It is estimated that 10-20% of Canadian youth are affected ...



It is estimated that 10-20% of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness or disorder - the single most disabling group of disorders worldwide.

Correctional Investigator of Canada Welcomes

Call for National Strategy on Delivery of Mental Health Services to Youth and Adult Offenders

OTTAWA, June 9, 2008 - The federal prison ombudsman, Mr. Howard Sapers, today welcomed a key recommendation by the New Brunswick Ombudsman and Child and Youth Advocate for a national strategy to ensure coordination and cohesiveness among federal and provincial mental heath and correctional systems. The recommendation was made in a report released by the provincial ombudsman into the services provided to Ashley Smith, a nineteen year old who, following incarceration in New Brunswick for three years was transferred to the federal prison system in October 2006 and died while in custody in October 2007.

"I will shortly be providing my Office's investigative report into Ms. Smith's death to the Minister of Public Safety and the Correctional Service of Canada. There will be a similar call for increased cooperation and coordination. A national strategy should focus on information sharing between jurisdictions and promote a seamless delivery of mental health services to offenders, as well as examine alternatives for the provision of health care services to federal offenders," Mr. Sapers said.

The failure of the province's Youth Criminal Justice System to provide adequate mental health care and treatment documented in the New Brunswick report, continued once Ms. Smith was in the federal corrections system. The teenager was transferred nine times between correctional institutions during her 11 months in federal custody and was kept in segregation for the entire period. The segregation cell where she died was more than 2,000 kilometers away from her parents' Moncton home.

The Correctional Investigator submitted an interim report on Ashley Smith's death to the Commissioner of Corrections and the Minister of Public Safety in December 2007. Given the ongoing criminal investigation, Mr. Sapers is limited in what he can say about the immediate circumstances surrounding the death.

In his 2005 Annual Report, the Correctional Investigator found the number of offenders in federal penitentiaries with significant, identified mental health needs had more than doubled over the past decade, and mental health services offered by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) had not been able to meet the increased demand.

According to a 2008 report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Improving the Health of Canadians 2008: Mental Health, Delinquency and Criminal Activity, more than one in four Canadians hospitalized for mental illness have had brushes with the law and that youth and adults diagnosed with mental illnesses are overrepresented in Canada's correctional facilities.

For example, four out of five runaway youth suffer from depression, and suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year-olds. BC statistics indicate that more than 140,000 of the 580,000 children and youth in BC over the age of six are estimated to have mental disorders that impair functioning.2 Most of these are teens since mental illnesses become symptomatic during adolescence. At the same time, 3,000 youth were in custody—and again, it is reasonable to conclude that many of these youth have some form of mental illness.

by Ginette Petitpas-Taylor for the Moncton Times and Transcript

Jails and prisons are currently the only institutions that cannot say, "our beds are full" or "you don't fit within our mandate." And so our prisons have become de facto asylums.

The apparent suicide of 19-year-old Ashley Smith last fall in a segregation cell at the federal women's prison in Kitchener, Ontario, was a shocking reminder of how badly our system fails people with serious mental health problems. The Elizabeth Fry Society advocates who visited Ashley a few weeks before her death found her wearing only a prison security gown, desperate to be anywhere but the cell with the metal toilet, sink, and bed without a mattress or blanket.

The troubled Moncton girl was just 15 when she was first detained in the provincial youth facility. When Ashley turned 18, it was on to the adult system where she endured nine moves during her 11 and a half months in federal custody.

What might have been done to prevent her tragic death? The inquiry report released recently by New Brunswick Child and Youth Advocate Bernard Richard documents numerous and continuous attempts by Ashley to harm herself over the years, desperate calls for help ignored by a system geared to controlling rather than treating offenders.

It is clear that time spent in solitary confinement exacerbated Ashley's pre-existing mental illness. She was also tasered, pepper sprayed, strip-searched, shackled and restrained. Conflicts with staff inside the correctional centres also added time to her sentence, a spiral of escalating misery that is all too common in the prison system.

Incarceration is obviously not the answer to mental health problems, for youth or for adults whose illness is often layered with experiences of sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, racial discrimination, addictions and poverty. Banishing these individuals to institutions where they find limited or no opportunities for treatment is a recipe for disaster.

Women's incarceration rates have risen in our federal institutions in recent years, although women still account for fewer than one in 10 of the incarcerated in Canada: six percent of federal prisoners, nine percent average in provincial and territorial jails, eight percent of inmates in New Brunswick's jails.

The fastest growing group of imprisoned women is Aboriginal. Aboriginal women currently account for 32 percent of female inmates in federal prisons but only three percent of the women in Canada. In New Brunswick correctional institutions in 2004-2005, 14 percent of incarcerated adult women, but just two percent of the province's female population were Aboriginal.

Women are far more likely to be incarcerated for property offences than violent crimes. They may have forged cheques, shoplifted, sold drugs or traded sex to get by.

Most women doing jail time are mothers — about two-thirds of federally sentenced women in Canada — and usually they were the primary caregivers. Separation from their children is for many the worst punishment. It may cause irreparable damage to their relationship with their children. Loss of custody is a real threat.

Compared to male prisoners, female inmates grapple with more widespread post-traumatic effects of childhood and adult abuse, higher rates of self-mutilation and of attempted suicide and differences in drug use and mental health problems.

A 2005 study by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia paints a picture of women failing to get mental health services in their communities, ending up undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and coming into conflict with the law. Inside the correctional system, treatment and support services prove inadequate, and conditions don't help recovery. Some women ask for federal time in the hopes of accessing better treatment programs.

This year, researcher Shoshana Pollack released her study of women who had served federal prison sentences to learn about their experiences after release. She found that women leaving prison had little preparation prior to release and were struggling without adequate community resources to help them rebuild their lives. Former inmates said they needed employment training opportunities, housing and income supports, along with women-centered and holistic mental health and addictions programming, and peer support services.

Canada continues to come under fire from the United Nations for its discriminatory treatment of women prisoners. The criticism inside Canada is just as fierce — for those who are listening.

In a report penned a dozen years ago, following incidents of stripping, shackling and segregation at Kingston's Prison for Women, Louise Arbour described our prison system as a "lawless state" and called for the introduction of external accountability mechanisms and judicial oversight of women's corrections.

The opening of five new regional federal prisons for women in the mid-1990s — supposedly based on women-centred principles of empowerment and respect — did not end the problems. In 2003, the Canadian Human Rights Commission pointed to human rights violations in these new prisons, on the basis of gender, culture and mental/physical disability. The CHR noted a series of outstanding concerns including the use of male-based security classification tools, lack of appropriate counselling, limited employment training and lack of a grievance mechanism for addressing prisoner complaints such as harassment.

The truth is, there are few champions for the people who make up most of the prison population: the poor, the under-educated, the substance abusers and Aboriginal people. Incarcerated women tend to be particularly invisible, given their small numbers. They bear a heavy stigma for their transgressions, particularly if they have children.

As New Brunswick's Child and Youth Advocate Bernard Richard insisted, in his recent report on youth with complex needs, we must stop "letting the youth criminal justice system pick up the pieces and be the stop-gap measure or solution to our historic failings in the area of child and youth mental health services."

Ginette Petitpas-Taylor, of Moncton, has been the Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status Of Women

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