The Canadian Prison Program That’s Failing Incarcerated Moms
AMANDA LEPINE WOKE at 5 a.m. sensing that something was wrong. House 8—her minimum-security living unit within the Fraser Valley Institution for Women, a federal prison in Abbotsford, B.C.—was silent and calm on that September 2020 day. Her three-month-old son, A.B., was sleeping quietly in his crib nearby. (Chatelaine has redacted her son’s name to protect his identity.) Amanda had given birth to A.B. while incarcerated. Before he was born, and after considerable lobbying on her part, she received permission from a special governmental program for him to remain with her in prison.
Peeking into the crib, Amanda found A.B. labouring to breathe, his eyes and face grotesquely swollen. Though she knew it wasn’t possible, she initially thought somebody had beaten her son.
She used the phone in her living unit to call the prison’s main control. She tried to speak in a measured tone as she explained the situation to the guard: A.B. was having trouble breathing, and he needed immediate medical attention. The guard, seemingly uninterested, told her someone would be down in 20 minutes.
“It felt like my son was going to die,” Amanda says. “I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t just walk out the gate. I couldn’t just call a cab. I couldn’t call an ambulance myself.”
Amanda roused the women in her residential-style living unit. They took turns at the house phone trying to persuade guards to help. One of the women who was in House 8 with Amanda that morning says she considered running outside of the unit to attract the guards’ attention. The front door was unlocked, but exiting the house without approval would have been a serious infraction with grave consequences. “You just feel so helpless,” she says. “It’s really sad that if I run out of the house, they’re there within 30 seconds, right? But, if a baby needs help, it takes 20 minutes for somebody to saunter over.”
Because calls from Amanda’s living unit were restricted to specific numbers, she eventually phoned The Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba, where she knew someone would pick up that early in the morning. She asked them to call an ambulance.
Only once paramedics arrived at the prison gate and refused to leave without A.B.—another 20 minutes—did the guards relent and escort Amanda and her son to the hospital. From a doctor, Amanda learned that A.B. had an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin he was prescribed for an infection.
Amanda is one of more than 100 incarcerated women across Canada who have participated in the institutional Mother-Child Program (MCP), a government initiative intended to keep families together and reduce the chances of reoffence among participants. But those good intentions don’t always translate to positive outcomes. (When asked to comment on Amanda’s case, a Correctional Service Canada spokesperson wrote, “As this is currently a matter before the [Canadian Human Rights] tribunal, CSC is unable to comment any further.”)
Children who are approved for the residential component of the MCP can live with their mothers full-time in prison until their fifth birthday. Part-time residency is also available for some children until their seventh birthday, and older children can stay temporarily in private visiting units until they reach the age of majority.
Mothers are eligible to participate in the program if they’re classified as minimum- or medium-security, if the relevant provincial child welfare agency supports their application, and if they have no mental-health conditions or criminal charges that make them unfit to care for a child. They must also have a designated inmate babysitter—another prisoner who has undergone requisite child-care training, including first aid, and is the only other person aside from the mother allowed to care for the child in prison—and an alternate caregiver who lives in the community outside the prison.
The MCP was fully implemented in 2001 as part of a progressive shift in women’s corrections in Canada. A 1990 national report on the condition of women’s prisons helped pave the way for the closure of Kingston’s notorious Prison for Women (P4W), at the time Canada’s only federal women’s institution. In its place, six regional facilities around the country were opened between 1995 and 2004. All six had to implement the MCP and have the capacity to support women and their children behind bars.
In 2022, Public Safety Canada pointed to the MCP as a cutting-edge initiative with the potential to reduce recidivism among incarcerated women at a time when women’s incarceration rates are rising at an alarming rate, especially among Indigenous women. It has indicated that the government would like to expand the program. And news reports about the MCP often laud it for being progressive.
But Amanda’s struggle to care for her son illustrates what scholars and advocacy groups have long argued about the program: For all its potential, the MCP is often unable to support incarcerated mothers and even undermines their efforts to care for their children, ultimately setting them up for failure.
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AMANDA INITIALLY DIDN’T want to participate in the Mother-Child Program. She worried about her son’s safety in prison. But she came to believe that the alternative was worse: B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development would remove A.B. from her care, she thought, and she would struggle to get him back after her release. As a Métis woman, she was wary of the ministry because of the legacy of state intervention in the lives of Indigenous and Métis families—from residential schools to the Sixties Scoop to today’s over-representation of Indigenous and Métis children in the child-welfare system. She had personally experienced the traumatic forced removal of her three older children by the Manitoba Ministry of Child and Family Services (with one of her kids experiencing abuse after being removed from her care). Her fear had context. Prison was not an ideal environment for A.B., but at least she could raise him herself and keep him safe.
Amanda was thrilled to be pregnant, excited for the arrival of her son. She wanted another baby. “I wanted a chance to be a mother again,” she says, “as the system took my first three from me and didn’t allow me to be a parent.”
A.B. was born five weeks early because Amanda had to be induced due to medical complications, including gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia and the fact that, at the age of 40, she was considered an older mother. Male correctional officers, she says, were present at the hospital throughout her labour and the birth, despite her request for an unescorted temporary absence for medical purposes. The guards refused to allow her doula in the room. Amanda alleges they threatened to handcuff and shackle her while she was lying in her hospital bed (to which a nurse objected). They occupied the seating area in Amanda’s hospital room, playing loud videos on their phones. They insisted that the lights in her room remain on, always. Once, when she cried out in pain during labour, one of the male guards yelled at her to “be respectful.”
After A.B.’s birth, Amanda alleges that the MCP proved dysfunctional, even damaging. She says her efforts to buy her son even the most basic necessities of life—including food—were met with bureaucratic mismanagement, incompetence and maliciousness.
Citing COVID-19 concerns, CSC suspended the escorted temporary absences that allowed Amanda to buy groceries for A.B., she says, insisting that she instead rely on the prison’s dysfunctional Inmate Transfer of Funds process to have supplies ordered on her behalf.
Amanda’s orders would often take weeks to process, and they would frequently be wrong, if they were filled at all. Diapers that she ordered arrived nearly a month later; by then, they were too small for A.B. Using the creaky machinery of prison bureaucracy to access formula was a nightmare. In the first three weeks of A.B.’s life, she had to ration his formula to maintain her dwindling supply, doling it out in small amounts rather than meeting his needs. She would often receive toddler rather than infant formula, or powdered rather than liquid formula.
Ultimately, because of the scarcity of formula and because she believed she had no alternative, Amanda started feeding A.B. cow’s milk when he was around four months old, even though it is not medically recommended. A.B. developed issues with chronic constipation as a result. (Only emergency health care is provided to children who are part of the MCP, so there was no institutional intervention in A.B.’s case.)
Then, in November 2020, Amanda submitted a food order that included milk for five-month-old A.B. Unaware that the order wouldn’t be filled for nearly four weeks, she waited. As the weeks ticked past and her milk supply dwindled, she started to panic. She desperately tried to source the milk: She placed multiple orders, pleaded with guards and asked for milk from the prison kitchen, all to no avail. Ultimately, A.B. went without milk for 24 hours. (As previously noted, CSC would not comment on this case.)
Looking back on the incident, Amanda is perplexed. Thinking of the guards and officials who refused to help her find milk to feed A.B., she says, “That was like, you have no compassion for a newborn. You have no empathy for me as a mom.”
But correctional officers and other prison staff often have little incentive to be compassionate or empathetic; instead, security seems to be the overriding mandate of the prison. That’s perhaps why guards weren’t especially helpful when A.B. had trouble breathing and needed medical care. Based on the policies of the MCP, he was technically Amanda’s responsibility, not the prison’s, and so the guards demonstrated no compulsion to prioritize his needs. But that’s also why the woman in Amanda’s living unit considered breaking the rules in order to get attention for A.B.: She knew the guards would respond immediately to such an infraction.
Senator Kim Pate is a former executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS). She tells Chatelaine that CSC’s focus on security overrides all other concerns in prisons: “Security always trumps therapy, programming, rehabilitation and community support. Security will always trump [everything].... It’s the nature of the institution.”
But CSC’s overemphasis on security procedures often undermines the goals of the MCP. Some formerly incarcerated women tell Chatelaine that they were released from prison with little support from the institution and had to adhere to regulations that increased rather than decreased their chances of recidivating. One of the MCP’s first participants, Bobbie Kidd, who lived with her infant son at P4W in 1993, says she and her son left prison with little institutional support even though she had spent years behind bars and had no resources on the outside. Because she was on parole, she was ineligible for welfare, so they had to survive on just $28 a week. Driven by her desperation to care for her child and unable to find a job with a schedule that would also allow her to attend meetings with her parole officer, Bobbie applied for and received welfare, resulting in her eventual arrest and reimprisonment for fraud.
The MCP has been little used throughout its existence despite being flagged by the federal government as an important tool for reducing recidivism. Imprisoned mothers report being unable to participate in the program because of its overly strict eligibility criteria as well as limited space and delays in receiving approval.
According to Dr. Martha Paynter, who holds a PhD in nursing and is one of the few scholars to have studied the MCP, while the program is offered in six federal facilities in different regions around the country, many mothers are still incarcerated far from home. They and their families often don’t have the resources to have someone live in the local community as an alternate caregiver. This is particularly true for Indigenous women from rural communities, especially northern ones.
Paynter also notes that the MCP is only available to mothers classified as minimum- or medium-security according to the commissioner’s directive. But Indigenous women tend to receive higher security classifications. A Supreme Court ruling, a Senate report and a 2020 Globe and Mail investigation have all identified this as discriminatory. As a result, Indigenous mothers are often ineligible for the program, so their children are removed from them and are sometimes placed with provincial child-welfare agencies or with other family members. “I’ve seen women have their babies and they get taken away right at the birth,” one imprisoned woman told Paynter in a Reproductive Justice Workshop in 2019. Forced separations can be deeply traumatic for mothers and their children, especially for Indigenous families suffering from a colonial system that has historically targeted, traumatized and divided them.
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SO WHAT CAN be done to make the system better for incarcerated women and their children? And, as a result, better position those women for life on the outside—and achieve the federal government’s goal of reducing recidivism in this country?
“Expediting [MCP] applications, supporting applicants in their assessments with Child and Family Services and addressing infrastructural issues such as space limitations” would help make the program more accessible, writes Paynter and her colleagues in one of the few academic studies of the program. But when asked about expanding the MCP, Paynter is hesitant. “It would be unacceptable for me to recommend expanding a program that we have no evidence of being beneficial for the child’s well-being,” she says. “I do not think we need to expand this program at all.”
Pate takes a similar position. She adds that it’s ultimately “impossible for prisons to be rehabilitative.... That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t insist on the principle of rehabilitation within the sentencing models,” she cautions, “but we do have to rethink how that’s done.”
Emilie Coyle, the current executive director at CAEFS, says the organization recognizes that it’s important for children to be with their mothers, and the MCP is currently the only option that makes that possible. But, echoing the sentiments of Paynter and Pate, Coyle emphasizes that prisons are not “therapeutic places” and says we should rely less on prisons and more on community options if we want to have a positive impact on the lives of mothers and children, recidivism rates and Canadian communities. In other words, for the MCP to meet its purpose of fostering positive mother-child relationships, the model of the program requires a reimagining rather than expansion—a move toward alternative forms of custody in the community that may allow for a supportive environment conducive to raising a child.
Today, Amanda and A.B. are outside prison, living in B.C. Amanda has filed a human rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on behalf of her son and is seeking compensation for CSC’s failure to accommodate her needs throughout her pregnancy and childbirth and while she raised A.B. during her incarceration. But her complaint, which is set to be heard in December, also argues for systemic changes within Canada’s prisons. “I’m trying to change the policy,” she says, “so that they’re actually helping with children’s needs.”
Update: This story has been updated to redact the name of Lepine’s son.
This story appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Chatelaine. Purchase the issue or subscribe to the magazine for more longform journalism.
