Moving female inmates to HMP makes 'no sense at all,' says women's council

The head of a women's advocacy group and the head of the province's largest union agree: transferring more than a dozen female inmates to Her Majesty's Penitentiary in St. John's due to overcrowding raises several red flags.

• 'Desperate measures': Spike in female inmates proves prison system isn't working, expert says

• Moving female inmates to HMP 'the only option,' Andrew Parsons says

"I think it's an absolute crisis point, when you're talking about moving 14 inmates from a woman's prison, and putting them into an overcrowded, unsafe men's prison," said Jenny Wright, executive director of the St. John's Status of Women Council.

Government announced Tuesday that some inmates from the Correctional Center for Women in Clarenville will be temporarily moved to HMP in the next week or so. The women will stay there for an undisclosed amount of time — potentially one to two months.  

Wright said that transferring the women is yet another problematic instance of the way Newfoundland and Labrador deals with addiction and mental health. 

"It makes absolutely no sense at all ... We're seeing more and more women who are addicted and we have inadequate services to get them the help they need and the help that they deserve," she said. 

"A lot of these crimes simply wouldn't happen if there was adequate services to deal with the addiction."

Instead of transferring the women and renovating a portion of HMP to accommodate them, Wright said the province should have considered a more proactive approach. 

"Lets take the money that they're putting into renovations in that old prison and have a supervised bail program, so that people who aren't a threat to community safety can be living in the community, receiving supports, receiving treatment — but still being monitored and supervised during the period of the sentence," she said. 

"[They] are not violent. They're not a harm to the community. They're caught up in a justice system that doesn't work, a system that criminalizes their addictions, and often their poverty."

Sending the women to HMP is simply not the answer, said Wright, as both staff and prisoners have claimed that conditions are unsafe there. 

"Adding 14 more inmates to that situation, male or female, is just going to up the ante on safety standards, and it's going to be a huge stress on the staff there and on the prisoners there."

Wright wants to know how long this situation will persist, and what the province plans to do to address overcrowding in the Clarenville correctional centre. 

"We're not hearing anything or a plan in place to address the overcrowding, and that's our real concern."

Wright stressed the high costs associated with imprisoning people who have addiction and mental health issues, and the need for more permanent solutions.

"People keep going back into the system because they keep committing small petty crimes related to their need for their drug addiction and that just continues over and over and over." she said.

"Even if we can't sympathize, or emphasize, or understand the plight of someone who has bad mental health or may be living in poverty, we need to understand in the big picture there's a huge financial cost of incarcerating people over and over again, and it's a much higher cost than wrapping services around them."

Move raises red flags, NAPE says

NAPE president Jerry Earle also responded to yesterday's decision.

In a news release, Earle said that while the union has no concerns from an operational point of view, the entire situation raises red flags for the province's correctional department.

"We will monitor the situation going forward, particularly as it relates to safety of our members, and all inmates and the general public," he said.

"We will also be keeping a careful eye on any strain this may cause on an already thin level of staffing."

Earle the province's push to get departments to cut 30 per cent of their budgets isn't realistic in many areas — especially for corrections. 

"An already strained and stressed system cannot function properly with fewer resources than it currently has," he said.

Earle noted that it's the first time in 30 years that female inmates have been housed at HMP, and stressed the need to follow through on the decades-old promise that government will build a new correctional facility "sooner rather than later."

"HMP is crumbling down around our members at the facility and the inmates they care for. It is certainly not fit as an environment for rehabilitation."

Like Wright, Earle also asks that the province look at the root of the problem and examine how poverty, drug use and lack of mental health support has led to a higher number of people being incarcerated.