Women Offender Programs and Issues

Cross Gender Monitoring Project

4. KEY FINDINGS

a) Introduction

This Section includes the results of key informant interviews, as well as, information captured during consultations, reviews of CSC's policies, and reviews of complaint and grievance data. The Key Findings section is broken down into quantitative and qualitative data and a commentary is included in the quantitative section to capture open-ended comments made by respondents. Interviews were voluntary, signs were posted and/or announcements made about our presence in institutions. In regional institutions, we also randomly visited housing Units to explain our purpose to inmates in those houses and interviewed anyone who wished to talk to us. Inmates from one institution submitted a petition to us signed by the entire inmate population. We met with Inmate Committees, Lifers Groups and Sisterhoods in all institutions where these groups are active. Although attempts were made to match the number of staff and FSW interviews, one of our sub-samples is lower in FSW than staff due to the voluntary nature of the exercise. However, the overall sample is more evenly matched.

Interview Schedules combined both closed and open-ended questions. As the Cross Gender Monitoring Project is breaking new ground, not only in Canada but in most jurisdictions, Interview Schedules emphasized open ended questions in order to determine issues and context for views expressed. This approach proved to be very useful in providing us with a wealth of comments, concerns and suggested solutions to problems. Different Interview Schedules were used for the first set of site visits and for the second series of visits. Responses to these questions were coded for data analysis and the findings are presented in the general categories as follows.

Preliminary comments from reviewers of early drafts of this report have indicated a desire for a greater breakdown of statistical information and more in-depth analysis of some of the findings. We have provided what we can within our own budget constraints, which limit the amount of time available for data analysis and writing. Despite these requests for more information, we believe that sufficient information is provided in this section to present a context and analysis for these findings.