Women’s prison a crowded, harder place

KITCHENER — They’ve still got the front porches, barbecues waiting for summer and pastel-coloured cottages where inmates themselves carry the keys.

But the Grand Valley Institution for Women, Kitchener’s federal prison that opened in 1997 as a kinder, gentler kind of jail, is most certainly a changed place.

A trip behind the razor wire will show you it’s nearly bursting at the seams with an influx of female inmates — housing 177 women on a recent visit, three times the number it was designed for when it opened with eight cottage-style units 15 years ago.

The formerly minimum-security prison now houses some of Canada’s most notorious female offenders, and will soon include Tooba Yahya, the mother convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in the recent Shafia honour-killing trial.

It took The Record more than three months to get permission from Correctional Service Canada to tour the institution. Once inside, the photographer was prohibited from taking any images of inmates, including pictures that didn’t identify the women.

Space at Grand Valley is at such a premium they’re extending the prison’s perimeter to build a new food services building near Homer Watson Boulevard. Those cottage units have now doubled to 16, and temporary portables fill the space where women used to play baseball.

Tenders are also out for a new two-storey, 40-bed minimum security unit to be built on a hill overlooking the prison. This February, construction will wrap up on a 16-bed building in what used to be Grand Valley’s courtyard.

The prison is so full Grand Valley recently ran out of mailboxes for inmates, has converted private family visiting rooms into sleeping quarters for inmates, and put bunk beds in what used to be single rooms.

It all means warden David Dick has had to get creative to find spaces for his growing population.

And his problem isn’t expected to go away any time soon.

“If they arrive at the front door, I have no choice. They’ve got to come in,” he said. “The legislation has had an impact on our numbers, and that impact is likely to be permanent.”

The space crunch is being driven by a dramatic increase in the number of women getting jail terms longer than two years, sending them to federal institutions instead of provincial jails. Canada’s female federal prison population has grown by 40 per cent in the past decade, and that growth appears to be speeding up.

Crowding has become such a challenge that some federally sentenced women are being transferred involuntarily to provincial jails because there’s no room for them.

Women who’ve spent time at Grand Valley say the population explosion isn’t just making it more cramped. It’s also increasing wait lists for rehabilitation programs and pushing tensions to the breaking point.

“It’s just warehousing now. It’s not about rehabilitation. It’s pure security now,” said Toronto’s Surriff Atkinson, who was first sent to the prison in 1999 for trafficking cocaine.

Programs that once dealt with issues like anger management or violence against women have been replaced by religious-based volunteer-run programs that don’t appeal to all inmates, she said.

Inmates at Grand Valley made 124 formal complaints in 2010 to the Office of the Correctional Investigator, more than any other women’s prison in Canada, according to the 2011 annual report by prison ombud Howard Sapers.

Many of the complaints have to do with the conditions of their confinement, and that’s no surprise to the federal watchdog.

“The more crowded an institution becomes, the more there’s an increase in tension within the institution,” Sapers said. “It affects the institutional climate.”

It’s meant more inmates living on top of one another, pushing some tensions to boil over.

Former inmates interviewed for this story witnessed fights breaking out between women made to share tight spaces. The Elizabeth Fry Society and the union representing prison guards have raised concerns about the makeshift accommodations too.

Records show use-of-force incidents, reported security issues and assaults, both between inmates and on staff, are all on the rise, Sapers said.

Security staff has been increased, Dick confirmed, but that’s because the prison population is growing and incidents of violence have risen in step. It’s an inevitable result of having more inmates, he said.

“There has been a rise in the number of fights between inmates, yes,” he said. “You put more people into a defined space, and you’re going to have more disputes … There’s no question there is frustration with the added numbers.”

Some former inmates complain that wait lists to get into some programs are now so long that an inmate can spend six months at Grand Valley without getting in. But others seem to recognize the prison is at the mercy of the courts, which is sending a steady stream of women its way.

“It’s not really their fault that so many more women are being sent to prison,” said Georgina Poirier, a Cambridge mother who was released from Grand Valley in 2007 after a drug trafficking conviction.

“It’s hard to accommodate everyone, and there’s only so many (program) spots open.”

The warden argues that more judges are choosing to send women to federal prisons because they offer such a range of treatment and educational programs for women.

That’s a change from the 1990s, when many judges sent women to provincial jails to avoid time in Kingston’s infamous Prison for Women, the warden said. That was before the regional federal prisons were built to keep women closer to their homes.

The number of women in Ontario’s provincial jails, meanwhile, is actually dropping, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services.

“Judges used to bend over backwards not to sentence them federally. That’s all changed now,” Dick said.

For all its overcrowding, Grand Valley is still trying to do corrections in a more progressive way. Much of the minimum security unit feels like a high school, where women in grey sweatpants linger in the halls and offer a pleasant hello to new faces.

There’s a library, a “grocery store” where inmates can pick up their week’s food and cook it themselves, and a spirituality centre where someone strums an acoustic guitar. In a far corner of the property, inmates have built a “sacred ground” area, a space for campfires and quiet reflection.

There are classrooms where inmates can work toward their high school diploma — an important goal in a place where as many as six in 10 never finished school. Officials here know an inmate who is released with few job prospects has a good chance of returning to prison.

“If they don’t find work when they get out, they may be back,” said deputy warden Pam Gray.

There has even been a partnership with the Accelerator Centre, where inmates have been trained off-site to gain skills that could help them start their own business upon their release.

Within a few weeks of arriving at the prison, every inmate is entered into a program that teaches them about things such as addictions and employment skills. There’s a special version for aboriginal inmates, who represent about a third of all inmates.

There’s the gymnasium where women still play volleyball and basketball, but because of space constraints it also doubles as a meeting room for parole officers and social agencies. It’s also used for classes on everything from yoga to quilting.

Grand Valley’s founding philosophy of women living and co-operating together in small groups in a house-style setting is still working the way it’s supposed to, Dick insists.

And with an army of volunteers, estimated at as many as 600, coming to the prison to run programs for the women, there’s still a wide range of activities to help inmates better themselves.

“Certainly, as your numbers increase, the dynamics change. There’s no question about that. But I think we’ve been relatively successful in minimizing that impact,” he said.

The prison has also increased the number of officers running in-house rehabilitation and counselling programs, Dick said, but it’s not staffing that’s the problem. The prison now employs 214 people.

“Our problem now is not finding program facilitators, but finding space where they can do it,” he said. “As our numbers have grown, I’ve had to add parole officers. But we have not grown in space.”

Grand Valley is not the minimum-security institution it used to be, although about 60 per cent are here for non-violent offences, such as drugs, fraud or shoplifting.

Today, parts of the institution look more like a conventional prison, with a maximum security unit, segregation cells, uniformed prison staff and razor wire. About 20 per cent of inmates here are “lifers,” serving long sentences for crimes such as murder.

In 2004, Grand Valley added its 27-bed, maximum-security unit, which looks like the type of imposing cellblock you might see on television. Inside, groups of eight women live in small, college-dorm-style rooms with bunks behind heavy steel doors. It’s attached to the segregation unit, where on a recent visit a guard kept an eye on an inmate on suicide watch through a small window in her cell door.

“We’re seeing many things in women’s prisons that weren’t in the original plan,” Sapers said. “The environment within women’s centres has certainly hardened.”

Overcrowding has meant inmates are being pushed into higher level security classifications, sometimes unfairly, as violence rises, and many can’t access prison programs, such as in-house employment or mental health services, Sapers said.

With inmates sleeping in spaces they were never intended to, the prison ombud says, there are concerns around personal security, hygiene and access to fresh water.

An overburdened prison also spends most of its resources just trying to secure its own population, and has less time and money to deal with the rehabilitation of inmates, he said.

“As a consequence, we do see there are delays in getting people into programs, there are delays getting people into their treatment plans,” Sapers said.

But the overcrowding isn’t likely to ease any time soon, Sapers warns. Despite the plans for the 40-bed addition, he’s concerned the expansion may not be enough to deal with a coming influx of new female prisoners, thanks to new federal tough-on-crime legislation.

The number of women in federal prisons jumped by 15 per cent in just one six-month period last year, according to his office.

The plans for the extra beds at Grand Valley were made before the Conservative government introduced changes that are expected to place even more women behind bars, Sapers points out.

“The net impact of those legislative reforms will be to add new population on top of that which was already projected,” he said.

“It’s now an open question whether the additional capacity will be enough to meet the demands that will be placed on the correctional service.”

gmercer@therecord.com

A troubled legacy

The construction of the Grand Valley Institution for Women was in part a response to the troubled legacy of Kingston’s Prison for Women.

The 90-year-old stone prison, closed for good in 2000, was the subject of 13 inquiries and commissions, and was once famously described as “unfit for bears.”

In 1990, the federal government commissioned a task force that recommended closing the outdated prison and replacing it with smaller, regional residential-style centres.

The new era of women’s prisons ushered in a whole new way to house female inmates, with an emphasis on co-operative living arrangements and increased programming. Grand Valley was opened in 1997.

Grand Valley, by the numbers

 • Inmate population has tripled from 64 women in 1997 to about 180 today.

 • Minimum-security housing units have doubled, from eight to 16.

 • A 27-bed maximum-security unit was added in 2004.

 • New 40-bed minimum-security unit to be built next year.

 • New 16-bed unit opened this month.

 • The prison now employs 214 people.

 • There are about 570 women in federal prisons in Canada, one third of them aboriginal.

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Women’s prison a crowded, harder place