Addressing Peri-natal Healthcare Inequities for Incarcerated Indigenous Women in Canada’s Penitentiary System: An International Comparative Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s federal prison system is legally obligated to provide adequate healthcare to incarcerated individuals under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA), the Truth and Reconciliation commission’s Calls to Action (TRC), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Despite this, maternal and perinatal healthcare for federally incarcerated women, especially Indigenous women, is consistently inadequate. Indigenous women now represent over half of the federal female prison population in Canada, the majority of whom are mothers. The failure to provide appropriate care during pregnancy and childbirth in prison not only undermines health outcomes, but deepens systemic harms against a population to whom Canada owes specific reparative responsibilities. By situating the issue at the intersection of prison reform, public health, and reconciliation, this project aims to offer realistic, evidence-based policy recommendations to strengthen carceral maternal healthcare. This capstone addresses this gap by examining how other settler-colonial nations, namely Australia and New Zealand, approach maternal healthcare within their prison systems. Both countries face similar histories of colonialism and Indigenous over-incarceration, and have implemented targeted policies to improve care for incarcerated mothers. Through a comparative policy analysis, this research identifies legal frameworks, healthcare practices, and reintegration supports that could inform carceral maternal healthcare reforms in Canada. Namely, the continuity of care through midwifery practices, amending statutes to better support mother-baby units, and developing Indigenous-led peri-natal corrections programs. Ultimately, this work argues that improving maternal care in Canadian prisons is not only a healthcare imperative, but a necessary step towards fulfilling Canada’s legal obligations and moral commitments to its Indigenous peoples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".