Prisoners have few ways to stay in touch with families, outside world

It costs the federal government $211,000 per year – nearly $600 per day – to keep a woman in a prison like Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women.

To keep them in the community, in a halfway house, costs closer to $30,000 per year.

But the costs to the offenders are often immeasurable – in some cases, a stint in prison costs them their families.

“There’s a very, very high percentage of women in prison that have children. Many of those women have children while in custody,” says Amy Reier, chair of the Waterloo Region Elizabeth Fry Society.

Sometimes, children are able to live with their mothers in prison – but there’s not much of that happening these days at GVI.

“That’s something that’s not happening because of overcrowding,” says Reier.

Sometimes, as happened to Marie Pelletier’s daughters, children of prisoners are shuffled between family members.

In Pelletier’s case, her daughters were cared for by their father while their mother spent time in jail for assault.

But when family members aren’t willing to take care of the children of imprisoned relatives, they often end up in foster care – which is how Pelletier herself grew up.

An aboriginal Canadian, Pelletier says she was placed with a non-aboriginal family that wasn’t sensitive to her background.

“We had to grow up with a lot of bullying. My culture was taken from me,” she says.

Aboriginals make up nearly half of Grand Valley’s population. Studies show aboriginals are overrepresented in prison populations across the country.

Aboriginal support centre Healing of the Seven Generations runs healing circles every week in Kitchener. Inmates sometimes join in, escorted by a prison staff member.

Centre officials says the circles make a huge difference in allowing aboriginal inmates to reconnect with their culture.

But for the majority of aboriginal inmates at Grand Valley, home is somewhere other than southern Ontario, and their culture is something other than the Ontario-based traditions evident at Healing of the Seven Generations.

“When we talk about our own medicine and our own tradition, that’s not Saskatchewan Cree and that’s not Mi’kmaq Newfoundland.,” says program co-ordinator Rosie Chrisjohn-Weiler.

Chrisjohn-Weiler says she’s trying to launch a halfway house in Kitchener specifically for aboriginal women.

For prisoners of any background, having contact with the outside world is a challenge.

Nicole Kish, who is serving a life sentence for what was dubbed the “Panhandler Murder”, considers herself one of the luckier prisoners at Grand Valley, as her family is able to pay her visits twice a week – the most the prison allows.

“We stick together, and they know just because she’s not with us on the outside doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stick with our family meetings,” Kish’s aunt, Wendy Green, tells CTV.

Still, family members note that the visits aren’t without their own heartbreak, including guards listening to the conversation and strip searches of Kish at the end of the visit.

For a while, Kish was able to communicate with the wider world by maintaining a blog. She would dictate entries word-for-word to her mother, who would post them online.

But the blogging stopped several months ago, with Kish telling CTV News through her mother that she faced a “backlash” from prison staff.

“Every time we speak out, every time we ask for answers, Nyki pays the price,” says Christine Lews-Bivens, Kish’s mother.

Blogging can lead to backlash, visits require visitors and phone calls cost money – which leaves letter writing as the only option for many women to stay in touch with those outside Grand Valley’s walls.

Abigail Bimman’s five-part investigation into Grand Valley Institution for Women is airing this week on CTV News.