Mental health services failing federal prison population

Dr. Yvonne Boyer expects that her second phase of research into mental health services received by Indigenous inmates in federal prisons will show that Canada is not fulfilling its Constitutional obligations.

Boyer is wrapping up more than two years of research that indicates there’s a “huge problem” with mental health care within Canada’s federal prison system. Upon completion of this phase, Boyer hopes to get more funding that will allow her to look at the Aboriginal and treaty rights to health that Aboriginal people are entitled to.

“Then I will be applying that legal analysis to the results of phase one and then producing a paper that will probably show there are breaches to Aboriginal and treaty rights to health,” she said.

Boyer, who serves as the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Health and Wellness at Brandon University, says examining health care received by Indigenous people incarcerated in the Canadian correctional system was one of the pillars of research she established when taking on her position.

Boyer set that aspect of health as a priority because of her years as a lawyer and time serving on the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
What she and her team of students have discovered since beginning research in January 2014 is cause for concern. Suicide rates in prisons are seven times higher than the regular population.  Between 1998 and 2008, 100 inmates killed themselves in federal penitentiaries. And $90 million sunk into mental health services by Correctional Services Canada since 2005 has had little impact.

Boyer points to the case of Ashley Smith. In 2007, the 19-year-old woman strangled herself and died despite being on suicide watch while in custody at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont.

Boyer says the problem is that CSC attempts to control mental health issues by putting inmates into segregation instead of dealing with the underlying causes. Guards aren’t trained properly to understand the symptoms of mental health illnesses or misinterpret the behaviour displayed by inmates.

“The result of that is an increase in suicide rates,” she said.
Until CSC changes its policies, there will be little improvement.
For Indigenous people, the impact is even more frightening.

Figures recently released by Correctional Investigator of Canada Howard Sapers indicate that 25.4 per cent of those incarcerated in federal prisons are of Aboriginal ancestry.

“Because we have such a high population within the system, you can be sure there’s a high population of Aboriginal people, who are logically killing themselves, too,” said Boyer. She adds she has students breaking down that figure now.

“If you’re not going to deal with the root causes you’re going to get all kinds of issues,” said Boyer. “But root causes need to be dealt with within society first, what got them into the prison system.”

Colonization, bad laws, policies that don’t work for Aboriginal people, assimilation, residential school programs and “everything that has affected the physical and mental, spiritual and emotional health of Aboriginal people today” need to be considered, said Boyer.

A lack of cultural training also has an impact and there are only a few federal penitentiaries that offer culturally-appropriate mental health programming. For incarcerated Aboriginal women, this lack of culturally-appropriate mental health care is particularly damaging.

A lack of cultural training as well as only a few culturally-appropriate mental health programming also has an impact on the Indigenous population, particularly the women, in jail.

Boyer is eager to put funding into place to press on to another phase of her study, which will tackle looking at solutions.

“We’re not just going to complain about this, but we’re going to come up with solutions,” she said. “It’s terrible, terrible statistics, but we also have to say there are ways to deal with it … let’s have a coordinated approach.”

Funding for the first phase of research has come from the Canadian Bar Association. Boyer says the Law Foundation of Ontario and the Manitoba Law Foundation have expressed interest in funding the legal analysis aspect of her next phase of work.

Boyer also hopes to examine the provincial systems, but that will also require more funding.