistics show that up to 22 percent of women are not out on their earliest date because there are delays for paperwork. And part of the paperwork is because there’s no bed for them to go to. That figure doesn’t even include the women in BC. At least 25 percent of women are serving more time than they need to serve, and that’s because there’s nothing in the community for them to go to.
AB: You’re a lifer on parole. What can you share about your own experience leaving prison?
GH: I did seven years, but I was fortunate to have family and friends and community people waiting for me. It even took me two years to feel like I was back into this world. It’s hard to explain the kind of paranoia you feel, about everybody must know, I must look a certain way. You’re so used to being counted and eyeballed, that it’s very difficult to feel that you are at liberty. And as a lot of people say, you don’t have liberty unless you have economic liberty. So most people coming out are extremely impoverished. They don’t have money. I was a lot luckier than most people, and that’s one of the reasons why I got involved with co-founding this group Strength in SISterhood, to try to provide a voice for women, and to network with other organizations to find some resources for these women.
AB: One of the key areas you’re working on is decarceration. How does that work?
GH: What we’re trying to say is that the majority of women serving time, in fact the majority of prisoners, are not dangerous at all. And these women should be in the community. Instead of building these maximum-security units, they could have released the minimum-security women to the community. I know women’s organizations that have shelters that would readily take minimum women because in fact they’re not a risk to the public or to other people. They are simply women who have been battered and who lack some assertiveness. All those women could have been released, about 25 percent of the population. And the medium-security women could move into the community on passes and do work release and education.
The maximum-security women, the ones that should be designated maximum-security, would be the ones who are and have been determined to be a risk to the public. They would be continuously assessed to see if that risk is still there. They could change a lot of the regional facilities right now; they could actually have community facilities. A lot of the reasons that women are inside is that they either lost control over their lives due to poverty or some kind of abuse that they weren’t able to deal with. We’re talking about women, many of whom are mothers. Their children, many of which are taken away. And the public will say they should be, these women are bad women. Well it’s simply not true. I’ve met some of the most incredible, creative, giving, and genuine women inside the walls than I’ve ever met in my life. And many of us are still friends, 12 years later.
