More help for female prisoners

It costs Canadian taxpayers an awful lot of money to lock up the 180 female inmates at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution, the country’s largest federal prison for women.

According to the latest figures, in fact, the bill for housing each prisoner behind Grand Valley’s barbed wire has hit $213,000 a year.

For many people that will seem a steep but necessary expenditure to hold convicted criminals accountable for their crimes and, in the meantime, ensure public safety.

But it also raises this question: If we’re willing to spend so much every year to lock a woman up and if most of the Grand Valley inmates are eventually released back into the community, are we spending enough to help them make that critical transition?

Chris Cowie, the executive director of Community Justice Initiatives, a Kitchener nonprofit agency, doesn’t think so.

And he made a convincing case to the standing Senate committee on human rights in Kitchener last week that the federal government should free up more money to help female convicts when they’re released.

Cowie accurately points out that the vast majority of women who enter federal prisons were wrestling with other, serious personal problems before they ran afoul of the law.

Roughly 80 per cent of these women haven’t graduated from high school and were unemployed when arrested. Meanwhile, 86 per cent of the women entering prison have suffered physical abuse and 68 per cent have been victims of sexual abuse.

To be sure, the inmates at Grand Valley are there because they broke a major law.

But if one of the goals of the prison system is to ensure the people leaving it are in better shape than when they went in — and don’t return — those other, pressing problems have to be addressed.

That’s one area Cowie says the prison system must do better.

“We still end up continuing to do a lot of damage” to the women in prison, he told the Senate committee.

“We put them in an environment where we tend to breed a kind of dependency, but when they leave we expect them to be responsible.”

The Stride program offered by Cowie’s agency is one way people in this community help former inmates to become responsible.

It provides them with close circles of supportive volunteers. It helps them overcome the stigma of being an ex-convict. It lets them adjust from being in a confined environment to living in the open community.

What makes Cowie’s job more difficult is the shortage of funding to provide such supports.

The Senate committee on human rights will have much to consider when its cross-country travels end. It should give full and fair consideration to Cowie’s request for more money for programs like his.

As Canadians we invest so much on the punitive side of our justice system, on segregating prisoners and keeping them hidden away from general society.

Cowie makes a compelling argument for investing more to rehabilitate and reintegrate people who one day will become our neighbours.