Report Highlights Consequences of Rising Transfers of Incarcerated Women
Wellness Within is calling for immediate action in response to the 2023-2024 Annual Report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI) which finds involuntary transfers between federal prisons designated for women continue to rise. The number of federally incarcerated women is at its highest, Indigenous women are hyperincarcerated, and Correctional Services Canada (CSC) is relying on interregional transfers to address overcrowding, exacerbating harm to incarcerated people and their families.
CSC’s most common strategy for population pressures is “double-bunking,” a practice that “inherently carries an increased risk for agitation, tension, and violence”. When shared rooms are insufficient, CSC transfers prisoners to institutions with more available beds, regardless of how this impacts family ability to visit and access to supports.
The 2020-21 OCI Annual Report recommended “transfers out of region should be minimized and used only as a last resort, not as a means of controlling population levels”. The Corrections and Conditional Release Act requires reasonable steps be taken to consider “the person’s home community and family, a compatible cultural environment, and a compatible linguistic environment”.
Prisoner affected by these transfers, express “discontent, uncertainty, and even distress about the transfer”. Transfers have disproportionate impacts on Indigenous people and fragment families that have already survived genocidal colonial separations through the Residential School regime, the Sixties Scoop, and contemporary hyper-removal of Indigenous children into foster care. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action require effort be made to end the overincarceration of Indigenous people. Transfers limit access to family visitation, community networks, and social supports. Video visits are difficult to arrange and are an impersonal and inadequate alternative to in-person connection, particularly for those with young children.
Transfers severely harm mental health. Prisoners explained to the OCI:
“I’m five provinces away from home. Why am I here?”
“They say I can’t go back there. I pray every day and I wish I could. Then my kids could visit.”
Wellness Within shares the OCI’s concerns about escalating use of involuntary transfer and supports the call for solutions that enable the earliest release possible, particularly for Indigenous people to return to their communities. We commend the OCI’s rejection of strategies fthat only serve to increase incarceration. We demand CSC work with the OCI to develop a strategy for decarceration.
Wellness Within is a volunteer-based registered non-profit organization that serves women, transgender, and nonbinary people who have experienced criminalization and are pregnant or have young children in Nova Scotia, part of the unceded and unsurrendered ancestral territory of the Mi'kmaq people.
Wellness Within supports people through the full spectrum of reproductive health experience; facilitates workshops and education sessions; develops resource materials; and advocates for reproductive justice issues.
Contact: Natasha Hines, Chair, (902) 717-2956 or natasha_hines@outlook.com
