 Hi there. I'm Shima Welkin. I'm Associate Director of the Health Law Institute, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's lecture in our Health Law and Policy Seminar Series. It's my special honor to introduce today's speaker, Kim Hain. Many of you know Kim at least by reputation. She's right out front among this law school's most beloved, brave, brilliant, no bullshit alumni. She makes a habit of making trouble or making trouble public. Kim graduated from Dalhousie Law School in 1984. Since 1992, she's been Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Frye Societies. Elizabeth Frye, as many of you know, engages with individual systemic advocacy on behalf of marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized women and girls, particularly those who are or have been imprisoned. As Executive Director of E-Frye, Kim has played a key role in a number of high-profile inquiries into the conditions of women in prison. Two important examples of the 1996 Ardore inquiry into certain events at the prison for women in Kingston, and more recently, the Ontario Coroner's Inquest into the death of Ashley Smith. Kim also works doggedly day-to-day to ensure that the interests and perspectives of criminalized and marginalized women are represented forcefully at the sites where they're most directly placed in jeopardy. Kim works well with others. She's been a friend to many women caught up in the justice and prison systems when they've otherwise been most alone. She's also been instrumental in building coalitions across the country with other equality-seeking women's groups and social justice organizations to pursue coordinated approaches to systemic discrimination and violence against women. Kim has recently built upon her broad experience and expertise working with women in the justice and prison systems through post-graduate work in the area of forensic mental health. I believe we'll hear something of her hard-won insights in that regard today. Last words, in 2003, Kim received Dalhousie Law School's Weldon Award for Unselfish Public Service, and in 2009, she received the Canadian Bar Association's Touchstone Award for Furthering Equality in the Legal Community in Canada. In 2012, she received an honorary doctorate from University of Ottawa. She's part-time professor in the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law, but this coming week, our students are so lucky to have her delivering an intensive force on prison law here. So now please join me in welcoming Kim. Thank you for that very generous introduction, and if my daughter was here, she'd be saying, they really don't know you, though. So I have an almost 15-year-old daughter who some of you heard about yesterday, and some of you know, and you know how that sort of goes, so it keeps you clear on how really well you don't do things. But I want to start by the way I always start, which is by acknowledging the traditional territory on which we have the privilege of being a beautiful territory of the Mi'kmaq people, and I live in Algonquin territory, otherwise known to many of you as Ottawa, unceded Aboriginal territory. And the importance for me of that has been brought home every day of the last almost 30 years that I've had the privilege and responsibility of walking in, but more importantly, being able to walk out of prisons for young people, for men, and for the last 22 years, as you heard for women and girls. And so it's very important that we know that heritage, know the impact of it. Today, though, I'm going to be speaking more specifically about the issues of women, criminalization of women in particular with mental health issues. Everything I say applies to obviously men and young people as well, but one of the things I really enjoy is to have a dialogue with you. So yesterday the audience was really animated, so it's a little competition. Those of you at law school, I know, likes competition. I don't particularly like competition, but for those of you who do and are here because of that, you can ask more questions today because I would really like it to be, for me it's always more interesting for me as well if I have some idea of some of the things people are wanting to hear. So before I start, is there anything that you came really wanting to hear about that I can make sure that I incorporate before I get going? So anybody? Yes? With the insight on the new super tales, what do you think that will be going in the desensitization of our society against voting people in jail? We think that that's the answer and obviously it's not working. Okay. Much of what I'll say will cover some of those sorts of areas, but if I don't speak specifically to it, please stick your hand up and ask me to answer that again. Yes? Was it in terms of the quality of access to health and health services for those in the community in particular? Okay. So again, part of that will be part, but if I don't cover it for you. Anybody else? Yes? This is about prisons being the new asylum. We do much into the mental health issues that are not being dealt with by our society outside of the real system, which is the only reason. Yes. So that's actually my entry point. So that's great. Anything else? Okay. So anything else I can say is just fine. Otherwise you'll let me know. So women are the fastest, as many of you know, the women of the fastest growing prison population in this country, particularly indigenous women, other racialized women and women with mental health issues. And I'm going to focus in particular today on some of the issues that we've been working with and on with respect to mental health issues. And some of you know very clearly, some of you, many of you here know far more than I do about some of the history of that. Certainly in Canada, the deinstitutionalization, the progressive trend to get people out of institutions was really interrupted and really started the trend towards prisons being the new asylums when we deinstitutionalized but did not appropriately resource communities or where resources were set up in communities. As we saw the elimination of some of the national standards around health care and social services, we saw the elimination or the diminishment of those resources. So we either had some that were diminished or we didn't have sufficient to start out with. And so we know that the history of not having sufficient resources in the community is part of what has contributed to the increased criminalization and institutionalization in prisons of people with mental health issues. So that's the starting point from which I come. If anybody wants to challenge that, I'm happy to have that discussion both here and in other sectors. But I do want to talk a bit about what we've learned over the past little while because of some of the issues around health care or the lack of health care and the lack of access to health care within both the communities and in the prisons. And this for me started in our organization really started in the early 90s, about the same time as I was starting with the organization. We started to see a growth of the number of women in isolation, in segregation, at what was the only federal penitentiary for women in the country then, the prison for women in Kingston. And what we saw was a number of women in segregation who were really there because they had both mental health issues and a number of them also had intellectual disabilities. And the other striking thing and having been from admittedly come from away but feeling like I was part of the Maritimes after being here and I'll just have to say that my dad's from PBI so I sort of claim some linkages here. But one of the things we noticed was the majority of the women in that category were from the Maritimes. And at that time 13 women were serving federal sentences from this whole, from all four provinces in the Atlantic region. And there were seven of them with significant mental health issues and so something didn't fit together, right? And so we decided to come and visit what was, in 1995, paid a visit to Newfoundland because many of them were from Newfoundland. We didn't have an old Elizabeth Frye Society at the time there. There was a new group trying to start up. But we were invited over to try and figure out what we could do about this. What was striking to me was it is the one and only time in the entire time of my nearly 30 years of doing this work that I was welcomed into a jail with cameras. I can't do a Newfoundland accent so my apologies to those of you, but I'll try. It's like, my dear, bring those cameras on in here and have a look at what we're doing to these women. And I thought, okay, so we went in. And what the fellow showed me as the man who was at the time, he was about to retire so he probably felt a bit safer than some of them doing that. But what he showed was that what had been essentially a hallway in the downstairs part of the courthouse in St. John's had been converted into the jail part for the women. So women didn't go to Her Majesty's Penitentiary as it's referred to, the provincial jail. They went to this basement area and it was literally a quarter that had been turned into a couple of cells. And when I was there, there were a few women there, but there had been as many as 11 women in this very small area. No light because it was a hallway that had been converted. And the day that I visited, he said, did you hear the news? So I'm not going to continue to try and do a Newfoundland accent. But he said, did you see the news today? And I said, well, I saw some. He said, did you notice they're closing another wing of the Waterford? Now, many of you will know that the Waterford Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in St. John's. And he said, and of course they're closing the wing where most of the women are. And I said, and why do you think that is? Because they won't complain. And my dear, they may as well take a truck over there, load it up because this is where they're coming. And so he very clearly was seeing what we were seeing was a situation where when all of the other resources are being shut down, the only place that can't say sorry our beds are full, sorry you don't fit our mandate, sorry we just don't have room for you right now and really this is not the best place for you, if you can be charged with something and so just charged can get you held, shouldn't be that way. But as those of you who practice know very well that if you can show that the person might be a risk to themselves or to commit another offense or just, you know, the sort of really patriarchal notion that we're caring for the people if we keep them in custody means that we'll see many people kept in custody awaiting trial or on the basis of charges just because there's a fear that if they're released into the community it may be more dangerous for them. So we see increasing numbers of people coming into the system. When I met with the judges they said the same thing. We went through even including the mental health workers and when we talked to the mental health workers in the community they said we are being told not to take people, we have so many, we are so oversubscribed, we only take the people who are motivated and if they cause any trouble, particularly if they do anything for which we could call the police, we're told to call the police so that they can be dealt with somewhere else. And so we saw very quickly the trend that now is very much across the country. It's not that it wasn't happening across the country then, but we saw it I think most profoundly there. Why? Because we saw some of the economic downturn most profoundly, most evidently and starkly there first but we've now seen it across the country. So what has that led to? Well, it's led to more and more people in the system. It's led to a system that is already overloaded, particularly the women's system, struggling to try and address the needs of women with mental health issues and other complex issues in an environment where behavior is seen through the lens of criminality first and foremost and so any behavior that is seen is in any way aberrant or stepping out of the norm gets characterized in that way. And it's a system where the way that you monitor people who cause you the greatest challenges is to put them in the very environment that is most likely to exacerbate any mental health issues you have and that's isolation. And so we've seen a default to not just prisons but in particular isolation and aggravation and exacerbation of mental health issues for individuals all the more so I would say for women but certainly what I'm saying applies to men. It's just that the last time I was in a men's penitentiary was almost three years ago. So I don't presume to say that I know everything that's happening in the men's prisons. I hear from people and I still keep in touch with some of the men I've known over the years but certainly this is true in the women's prisons. And so we started to do a number of things. One of which some of you are aware of and some of you have been involved with is everything from human rights complaints, complaints to the United Nations. We've worked with UN Special Rapporteur in torture and some of you will know he recently, Juan Mendes recently said that to put anybody with mental health issues in isolation is wrong. It should not happen. And that even though he doesn't support use of isolation for anybody, 15 days is a maximum that he would see for putting people in. So no young people, no people with mental health issues. And yet it still is the default in our prison system. It's also if you're not in that system, in our women's prisons, our federal penitentiaries for women, in the mid-90s they developed mental health units. And in fact, Professor Waldman did what still stands as a high watermark of the analysis when she was working with Archie and Professor Kaiser and here as a high watermark of really an analysis of why that can't work, why trying to put a therapeutic environment into a prison is ineffective. Not the least of which is what I've already said but also those mental health units were all put in the areas of the prison that are for minimum and medium security women. There are no minimum security institutions for women really in this country. There's been one outside the prison built in Edmonton just recently and there's supposed to be more houses built outside the prisons because there aren't minimum security. So they're in the medium security part of the institution and therefore not accessed. Why do you think they're not accessed if they're in the medium security part of the institution? Any guesses? Well, there are three ways that you can be classified as maximum security in our federal penitentiary system. So those of you are in the, how many of you are in the prison law class that's doing next week? Okay, so you can just take a mental vacation when it comes to this part of the course. There are three ways and one is if you're, whatever you come in on. So if you come in on a serious offense, murder, a serious violent offense you're likely to be classified as maximum security. If the day that you're assessed that you're perceived risk to the community no matter what you are convicted of is high, you're seen as a high risk to the community so whether it's because you might escape or you might be released on that day then you will be classified as maximum security. And the third way that you can be classified as maximum security is how you adjust to an institution. And you can imagine individuals with mental health issues don't adjust well to an institution. I facetiously often say for us the worry is usually the people who do adjust well to institutions but that's not there in this context. Anybody who comes in with a significant mental health issue does not adjust well, usually is almost, well not usually, is almost immediately classified as maximum security therefore ends up in the maximum security part of the institution which is also a segregated area by law. You have either general population where you can mix with everybody, go to the gymnasium, go to the gym, go to programs, or you have segregation. So in every one of the federal penitentiaries in this country not only do we have segregation units that are called segregation but segregation is a status, not just a place that you also have because of the way maximum security units are operated they are also segregation units. You're damned either way if you're someone coming in with mental health issues because you're likely to be classified as higher security and if on the day you're coming in you happen to be having any kind of episode that is seen as problematic to the staff in terms of management you're likely not only to then be maximum security but also be placed in segregation. So that caused us to start to do some work around how do we challenge some of that and we've been trying to challenge it through all kinds of means not the least of which is to try and get federal and provincial and territorial bodies to be talking about what they need to put in place so that individuals are not kept in those institutions and there are discussions underway. I'm told that in fact the head of women's corrections is going to be here on Monday having that kind of discussion with the Burnside folks and the Nova Scotia Hospital people to try and have some contracts set up so women could go there. To a woman, I would say to a man as well but my most recent experiences as is really evident to you now is with women, but to a woman, every woman we have managed to get out of prison into a mental health facility even a locked forensic unit I'm ashamed to say if I had ever thought I would be advocating for that when I was here or even now it sends chills up my spine some time but even locked forensic units within 24 hours do a measurably better. For one main reason is in those facilities their behavior is then seen through the lens of their mental health label whether or not we agree with that label it's seen through that label and so their behavior is no longer seen as just bad behavior or criminal behavior but is seen through that lens and so even though there are things happening in those institutions that we sometimes disagree with the reality is they tend to start to improve and every single one of the women that we've managed to get into those sorts of institutions have started to be able to integrate into the community and a couple of them have been out now for several years one out for 15 years in the community with supported sometimes supported independent living, sometimes familial support and these are women who previously had been described in much the way Ashley Smith was as incapable of living anywhere out of an institution which is how she came to be described. So one of the things we're doing to try and do that in addition to one case by case analysis and advocacy is working with doctors and nurses and doing training with them obviously these sorts of venues and opportunities are also incredibly valuable but trying to get people to become more aware of what is happening especially amongst the public because there is a perception that going to jail and being helped is better than just being left in the community and if there's anybody here who still has that notion at the end of today I want to sit with you and I'm sadly to say well I won't tell you I won't let you go until you have a different view but if you still have that view I will be surprised and because in the process in particular of going through the inquest into Ashley Smith's death it has become evident to me how little we even know and I say we, me personally and our organization knew about how some of these issues were understood within the prison and when you've been doing this for as long as I have and something can still surprise you in a very bad way it's scary, it's disconcerting and it prompts you to want to do something about it and what really surprised me is we've been doing human rights training in the prison since the early part of the last decade after we did the human rights complaint in 2001 that was reported on by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2004 the women at that stage said we don't want another report there will be another report but what we really want is the tools to be able to do something about this you come in and wander through the institution we do walks through the entire institution of confinement, document them, meet with the women meet with the administration try to address the issues but then we leave and it's clear that for every other minute of every other day, of every other week, of every other year those women are there really with individuals who are in the prison who may or may not understand what's happening and so the women said we want training on what our human rights are, what our charter rights are what our rights are under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act so that we know when things are going wrong so we started to do that training and in 2008 or 2007 sorry our membership decided that women across the country deserved an equal level of advocacy whether they were in Nova Institution out in Truro or in the Fraser Valley Institution in Abbotsford in British Columbia and so they decided to do something which is really unprecedented in our organization because we're a grassroots organization is they wanted to have all of the organization of the regional advocates come under our office the national office and the training happened out of our national office and so that's what we've been doing since 2007 it coincided with, in fact it was seven years ago yesterday that Ashley Smith came into the federal prison system and it was six years ago two weeks ago that she died in the federal prison system and so it coincided with Ashley Smith being in the institution but it wasn't driven by that some people think that we changed it because of that I wish I could say we did we have changed lots of things as a result of Ashley how Ashley was treated and I don't mean treated in a positive sense of the word in prison but that was one that we were in the process of changing had we been doing something different had we been doing what we're doing now then I would like to think something different would have happened because we have been able to intervene in other women's cases but as I'll talk about in a minute that's not always true but one of the things we have learned through this process is how little staff knew as well and so our training now also includes staff and I'll explain a bit about that so I'm going to... these are not pictures of Ashley strangling herself I find them disturbing but they're not going to be the ones that you've heard of or that have been shown live streamed and I want to say for a minute the reason you're seeing these pictures is because Ashley's family had the courage and the tenacity to insist that if they didn't understand what had happened to their daughter nor could anybody else probably and so they insisted that all of these images all of the proceedings of the inquest be aired publicly and so right now if you turned on if you googled Ashley Smith inquest live stream you could be watching the proceedings that are happening right now they'd still be going on right now in Toronto in the inquest and part of the other thing that happened is something that I would never have predicted when I was sitting in the seats well they were not these seats but as I said yesterday much nicer seats now at the law school but it was... when I was here I would not have predicted I would get as much information from staff as I get but the information that I've been able to get about what happened to Ashley has either been through our court case we had some of you know we had to go to the federal court twice even though Ashley had given her authorization twice to us to get her files I met her, unlike many of the women who I've worked with I didn't know Ashley very well I only met her in person twice I talked to her on the phone a number of times but when I met her she asked that we get her file information and assist her with what was happening to her but in fact we never got the information and the corrections delayed and delayed and delayed getting her information to us and then eventually tried to use the excuse of her death as a refusal to give us the information we ended up having to go to the federal court twice to get that information and untold resources I went without staff our two of us usually in our office went without staff for almost three years to do that and so you can imagine if you're a prisoner wanting to access your records it would be when we had me with legal training we had two lawyers working pro bono with us and we had people working inside trying to assist us and we had the privacy commissioner rule in our favor and went to the federal court and still it took us almost five years to get some of the documentation I got the videos through other sources let me just leave it at that and the reality is that is part of how we managed to get them released because I have not yet seen the inquest brief so imagine those of you who are practicing those of you who are law students the significance of this is that we have standing at the inquest our organization, the Canadian association of Elizabeth Frye Society says standing at the inquest is part of that standing I've signed a release saying that if I access any of the material through the inquest process I can't do anything with it basically I'm precluded from using it for any other purposes for the inquest I haven't signed that but we have two letters have gone because there have been two different corners involved in this process two letters that have gone to the corner outlining that even though I have signed that saying that if I accessed it I wouldn't release it I have not yet accessed the inquest brief so everything I'm going to show you has either been made public through other means or most of the videos I first saw and then did affidavits about their existence to try and get them released into the public sphere through the inquest process or through other processes and some of you know that that can be a little risky at times because the first challenge from corrections was they don't exist there's no such thing whether it was the forcible some of the forcible confinement some of the pepper spray the forcible injections all of those some of the excessive uses of forces as well and so our response was then you prove that they don't exist show us that all of the videotape you have of her a period of time to prove it doesn't exist and the long and the short is obviously that couldn't exist so what I'm going to show you is some of the stills we have and some of how and talk a bit about how Ashley was described during those processes as well as another couple of women's cases that we're working on so Ashley was described as almost constantly out of control a risk to public safety a risk to herself in a particular incident you can see can you see it all right with those lights so this she was described as this was an emergency situation where she was violently out of control and required the emergency response team to come in and first pepper spray her and then take her out and then involuntarily transfer her across the country I'll leave it to you to determine whether in fact you see that as an out of control behavior requiring the kind of force that is clearly being applied here you can see that she's fully shackled as well as being cuffed to the front so she has a belly chain on she has a chain going down her legs her ankles are a chain together and she's cuffed to the front and they've got gas masks on and they're getting ready to move her one of the challenges we have said to corrections is if there is one videotape of Ashley Smith actually being violently out of control it would have been produced by now she has now been dead six years there is not one and if you doubt that please get in touch with commission council get in touch with any of them and ask for proof of the violent out of control behavior what she did do was swear what she did do was taunt what she did do was tell them when they were doing things illegal what she did do was document some of things her writing materials being taken away her reading materials being taken away her being denied access to others and her being treated in a way that was really about stopping that behavior but really what it did was escalate the very behavior and I go back to she was at this stage 19 years old but operating very much she went into prison as a 15 year old and she was still operating emotionally so as I watched the videotapes I see the behavior that is strikingly similar now my daughter will be here next week for a take care kid to school or a work day so don't tell her I said she acts like that but truly some of the things that come out of her mouth and some of the things she says and some of the ways she challenges I would argue as much as I don't like them at times and I find them challenging to think of really good ways of addressing them they are normal behaviors they are not abnormal aberrant requiring punishment types of behaviors and yet in a different context I could see a mouthy stroppy young woman like my daughter being treated in much the same way when she challenged authority or told them they were wrong or what they were doing was against her rights or that they were stupid or that they were weird sorry I'm talking about what my daughter says about me but you get the picture so her behavior was she was not someone who bowed to authority very easily and I would say legitimately didn't bow to authority very easily given what was happening to her and the more that they treated her in a way that demanded her to be cowed by and bowed to authority the more she resisted it this was some of you have seen or may have did any of you watch the prisoner transfer videos of her being transferred so this was actually being transferred from the regional psychiatric center in Saskatoon to Joliet prison in Quebec now those of you who have traveled across the country how long does it take you to take that travel across the country four or five hours this was a police plane it took almost five hours part way through the trip there are five staff on the on the plane two RCMP officers flying the plane it's an RCMP flight she is chained to the chair by her arms and by her feet so she is locked into her seat and she has a seatbelt on and she has to go to the bathroom and they say wait she has to go to the bathroom they say wait then she starts to try and unbuckle her seatbelt and they get mad and she has to physically hold her arms down now she has a range of motion of about five inches at that stage and then they cup her hands together in the front so she still has a little range of motion and she can still reach her seatbelt and so she starts to irritate them by repeatedly unbuckling her seatbelt now remember how she is in the seat there is no illusion on anyone's part I would suggest that she is going anywhere she is not getting out of that seat she is chained to the seat but she continues to do it she is upset and tell her that they are going to duck taper to the seat if she does not stop she goes to the bathroom in her as you can see the prison uniform she goes to the bathroom and they start to taunt her and tease her about how she stinks and smells like a pig and she starts to swear at them and yell at them and first they put a spit hood on her which is designed she has spit she would try to spit or spit in the direction of staff so they put a spit hood on her it seems clearly from the video they are putting it on because they are annoyed with her what she is saying to them when she is speaking back to them when they are taunting her and when she continues to play with her seatbelt they put a second spit hood on and the the pilot comes back and further duck tapes her arms and her feet and has her fully duck taped to the seat heaven help us if there had been an emergency but let's not get there do that and when you hear her say in a very plaintive voice he says something like now behavior will get worse she says how could it possibly get worse you hear him say I will duck tape your face and you never hear another word from her for the entire transfer so when we are talking about transfers that are being done in ways that not only breach the corrections and conditionaries act for human rights the charter rights but breach everything around basically how you try to dispose of transfer prisoners period and some of the provisions about what happens when you are in an airplane and how you can be dealt with in an airplane in a medical emergency even for instance so this is her in the prison and you know some of you know she was transferred 17 times in the 11 and a half months she was in federal custody a regulation that there has to be a female accompanying females when they are transferred in that situation frontline staff are supposed to be women but as long as there is at least one woman there can be men and routinely with Ashley there was sometimes one woman sometimes more I should have argued that there should be all women working on the frontline but there aren't at this stage and this most of them were men but there were two women that's right so this some of you have heard about the involuntary treatment the forcible injections that happened at Joliet so one of the points to come back to that I mentioned I did not hear about the involuntary treatment from Ashley so when I talked about some of the things to ask better and more probing questions because when I asked about things like transfer when I asked about treatment when I asked about whether she was dealt whether other things were breached I didn't have the wit to ask did they ever give you an injection that you didn't want because there was no record of her being given injections other than when she had been committed under mental health legislation and usually the rules should be followed we now know in fact routinely the rules are not followed routinely in prison settings what happens is a call is made to a psychiatrist psychiatrist may not ever even clap eyes on the prisoner call is made saying someone is out of control so in this context this is the fifth injection that she got in this series over a couple of days at Joliet institution but in this context the nurse this nurse that you can see in the gas mask calls in and says she is out of control she is psychotic she is a danger to herself there is no evidence of that in the video of any of the videos that I watched of over 30 hours of her being monitored by video camera by the staff but he authorizes not one but five injections during that period of time and never sees her violates all of their there is a reason that the doctors have the inquest right now because not just at that institution but a number of others doctors authorize injections on the basis of the staff reporting of her being out of control and then they would start the proceedings for committal proceedings so those of you working in and around prisons watch for this they start the proceedings and then abandon them before they need the second signature of a psychiatrist or they just continue to start a new process each time and so that was something that we weren't fully aware of that we are aware of that we're now doing both training with physicians but also doing work within the correctional system to say this can't be happening and your contracts have to clearly outline what the responsibilities of doctors and physicians are and nurses when they're in this position this one, so corrections has grudgingly agreed to be fair some have agreed the minute they saw these videotapes this was involuntary and illegal or at least unlawful and some have grudgingly accepted after this been produced at the inquest there are many within corrections including some of the lawyers involved who still argue that this particular injection was still they would characterize as voluntary treatment why do you think? she's smiling she's actually in the video you can't really tell from here she offers up her arm she's described as she clearly was okay with it the nurse is saying to her you know we're going to give you another one you may as well make it easy and so she just smiles and offers up her arm and gets the injection now I ask you, does that look what makes it not look voluntary to you? she's handcuffed does the nurse look like she thinks that everything's safe here? that she's voluntarily doing this in a gas mask to get the ready to spray the staff are fully suited in gas masks so this will give an example of something that still for corrections folks is described as voluntary treatment they saw that as voluntary because she offered it up in prison for women in 1994 the physician who did body cavity searches of women who were fully shackled described it as voluntary because they signed their name to a paper so we have an obligation as individuals who are trained in the law to be identifying when things just because they look like they may be lawful aren't necessarily lawful and again to those of you who are in prison law but if you're not you don't need to be a lawyer to understand this what I say to whether it's law students lawyers, doctors heads of prisons or women or men or young people in prison is the law is very clear the penalty that's being imposed on you when you get a prison sentence is separation from the community that's it anything that takes away your freedom any more than separating you from the community is either one not allowed or two has rules about how it can be done and three you're entitled to know what those rules are so that's all you need to know so those of you who signed up for prison law if you remember that you passed and you don't have to take it of course now it is that simple and complicated but it is that simple, yes you have a question that's that statement that you're making now like security certificates that are sometimes issued for prisoners do you mean for immigration for security certificates or securities they twist it and make it and see whatever they want but you're saying that you have a right to know and all that kind of stuff and they tell you know you don't that's right well I'm not involved at all in the security certificate but I do know that the charter has been breached in many contexts there so in theory at least the rules should apply that but my understanding is it's not being applied in those contexts so that's voluntary treatment this was so this was actually this is out of time from the previous one this was actually just before the fourth injection but I put it in here because one of the things when I was challenging that there weren't actually incidents of her being violent or out of control they said yes there was before one of the injections she got out of her restraints and she was getting going to attack the staff this is the incident so she's actually still restrained I don't know if you can see that her hand is still down she's still attached to she's in four point restraints but they didn't have her head in the restraint that would be the five point restraint and at one point just before all of this happens she's been asking for about eight hours for someone to change her tampon because she's got her period and she's wanting to be cleaned up a bit at one point they start joking change it yourself who cares you're here and so then they all leave the room and she's in this small room an observation room in the hospital unit and they leave the room and she's calling out to them still she can hear that they're talking and laughing in the hallway and so she tries at one point to get up and manages to get up on her elbows somehow and is trying to look and see where they are when they see that she's actually up they say she's getting up and they run in and they put her in a choke hold back in restraint so she can't repeat itself this is described on paper not as a use of force but as an intervention to just gain control when she was starting to get out of control as a preventative measure now by law this is a use of force everything that's happening is a use of force the restraints going in, having the pepper spray at the ready but this is described as them just gaining control when she started trying to intervene and said there are other things that actually really like to do and that if they wanted to encourage a different behavior this is before we obviously knew all of this we actually thought there may have been some incidents where she was getting out of control but it was clear that she liked to write she liked to read she was actually quite a good student and had plans to go on and thought she would do work working with poor people was what she wanted to do and so we encouraged them to actually give her some of her writing materials back for a while they did give her crayons back they never gave her anything more because they said she might hurt herself with them but this would be an example of some of the things that she would write about when she had the opportunity to write this was actually done when she was much younger when she was still in the youth system but you give an idea of someone who was not just an anomalous amorphous bag of rage to the public or to the people she was with but a much more complicated young woman who we know likely would have responded much better had they provided more access to her family had they provided her with educational efforts and in fact as a result of this Ashley's family and I always want to give credit here has made a significant donation to the organization for a fund that allows us to fund any woman who's coming through the system who wants to basically further their education and can't afford to now those of you who have worked around the system know in 1992 all post-secondary education in the federal prison systems were cut despite what you might have heard about Carla nobody the government wasn't paying for an education people have to pay for their own education we have a small bursary things like this me teaching here and doing speaking engagements goes into a fund that we then use to provide bursaries and funding to women so they can pursue their education and Ashley's family provided a sizable donation that means that every woman now would not be in a position that she was to not be able to afford to have a course unless they asked their family for the money or had the money independently but nevertheless the challenge is still to get that material into the prisons and so one of the things corrections has said some of you will have heard is that everything has improved since Ashley's death that in fact things are much better and much further ahead if you're tempted to believe that I'd encourage you to read this little report that was put out a couple weeks ago actually a month ago now by the Office of the Correctional Investigator the Office of the Correctional Investigator is an Ombuds Office that provides as an Ombuds Office does will investigate issues that come up that are brought to their attention by families, by organizations like ours and one of the things we'd asked them to look at is we were being told that much had changed that had been an investment of resources for mental health services in the prisons since Ashley's death and that our contention public contention that things were worse not better for women needed to be challenged and so we asked the Correctional Investigator to document because as I've already mentioned even though the rules are that we should get access to because they give us their releases of information we routinely don't get access to that information so we went to the other body other than the Correctional Service of Canada that has access to all of it the Office of the Correctional Investigator and said could you please monitor it thankfully we didn't know this because they don't account to us they account to Parliament but thankfully they actually also not only did that but then provided a report and in that report called Risky Business an investigation of the treatment management of chronic self-injury among federally sentenced women they report that there were at the time they issued this report or at the time they did the report eight women in much the same situation as Ashley was and possibly as many as 20 but eight who they had fully documented needed to be immediately out of the prison system this is one of them she died on January 20th 2013 in the Regional Psychiatric Center in place where I first tried to see Ashley and was denied access we now know because she had just been assaulted at least three times by staff and they did not want us to intervene and did not want us to see what was happening and I was just there this week because a woman who another woman we know an indigenous woman is facing a dangerous offender hearing on the basis of charges that have all arisen while she's in prison those of you who know Ashley's story she started in the prison system she was arrested on a breach probation and a shoplifting charge the breach probation she was on probation because she had assaulted with crab apples a postal worker and when she went to prison she then accumulated charges and so by the time she died she had a cumulative sentence of more than six and a half years one of the longest sentences she had in that period was 137 days so she was accumulating charges a lot of the Canadian public a lot of people a lot of lawyers don't know that you go to prison you can then be charged further on the basis of what happens in prison when I started doing this work coming out of here that didn't happen very often it had to be a very serious very very serious assault or a murder or a rape in a prison for charges to then be laid against a prisoner and criminal charges and so there's also the notion we're in the midst of trying to see if we can do some class action types of approaches on the whole issue of double jeopardy because of the number of people who accumulate charges so this woman is one of the eight who is listed in this report but she died in January so this report was released September 30th she died January 20th and this is written up still as dangerous behavior what do you think is dangerous about this let me look at the picture for me there's larger than the other there's actually me with shorter longer hair three years ago so the dangerous behavior was actually me I was cited for dangerous behavior in this so the dangerous behavior was that this was a woman her name is Canoe James she said she wants her name used she is one of the women outlined she is the woman who when she came into the prison system had no more than a grade three education was described as she said they tell me I'm stupid and fat and ugly and that basically I should go on a diet and I'll never be smart so I can't do anything and her dream was not just to get a high school education but to go to university and they told her no you can't they basically said she had intellectual disabilities and feel alcohol and she would never get an education she spent most of her time in segregation in various prisons was also transferred across the country and in this this is her graduation ceremony she had the we funded a number of courses and through the bursary process that I mentioned she was able to get her high school education and to the credit the everlasting credit of a very lovely man who works as a teacher at the school at Grand Valley institution so she was in the same segregation unit that actually died in when she was living there when this picture was taken he insisted that she should like everybody else have a graduation ceremony he was willing to do whatever the institution wanted to make that happen but they refused to let her participate in the graduation ceremony with the women in the general population the minimum medium security women because she was too much of a risk too dangerous and too volatile they said so he then set up that she would have a graduation ceremony inside and ask that a number of people were asked to attend in the end they wouldn't allow anybody in because it was too dangerous a situation to allow that she was only permitted to get her diploma if she was fully shackled so I don't know if you can see here but this is a handcuff so she was shackled and she was cuffed to the front and this is a bit of an awkward hug because that's how she had to be to be fully shackled and get a hug and the dangerous behavior was we were not supposed to go near her and what do you think how did I cause a danger here side hug side hug and what would be the potential danger for me that she could do something she could have had but they didn't say good thing they didn't think of that no they didn't think of head but what they said is she could have somehow twisted herself around and got those shackles up over my head I'm taller than her she can imagine she's even smaller than me but somehow she could have twisted up got those chains around and strangled me and so I put the entire institution at risk because that would have been a security incident that was written up as me putting the institution at risk and dangerous behavior so so it gets better she had seen movies and you know when people graduate they throw up their mortar boards and you know so the other thing she really wanted to do is to be able to throw up her hat and have a picture of it to send to her mom so we everybody agreed that she could do that but we had to stand 20 feet back for this picture to be taken why sorry she might have flung that hat at us and harmed us I don't know if any of you have seen some of the ones it's not like you can get some really nice mortar boards for graduations around but these are ones sort of like you have for kindergarten your graduation but nevertheless that was the and look at she there you can see can you imagine trying to throw it when you're shackled and her range of movement would have been limited because she was also chained to her waist so I call this educational opportunities and freedom to learn one of the things they said is once she started being able to get her education her whole attitude changed and gee what a surprise and she started when she died she was actually doing a university course and she had asked to go to the regional psychiatric center because she wanted to get some treatment because she was told she needed treatment to get out of prison so she went to the regional psychiatric center she died of a heart attack she started giving the staff and the nurses her symptoms 14 hours before she died why do you think she died of heart attack symptoms were ignored and she was seen as just trying to get attention so in this context this has been described as her dying of natural causes we're arguing that for an inquest right now into her death and we have a lawyer for her family who's doing it pro bono and we have a lawyer trying to get and trying to get them to actually have an inquest because it's called natural causes because she died of a heart attack she died of a heart attack though I would suggest to you because she had mental health issues that meant that her symptoms when she described them were seen as her trying to get attention not as her suffering medical attention and in fact the nurse didn't even go into her cell until she was probably dead she was declared dead when they took her out to a hospital but she was probably dead at least an hour before and if it can possibly get worse it gets worse because she was in a unit with 11 other women and when we went in a few days after she died to meet with the women because often times the support that's provided is to staff not necessarily to the women prisoners we went in with our other Elizabeth Fry folks and some lawyers we heard that the women and they fortunately have also advised the police of this that the women were negotiating amongst themselves as to who should press their call buttons after she had pressed her call button repeatedly why do you think they were negotiating who should press their call button could be disciplinary action but they were actually doing it because they said we want whoever they will actually come for to be the one to call now can you imagine in that kind of situation every having to try and figure out which one of us will they take seriously which one of us will they respond to which one of us has the responsibility of getting medical care for our sister prisoner and that's essentially the role they were put into so at every level we are seeing a repeat of the very same issues and we are seeing outlined and erred and publicly provided to the Canadian public right now in the end question to Ashley Smith's death will be replicated and even more so when you consider that in this case it was, Ashley's was a preventable death too she was tying ligatures around her neck yes but she was on constant observation five staff there at least three cameras she shouldn't have died the symptoms of a heart attack 14 hours before she died could have most physicians have said to us that they would almost guarantee she would have likely survived so what do we see as some answers this is a woman who is actually from this community right now is in the hospital and she said I could she is supposed to be doing a guest appearance in the course this next week but depends how she's doing this is a woman who is similarly described heard of Ashley's death and heard the story of Ashley she calls me up every couple of days and said I get it now, you thought I was going to be Ashley she was in Springhill institution several years quite a few years ago and when I saw her this one visit I was sure that I probably wouldn't see her again and she was charged with assault just before I had visited an institution she had been charged with assaulting a staff member and the benefit of her having been charged with assault was that in fact because she was charged with assault they had to take her to outside court for the judge to hear that charge and we were able to intervene to get her into the Nova Scotia Hospital for an assessment and that started a chain of events that has meant now she likely cannot be returned to prison because she is now recognized for her schizophrenia and requiring interventions whether or not we like all the labels but requiring mental health interventions and she does end up in the hospital sometimes and goes back into the community and lives in supported independent living supported by RE fry folks here and supported by mental health team here as well as other individuals who have become her community of support that is she is one of the women who is now in the prison system into mental health services and it doesn't end there we then have an obligation to continue to follow them so that any abuses that can happen in those systems don't persist and in fact are in the midst right now with Nova Scotia legal aid of looking into the potential of intervening not in this woman's case we are already involved in hers but in the case of some other women who are in for civil committals alone not criminal committals because these other two women who will be working on their cases are women who are being held in the mental health system under civil committals because there are no community-based resources and that's just as unlawful and just as inappropriate and just as egregious a breach of the law in my opinion as are the other ones you've seen so we're very very keen to be working on this we're very keen to me it's very exciting to be here this 10 days because I see incredible hope for things to change things are very obviously I've given you a very bleak picture of what's happening in the prison system but let me try and inspire you what is hopeful about this most of the information that I've received I've mentioned I get from people inside now the negative side of that is people are feeling pretty hopeless inside if they're coming to people like me we're a one or two women office there are 30,000 people working for the correctional service of Canada they're asking us to bring human rights complaints they're providing us with information they're feeling impotent inside but they are providing that information that helps us to be able to then take and challenge the system as well there are negotiations happening within federal provincial and territorial working groups in particular in women's corrections the head of women's corrections federally is very keen to push on this issue and some of you if you watched or saw any of the reporting of the testimony of the commissioner of corrections two weeks ago he was on the stand right after I was he reported that the only reason they do not have agreements is they do not have the funds so he has essentially said not essentially he did say that he cannot fulfill his mandate to have people in appropriate services because of lack of resources so we're now in the midst of trying to get launched an auditor general review of the correctional service of Canada and spending because you can rest assured when they need a plane to transfer someone across the country or they need monies to bring an emergency response team or to have forceful injections they have made money available and so we're looking at that mechanism and here there is a potential those of you are interested in this area and I think we'll talk on some of these cases of not just Tonas but also some of the other women who will be working on their cases so I think there is reason for great hope and I think the energy and the enthusiasm of people working within the system to change it is very real and it's shared by people both inside and outside of those institutions that there is a need for change and so I think there is great hope that that will happen because I'm just conscious of time I want to make sure that there is time for more discussion for any of you who would like to have more of that discussion or want to hear more about some of the recommendations the correctional investigator has made but I urge you those of you who know this someone said to me recently what could we do and I said if the only thing you do is repeat two of the things you heard today to someone you don't know or someone you do know but to repeat it and make sure people know that these conceptions of what is happening are challenged every day that would be extremely helpful because I think most people don't know this is happening it's happening in your name and it's happening in my name and we all have a responsibility to challenge it so the quote that I'm going to leave you with is one that was first given to me by another woman, Lifer who I keep in touch with her name is Gail Horry some of you will know her she's a prisoner in the prison system and it's a quote that she got from an indigenous woman named Lilla Watson who I've since had the privilege of meeting she lives in Brisbane in Australia and it goes like this if you've come here to help me you're wasting our time if you've come here because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together so I look forward to working with all of you and that's it 10 minutes for some questions this slide took in Glasgow I was there for a conference about women's international conference on women's imprisonment and they just happened to have all the torture devices they've used to keep women quiet over the years and this is a branch used to be called a school's bridle and it was basically to silence women whether they were nagging their husbands or whatever at a time when women had no rights so it went in the mouth and you couldn't talk if it was in because it would stab your tongue I'm not suggesting they bring these back by the way it's just a provocative picture that I I was just wondering if you could clarify a little bit more because I know that prisoners can be charged under the Corrections Act regulation with assault it sounds like you're talking about being charged under the criminal so they're taken outside is that how the time is being extended beyond what was given to them thank you for asking and argue it's double jeopardy we usually routinely put in grievances with the women about that so let's say as I'm being restrained actually the most common is when I'm being strip searched women are disproportionately strip searched more than men in fact when we ask to access information for the stats on how often women are strip searched it's so often they don't keep track anymore can you imagine the deputy wardens of women wrote to the head of corrections the commissioner of corrections and said they should get rid of routine strip searches so not yahoo's like kim pay but the deputy wardens who were responsible for security of the federal penitentiaries for women said this wrote in said it and when they when they saw this the head of corrections I'm told was not very happy but they basically said it does nothing except promote prisoners and staff because many of the women 91% of the indigenous women 86% of the women overall have histories of physical and or sexual abuse and so they're being strip searched they start to strike out so if you resist you could get a criminal charge of resisting arrest depending on what stage it is assaulting a peace officer and you'll likely then not only get punished by a higher security rating and possibly placed in segregation but also almost invariably get an outside charge and when you hear the term outside charge if you're going into a prison that means they're being charged criminally and they'll be charged on the criminal code and they'll be processed in outside court in the regular court criminal court and get receive additional sentence usually so for instance tona when I first met her she had done a B&E had broken into a school and she was being raped by her birth father she was adopted out as a child and from an indigenous family mom was adopted out and when she went looking for a birth father he let her stay with him but proceeded to rape her when she left that situation she broke into a school was arrested that was her first charge by the time she left the nova institution after serving or spring hill and then nova she had served more than 10 years she had accumulated those charges and that was more than 10 years ago now and as I mentioned Ashley has accumulated there's another woman canoe was serving a life sentence so she just get accumulating time that delayed her statutory release date so if you're serving a life sentence despite what this government's doing you can't serve more than a life sentence yet but it can change your release date Are there? Yes I'm interested in an initiative you described that involves bringing staff, frontline staff within corrections into the conversation about promoting and respecting human rights I was interested to hear a little bit more about that how one would approach bridging that gap and making it a conversational value Yeah, it's a great question because when I first was suggested when we first started doing the human rights training we would do a session for the staff the night before and then do a session for the women or two days of sessions with the women and that led to some interesting things I say interesting because it led to a couple of things like for instance I was accused of instigating riots trying to instigate riots because I was telling women that they had rights and they didn't have to follow rules is how it was heard by interpreted by staff I was told that I was actually taken hostage at one point because I refused to leave a situation because the women were upset and didn't understand a direction that had been given and so I was staying talking about it so the long and the short was I started getting these sorts of information and staff were saying sorry I'll put that down so I can see you guys staff were saying that I was basically giving misinformation to the women and so and that our organization was and so that happened and some of the women who were higher security in the maximum security unit but were getting ready to be moved into the general population to the medium security were allowed to come to these we were told they could come to the sessions if in fact staff could attend so it left us with a real conundrum about what to do and so we decided the way we've organized it is now we invite staff to participate and we allow them to come into the meetings hear all of the information and then we go into the small groups to develop the advocacy plans which is a process in the training of looking at what the actual issues are they're private ones so they're in small groups and so staff aren't involved or staff have their own one but it's led to some interesting things that I would never have predicted so for instance in one of the organizations the first one we did it and I had a lot of trepidation one of the guys who was there the supervisor for that day was in it and he was an old fellow I should say old okay it's probably my age but anyway he was a more experienced guard let's put it that way who had been around for a long time had been at the prison for women I'd known him for a bunch of years I would have said he probably you know would have been a bit crusty around me and stuff but he sat through the whole thing and at when all the women had asked their questions we'd had all the discussion at the very end I said so is there anybody else and I looked to the staff and I said you know you haven't spoken up but if you'd like to and then I and then he said yeah I'd like to say something and I thought this is like and I thought okay these are the ones I make every mistake in the book and I learn from those mistakes and I thought okay now I'll ram my head into the wall so that was like not smart but to you know he stood up and he said he said now you people if you say I said this outside of here I'll say you're lying and I'm thinking oh god now what is he going to do and he goes you listen to this little lady and and he's a big guy so he says you listen to this little lady I can't tell you that but you got to do it you got to stand up for your rights and you got to just fight it and it's just getting worse and worse and you just got to do it and so just listen to her and then he said but don't say I said that and I couldn't have said anything better it was someone who you know he was it was one of the women described it as excuse my language but mind fuck when he did that because it was like but they heard it and said okay well they may not say it to our faces that they support that this is happening and so it's led us to actually be even more vocal so one of the last sessions I did in British Columbia the warden actually sat in and the management team of the institution and then afterwards decided they wanted more training on what they should be doing around how section 718 2E the what's often known as gladu factors apply to parole and what they should be doing for all women as they're getting ready for parole so it's led to some interesting and surprising developments this prison so for instance when the students go in next week next Friday the final day of the class is going to be in the prison and the staff have all been have been actually trying to change shifts to get in on the training which is amazing to me and so they hear what they're allowed to do what they're not allowed to do and many of them have said privately if you can imagine I'm not in charge of the institution when I walk into a seg unit they're saying we weren't going to let her do that is that legal? so if it's not and usually it's not I say no it's not legal you shouldn't be doing that and so they'll often now apparently be writing up and saying we consulted a lawyer who says it's not legal I'm sure if they won't we can still compete they'd say tough shit so it's been really surprising to me and yet has helped bolster the ability of some of the women to be challenging because it's being seen within not all staff obviously but it's being seen within as a more of an effort that we're all trying to work to get you out and you're trying to work to get you out so I'm not saying it doesn't get used in the course of fashion in some instances I'm sure it does but on the whole it's been a move in a more positive direction of being able to challenge staff and not have them be able to scapegoat the women or scapegoat our regional advocates or whatever so I think it's things along are we? this is one of our regional advocates so Nikki is one of our regional advocates here in this region and yes we're in the midst of reprinting the Human Rights and Action Handbooks they are on our website if anybody wants to access them anything that's on our website feel free to use it's there for the using and it gets copyrighted because some of our members feel strongly about that but it doesn't mean you can't use it just use it a lot of the women recognize that reasonability is going to be determined by people who have a whole lot of color with them I think they can also be punished for maintaining a certain status yes and also having spoken to a lot of the women like a lot of the meetings that happen when we look at prior other advocates happen in prison where there are ways that are free to listen conversations and a lot of women are very nervous to go into those conversations and they get your passions from none of them are in prison and I also spoke to a woman who is nervous to write in a journal about the ways women communicate because their journals get searched and they go into the segregation for it so I think it's really valuable but I also feel like there's so many structural things that women can even use to make complaints that's absolutely true I mean the women are the least likely to make complaints and grievances and you may have heard through the the very last grievance she did was one that I actually wrote up for and I kept a copy of it and we kept insisting there was a grievance and even the Correctional Investigator was convinced by Correctional Services there wasn't a grievance and I finally went to them and said look here it is I put it in the grievance box this is the copy and that's when they finally disclosed that they hadn't opened the grievance box for three months so absolutely I mean if it sounds like we've solved or any of this is solved I appreciate you raising that Mary there are some real issues around what needs to be happening there and around confidentiality and even more so in the Provincial and Territorial Jails I mean breaches of human rights happen on a daily basis if I had a lawyer for every single woman I'd have a court case for every single woman right now and man for that matter and so anything I've said if it sounds like I think it's solved in those ways please don't hear it that way I was trying to find the positive huge work to be done so yes I'm so sorry I have to play the role of some man right now shut down what is certainly a lively conversation so that we clear the room when we're supposed to but let me say just a couple of words for us we're actually going to continue to draw on cam starting at 22 the hour as law students are invited to go up and talk to her about her career path in social justice advocacy up in the faculty lounge so that's happening after this for those of you who want to come up and speak to each other in the next few minutes before that I invite you to do it I also want to take the chance to mention our next seminar which is coming up on Friday November 15 that's Joanna Erdman and Tamar Azair talking about human rights education in the health professions Eastern Europe and Central Asia and finally I want to thank once again our speaker for her devastating talk today and for bringing I guess bringing to life the story of Ashley Smith and others and reminding us of our responsibility for what happened in those cases and for what continues to happen in the prisons so long as we don't act okay thank you