Report on Aboriginal prisoners in Canada finds limited understanding of Aboriginal people, culture and approaches to healing within federal corrections, especially among front line staff in facilities
A report by Canada’s Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers has found that disparities in opportunities and outcomes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders continue to widen. Aboriginal offenders now account for 21.5% of Correctional Service of Canada’s (CSC) incarcerated population and 13.6% of offenders supervised in the community. The total Aboriginal offender population (community and institutional) represents 18.5% of all federal offenders. The situation of Aboriginal female offenders is even more concerning. In 2010-11, Aboriginal women accounted for over 31.9% of all federally incarcerated women,9 representing an increase of 85.7% over the last decade.
CSC has established four Healing Lodges operated as CSC minimum-security institutions (with the exception of the Healing Lodge for women that accepts both minimum and some medium security inmates). CSC-operated Healing Lodges can provide accommodation for up to 194 federal incarcerated offenders, which include 44 beds for Aboriginal women. However, the Correctional Investigator’s report found that Healing Lodges are being underutilized and that funding discrepancies have emerged between First Nations-operated Lodges and CSC-operated Lodges. The report also points out that, due to CSC policies restricting participation in healing lodges to minimum or “low risk” medium security offenders, almost 90 per cent of incarcerated Aboriginal offenders aren’t even being considered for transfer to a Healing Lodge.
Kim Pate, executive director the Elizabeth Fry Society told The StarPhoenix that so few Aboriginal women qualified for the minimum security Buffalo Sage healing lodge when it opened in Edmonton 18 months ago that there were none among its first inmates. Pate said that the high rates of Aboriginal people being incarcerated results from discriminatory public policy going back for generations. “The situation is all the more dire for Aboriginal women and girls because they experience discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race,” she told The StarPhoenix.
We speak with Kim Pate.
RELATED | News release: Special Report on Aboriginal Corrections Tabled in Parliament (Mar. 7, 2013) | Read the full report in PDF | Summary of the report: Spirit Matters: Aboriginal People and the Corrections and Conditional Release Act | Winnipeg Free Press: Canada is failing Aboriginal Peoples who wind up behind bars, report says (Mar. 7, 2013) | CBC News: Federal response to aboriginal corrections report ‘dismissive’ (Mar. 9, 2013) | The Globe and Mail: Prison watchdog says officials ‘defending the status quo’ on aboriginal incarceration (Mar. 8, 2013) | The StarPhoenix: Few aboriginals in healing lodges (Mar. 9, 2013) |
