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Kimberly Squirrel
More information has come to light about the woman found frozen to death in Saskatoon on January 23. Kimberley Squirrel, a 34-year-old mother of six, was released from the Pine Grove Correctional Centre on January 20. Squirrel’s sister wants to know why the province didn’t inform her family that she was being released. While there are real safety and privacy concerns with respect to informing family members that a person has been released from prison without that person’s knowledge or consent, it’s unknown if correctional services even gave Squirrel the option of contacting her family and letting them know she had been released. It’s unknown how she made it from Pine Grove, in Prince Albert, to Saskatoon, but one defense lawyer, Aleida Oberholzer tweeted that she’s had clients tell her they would “walk home.”
Turning people out of an institution, be it prison or a hospital or a drug and alcohol treatment centre with nowhere to go, no one to lean on, and no money to support themselves is a kind of passive brutality that must not go unnoticed. Although Squirrel’s death lacks the deliberateness of the Starlight Tours, people still need to be held accountable. Why are people being removed from their home communities and placed in institutions, instead of receiving the resources they need to thrive in the places where they belong? Who in government has allowed for people to be turned out of prison without money, a ride home, or the support of even a single person? Why, after the shuttering of the STC, which used to transport people released from the correctional centre, in 2017, did the government not bother to make any other transportation plans for the human beings they are incarcerating? Why, after the freezing death of another person in Saskatoon just three weeks before, did that city not snap into action to ensure that, whatever the cost, not one more person would find themselves on the streets with no place to go? Squirrel’s story is a story of multiple system failure through negligence.
via Google Maps
The government has been slow to respond to the fact that rates of women in prison have been rising dramatically. In November, Julia Peterson reported on some of the struggles facing women who are involved in the justice system for Sask Dispatch. This includes a devastating lack of supportive housing for women who have been released from prison. And on Thursday NDP critic for Social Services, CBOs, Housing, and Human Rights, Meara Conway, herself a former Legal Aid lawyer, tweeted that “there were days I had the impression our system did everything possible to guarantee recidivism.” Turning people out of jail with nowhere to go leaves them with no good options, and it is not unheard of for people to break the law simply so they can be arrested and taken somewhere warm. For Kimberly Squirrel, she was literally left to die.
Police assault
On Wednesday CBC News reported that Angela Skjonsby, a Saskatoon woman who survived a serious domestic assault by her husband in 2009 has accused Saskatoon police officer Patrick Skinnider of sexual assault after she went to police to report her assault. Skinnider claims that the sex was consensual.
The CBC story is notable for the sterility of its reporting for the complete lack of analysis of the power structures involved when a cop makes advances on a victim (or, quite frankly, on anyone). Cops are notorious for being violent in their personal relationships. A 2015 book by Susanna Hope and Alex Roslin, Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence, found that a staggering 40 per cent of cops admitted to having been violent with their spouses and children in the six months prior. It found that Canadian cops are even less likely than their US counterparts to face any consequences for being violent or abusive to their partners (and their US counterparts aren’t exactly facing the music). RCMP who assault their partners may face as little as a 1 in 6500 chance of ever being held accountable for domestic violence, and are in fact more likely to be disciplined for theft or making a false statement.
raiva via Flickr
It’s critical to recognize the limitations on a person’s ability to consent to a sexual relationship with a police officer who is investigating their case. The unethical amount of power that cops hold makes it nearly impossible for someone to refuse their advances without fear that their case will be dismissed or even that further violence will be visited upon them. Further, they have no recourse to report the officer’s behaviour except to turn around and go right back to his workplace and file a complaint with his friends and colleagues. The only real solution - and this is not hyperbole - is to abolish the police and neutralize the threat of the inordinate power that has been granted to some citizens over the lives of others.
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