CA — Ottawa, Ontario. In June 2021 (prior to the dissolution of the 43^rd Parliament), various women sent briefs to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, expressing their concerns about the safety of women in prison, due to male prisoners being housed with them. The Parliamentary committee was studying the “Current Situation in Federal prisons in Relation to…Reports of Sexual Coercion and Violence in Federal Prisons”.

The following is an overview of the briefs submitted.

Heather Mason

For the past two years, Heather Mason has been advocating for criminalized women on a variety of prison issues, including segregation, strip-searching and conditions of confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. In communications with these women, many have reported distressing experiences with male prisoners. Ordeals recounted to Mason include “frequent issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, sexually transmitted diseases, negative impacts to programming, negative emotional impacts, increased issues with drugs, and increased issues of fear of retaliation”.

In her brief, Mason summarizes numerous instances of women reporting frightening actions (including violent crime) perpetrated by male prisoners, such as rape, sexual assault, exhibitionism (i.e. exposing their genitalia to the women), and sexual harassment. The latter offense includes instances of convicted pedophiles loitering near a woman and her child (who were part of the mother-child program), and “making sexist and inappropriate antagonizing comments”.

Brief submitted to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

This is what you want to know about women's prisons in Canada. https://t.co/9ekKpQVWgM

— Heather Mason (@Mason134211f) August 24, 2021

Mason also notes that women have pathways and histories to criminality that differ from male prisoners, including those who identify as women. Many male transgender-identifying prisoners “have appalling crimes of assault, sexual violence, and murder against women and children”. She points out that merging these two groups of prisoners (women and transgendered individuals transferring from men’s prisons) obscures differences in their differing pathways and histories, impacts security protocols, results in deteriorating physical and mental health for women, and heightens women’s trauma reactions.

Several women also told her that “transgender individuals break the rules without any response or reprimand from correctional staff, including the known distributing of drugs, the known ingestion of drugs, the known threatening of women with assault or murder, and failing to stand for count among other things.”

Further exacerbating the situation, women report having their accounts of violence dismissed by prison staff, organizations and politicians, thus leaving them “without supports, without recourse and without any surety of security from targeted sexism and sexual violence”. Since any disclosure of violence committed by transgender-identifying individuals is treated as transphobia, in many instances, women avoid reporting their experiences. This occurs in a context where women “are already reluctant to do so due to the shame around sexual assault, sexual harassment and reporting in prison generally”. 

Mason concludes her brief by outlining five recommendations, re-printed verbatim below:

1. Correctional Service Canada should immediately halt the transfer of any transgender individuals from men’s prisons to women’s prisons.
2. Transgender individuals with histories of violence toward women or children who have already been transferred from a men’s prison to a women’s prison should be immediately moved to an accommodation other than a women’s prison.
3. Transfer criteria for transgender individuals should be developed in consultation with transgender groups and organizations. These transfer criteria should ensure that transgender individuals who meet the criteria be provided with a transfer to an accommodation other than a women’s prison and one that is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of transgender people.
4. Independent feminist supports of women’s choosing should be provided to all women inside in order to foster the trust and support required to allow women to disclose any experiences of violence. Women should be allowed access to these supports either in person or by telephone, or both on a regular basis.
5. Prison population statistics should be registered according to prisoners’ sex at birth, or two new categories of statistics should be established for transgender women and transgender men respectively.

Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights

Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar), a Canadian coalition working to preserve the rights and protections of women and girls, submitted a brief asking that Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) Interim Policy Bulletin 584 be revoked. The brief highlights internal CSC correspondence to the deputy commissioner, wherein officials anticipate an increasing number of prisoners “whose gender marker on their identification cards is unspecified, is neither ‘man’ nor ‘woman’, or is incongruent with their anatomical sex”, with most requests for placement accommodations expected to be from men’s to women’s prisons.

caWsbar points out that, since the female prison population is so small (less than 700 women in total, across six institutions), “even a handful of transfers will have a deleterious impact on women’s security – especially since considerations of the safety of female prisoners seem to rarely influence a decision to house a male prisoner in the female estate.”

Because CSC’s position is that gender can be “fluid”, caWsbar also questions how CSC will ever have “reasonable grounds to believe the offender is not being sincere” when it comes to an individual’s gender identity or expression (grounds for denying a placement request).

Moreover, caWsbar underscore’s how CSC’s interim policy runs counter to the Geneva Convention, which stipulates that women prisoners of war “shall be confined in separate quarters and shall be under the supervision of women”.

Finally, the brief highlights an open letter from formerly incarcerated women, which among other grievances, outlines how CSC’s accommodation approach is negatively impacting female prisoners, who are often afraid to express any concerns or report any instances of abuse by male prisoners who identify as women, due to threats of being labeled “transphobic”. In the open letter, the women specifically admonish CSC (among others) for “silencing” women:

Some of us, and many of our sisters with lived experience, have been silenced, not only by male abusers but then again by CSC and by [the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies]. We know women inside and others who are out, who have been told both by CSC and by CAEFS that any complaint against a transgender person is transphobia.  

Keep Prisons Single Sex

Keep Prisons Single Sex, established in 2020 to campaign for the rights of women in prison to be held in single-sex prisons only and to only be searched by officers of the same sex, submitted a brief highlighting the vulnerabilities of women in prison. Drawing on studies conducted in the United Kingdom, Keep Prison Single Sex outlines the high rates of domestic violence, abuse in childhood, traumatic brain injuries (mostly caused by male partners) and depression among the female prison population, as well as the disproportionate rate of prison self-harm incidents among women.

Given the vulnerabilities of female prisoners, the lack of privacy in prisons, and an absence of choice with whom they share spaces, the brief stresses the importance of prisons being single-sex spaces (an established best practice), especially given consistent evidence that female-only services lead “to reductions in arrests, in prosecutions and in the number of women sent to immediate custody”.

Keep Prisons Single Sex emphasizes that accommodating male prisoners in the female estate increases the level of risk to female prisoners, including rape and pregnancy, and that a transgender identity does not appear to make any material difference to this level of risk. Additionally, the brief maintains that placing male prisoners with women contradicts a trauma-response approach (considered key to successful rehabilitation), and has negative psychological impacts on the women, even in cases of ‘well-behaved’ male prisoners.

Moreover, the brief outlines other potential harmful effects to female prisoners, including having to refer to male prisoners with female pronouns, being gaslit (a form of emotional abuse, wherein someone is manipulated to question her thoughts, memories, and the events occurring around them), or coerced into agreeing that these male prisoners are women. This latter kind of manipulation could inhibit women from voicing any concerns they may have, over fears that prison officers will perceive their distress as ‘hateful’.  

Keep Prisons Single Sex, USA

In its brief, Keep Prisons Single Sex, USA points to American data indicating that “86% of the female incarcerated population has experienced sexual violence prior to entering prison”. Thus, housing males, regardless of how they identify, with these women is retraumatizing, and instills a climate of fear that impedes the women’s ability to engage in personal work (i.e. healing from abusive relationships).

The brief also underscores how housing males in intimate quarters with women violates their dignity and privacy, in a context where many incarcerated female prisoners have difficulty knowing and asserting boundaries, due to prior trauma. It notes that it should not be a surprise that some criminal males who are given access to incarcerated women will engage in aggressive behaviour, including sexual assault.

As an example, Keep Prison Single Sex, USA cite the case of Harks, a Canadian serial child sex offender who confessed to committing approximately 200 offenses against 60 victims, and who is alleged to have repeatedly harassed a young Indigenous woman with a history of childhood sexual abuse. The brief also references a male prisoner in Illinois with many convictions for violent offenses, who was accused of raping a female prisoner while incarcerated in a women’s prison.

As with the caWsbar brief, Keep Prison Single Sex, USA also cites articles from the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that require separation by sex for prisoners of war, as well as other international protocols specifying that males and females should not be confined together (for example, the “Mandela Rules”, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners).

The brief concludes by stressing the need to ensure safety for all individuals in prison, no matter how they identify, and that secure and safe housing in the men’s facilities should be provided for males who identify as women, along with other vulnerable incarcerated men.

Featured image credit: Josue Escoto