Women Offender Programs and Issues

The Cross Gender Monitoring Project
3rd and Final Annual Report

4. KEY FINDINGS
a) Introduction

This Section includes the results of interviews, as well as information captured during consultations, for example, with National Stakeholders, reviews of CSC's policies, reviews of complaints and grievance data and other statistical data. The Key Findings Section is broken down into a) interview findings, b) other findings, c) submissions from Stakeholders, and d) the legal context.

In terms of interviews, all 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. We met with Inmate Committees, Lifers' Groups, peer counselling groups, Aboriginal Elders and Sisterhoods in all institutions where these groups are active.

In a perfect world, it would have been preferable to interview a truly random sample of both staff and FSW, but in a prison setting, the difficulties of random sampling within a tight time-frame are less than workable. Both staff and FSW are occupied at a variety of activities during visits, and it is not always possible to pull selected interviewees away from their activities, even when the administration is notified in advance of visits. To refuse to speak to those who requested an interview on grounds of random sampling would also, we felt, have in some ways been a violation of our mandate. Finally, the wide range of opinions expressed in the interviews has convinced us that we were not exposed to viewpoints on only one end of the continuum

In terms of what we refer to as "other findings", this includes reviews of policy and other CSC documents and a review of related literature. This section also captures overview comments made to us during our site visits.