Can you explain how inequality in Canada’s prison system is getting worse?
The country recently hit a grim milestone, but Indigenous peoples in Canada have long faced inequality in the federal prison system due to systemic racism.
Welcome to the 74th issue of The Supplement, a newsletter that fills in the gaps of your other news intake. This is Alex, one-third of The Supplement team!
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This week, we’re tackling this question: Can you explain how inequality in Canada's prison system is getting worse?
TL;DR: Indigenous peoples in Canada have long faced inequality in the federal prison system due to systemic racism. But the country recently hit a grim milestone: Indigenous women now make up 50 per cent of women incarcerated in federal prisons. The federal government has known about these challenges for a long time, but not many solutions have been successfully implemented for this crisis. Most recently, Canada is working on a bill to remove a number of mandatory minimum penalties, but critics said this bill doesn’t address the challenge enough.
Indigenous peoples have long been incarcerated in Canada at a disproportionate rate due to systemic racism. But the country recently hit a grim milestone: Indigenous women now make up 50 per cent of women incarcerated in federal prisons. For comparison, they only account for around 5 per cent of women in Canada.
The rate stands at 32 per cent when looking at all Indigenous people who are incarcerated in the federal system. This is still much higher than their representation in the general population in Canada, which was around five per cent in 2016 and is now growing.
The federal prison system is stacked against Indigenous peoples in other ways too.
An oversight panel found earlier this year that Indigenous people account for almost half of those who are placed in federal structured intervention units. These units are meant to be a “humane replacement” for essentially solitary confinement, but they are still the most severe form of detention.
An investigation from 2020 by Globe reporter Tom Cardoso also shows that race is the factor that makes Black and Indigenous people more likely to receive worse risk assessment scores — which determine important things like the detention setting’s severity and access to rehabilitation programs — than white people in federal prisons. In a follow-up article, Cardoso found that this bias around risk assessment scores can have an even more severe impact on Indigenous women.
Canada has known about the problem around the mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples for a long time.
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada already called the disproportionate representation of Indigenous peoples in prisons “a crisis in the Canadian criminal justice system” as part of the decision handed down in the Gladue case. At the time, they made up 12 per cent of the prison population — almost three times less than they do now.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission included a call to action for “federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody over the next decade.”
In 2018, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls reiterated the need to address this issue.
Amongst a number of measures, federal Justice Minister David Lametti reintroduced former Bill C-22 in December 2021 as Bill C-5, which is aimed towards repealing 20 mandatory minimum penalties that were introduced under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. (Mandatory minimum requires the court to give at least a predetermined sentence, regardless of individual circumstances.) The bill would also return the ability to set conditional sentences for some crimes.
But Bill C-5 still leaves behind 53 mandatory minimums, Senator Kim Pate pointed out. She is one of three senators who recently released a report that calls for the removal of all mandatory minimums.
“I’m interested in things like guaranteed livable income, and health care, and issues around clean water – the things that will actually create more substantive equality rather than more tinkering with the criminal legal system,” Pate said to the Globe.
Lametti told Globe reporter Patrick White in a recent interview that the fact that Bill C-5 left behind a large number of mandatory minimums is “a fair criticism.” But he also believes that the bill and the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will make a dent on the challenge.
Lametti also said the federal government is working on ways to develop a commission that reviews potential wrongful convictions.
Here’s someone to follow:
Much of our newsletter this week relies on Globe journalist Patrick White’s reporting, so it’s a no-brainer that we recommend that you give him a follow!
Here’s a story to check out:
Last week, the US saw several mass shootings across the country with some of them specifically targeting Asian businesses and Black communities. In the deadliest case, a white 18-year-old gunman has been charged with first-degree murder for shooting up a supermarket in Buffalo, NY where almost all of the 13 victims were Black. The gunman also posted a manifesto that espouses a white supremacist conspiracy theory. This New York Times article broke down not just the conspiracy theory’s link to various racist attacks, but also how right-wing pundits and politicians have amplified it.
Also The Times just published an interesting series that looks at how Haiti’s wealth was historically stolen through debt to colonial powers.