Offenders

A healthy lifestyle is essential for everyone. Not surprisingly, a CSC fitness program that promotes a healthy lifestyle is helping incarcerated individuals improve not only their physical health, but their mental and social well-being.

Over the past three years, Edmonton Institution for Women’s (EIFW) gardening project has blossomed. What started as a small patch of vegetables has grown to over a dozen raised boxes, a medium sized plot, a few greenhouses, and composting stations—thanks to a group of offenders with green thumbs.

The Ephesus Project is a volunteer initiative that funds, organizes, and delivers post-secondary courses to incarcerated learners within the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) institutions. The project, named for the great library in the ancient city of Ephesus, a centre of culture and learning in the Roman Empire, seeks to bring wisdom and culture to the incarcerated.

For offenders from Nunavut, maintaining a relationship with family members and friends is a lifelong challenge. Nunavut consists of roughly 25 small and remote Inuit communities that are only accessible by air. There is a lack of federal facilities in Nunavut and offenders often serve time in the South away from their communities and families.

In an effort to improve the living environment of Indigenous offenders at Archambault Institution, and to make it more conducive to healing, the Aboriginal Initiatives team in the Quebec Region sought the services of Ms. Megan Whyte, an Indigenous artist and art therapist. During summer 2018, Ms. Whyte worked at the institution’s Indigenous Intervention Centre (medium security) to create a mural.

In 2007 Dwayne Cole was a Correctional Officer walking the ranges at Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba.

For Peter Stuart, Chief of Education at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, increasing access to post-secondary education for offenders can turn their live

In March, a group of CSC staff from across the country will start rolling out a new online tool that will help connect Indigenous offenders with their home communities.

Offenders released back into the community face a number of significant challenges, one of which is finding employment.