Time for Accountability: Effective Oversight of Women's Prisons

Abstract

Numerous reports and commissions of inquiry have documented the need for oversight and accountability mechanisms to redress illegalities and rights violations in Canada's women's prisons. This article examines the recent troubled history of women's imprisonment in which the calls for meaningful accountability and oversight have arisen, outlines the necessary criteria for any effective oversight body within this correctional context, and measures some of the key recommendations against those criteria. The authors conclude that the judicial oversight model and sanction proposed by Justice Louise Arbour in 1996 is the proposal that best meets the criteria and therefore ought to be implemented.

Sacrosanct or Flawed: Risk, Accountability and Gender- Responsive Penal Politics

“…Canada has developed one of the most advanced GR penal models, however, a number of critical reports (CHRC 2003;OCI 2009;Arbour 1996) over the past 20 years and the 2007 death of female prisoner, Ashley Smith 6 , consistently reveal a pattern of ongoing systemwide problems. Ms Smith's death and the current state of federal women's prisons exemplify a litany of systemic problems associated with the management of women prisoners, and in particular of women characterised by correctional authorities as 'high risk' or 'high need' (Arbour 1998;Sloan 2004;Parkes and Pate 2006;Sapers 2008;UCCO 2008;Dell et al 2009;Pollack 2009). This section will focus on Canada's system, as it provides an excellent example of how gender is 'recognised' but narrowly-defined, thus contributing to a new set of challenges.…”

“…As demonstrated in the next section, even the provision of a GR template, has not resulted in significant improvements in how gender has been addressed in penality. A number of well documented operational and systemic problems remain in Canadian women's prisons (Parkes and Pate 2006;OCI 2008, Hannah-Moffat 2009Dell et al 2009) The GR Model…”

Examining the preventable but predictable death of Ashley Smith

“…The CSC has a long history of reinterpreting women's needs as institutional risks (Dell et al, 2009;Hannah-Moffat, 2000Parkes and Pate, 2006). For example, the CSC determined that women prisoners classified as maximum security or who are said to suffer from mental health problems require enhanced supervision, forms of control and intensive treatment (Hannah-Moffat, 2001;Laishes, 2002).…”

“…This not only represents a violation of the CCRA (1992), but is also in contravention to her human rights under sections Smith was given insufficient access to voice her concerns regarding her treatment and imprisonment conditions through CSC's Offender Complaint and Grievance System (2011b). While this system is in place "to support the fair and expeditious resolution of offender complaints and grievances at the lowest possible level in a manner that is consistent with the law and to ensure that the legal obligation to provide timely and impartial resolution of offender complaints and grievances is met" it has been heavily criticized for failing to provide timely and efficient remedies and for its failure to hold anyone justifiably accountable for prisoner mistreatment (Arbour, 1996;Parkes and Pate, 2006;Zinger, 2006;Sapers, 2008). The CSC violated Commissioner directive 081: Offender Complaint and Grievance System (CSC, 2011b) and section 36(4) of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights (1955), by: failing to provide Smith with appropriate, justified and timely responses to the seven written grievances she submitted; failing to interview her for five out of seven grievances, which is mandated in order to facilitate a holistic response; and unjustifiably categorizing all seven of her grievances as low priority.…”

Searching prison cells and prisoner bodies: Redacting carceral power and glimpsing gendered resistance in women’s prisons

“…In this era of mass-incarceration civil libertarians, prisoner advocates and human rights lawyers have called for increasing transparency and accountability of prison authority, as well as the legal recognition and protection of prisoner rights and grievance processes. In Canada, as in other western countries, the use of solitary confinement has become subject to numerous legal challenges (Parkes, 2014;Parkes and Pate, 2006). But what of those carceral spaces that are at the edge of law's control and protection?…”