The scandal of Aboriginal incarceration in Canada is getting worse as “tough on crime” policy changes stamp out rehabilitative intent
A report by Howard Sapers, Canada’s Correctional Investigator, has found that over-representation of Aboriginal people in federal corrections is pervasive and growing. Today, 23% of the federal incarcerated population is Aboriginal, a 43% increase in the Aboriginal inmate population since 2005/6. One in three federally sentenced women offenders are Aboriginal. The highest concentration of Aboriginal prisoners is in the Prairie Region, and recent growth in correctional populations is primarily attributable to rising numbers of Aboriginal admissions and readmissions.
Lisa Kerr, a Trudeau Foundation scholar and doctoral candidate in law at New York University, observes in a Toronto Star commentary that while Métis, Inuit and First Nations people make up 23 per cent of the prison population, they comprise just 4 per cent of the population of the country. This rate surpasses even the rates of incarceration in the United States:
Levels of imprisonment in Canada’s aboriginal communities are higher than the overall incarceration rate in the United States — a nation that famously has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world and probably in history. There are 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons, with another 4 million under some form of community-based correctional control. No other country matches that, not by a long shot.
The U.S. rate is seven times higher than Europe, and six times higher than Canada. According to the metric that criminologists use to make comparisons, the U.S. imprisonment rate is 730 per 100,000 people. Canada remains at a safe distance: 140 per 100,000, with about 38,000 people in custody on any given day last year. When that number is broken down, however, the intensity of the impact of incarceration on aboriginal communities is revealed. Astonishingly, aboriginals are imprisoned at a rate in excess of 910 per 100,000 people.
The situation in Canadian prisons is worsened, Kerr writes, by so-called ‘law and order’ or ‘tough on crime’ policies:
A recent flood of policy changes seems designed to stamp out any rehabilitative intent. We have seen the cancellation of prison religious providers, the reduction of already low prison wages, and the elimination of standards mandated by the constitution in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. Access to college courses, widely available in U.S. prisons, is largely non-existent. Even voluntary programs of university-level instruction have been forcibly cancelled. It is unacceptable that this harsh and increasingly non-rehabilitative system is concentrated on aboriginal communities.
We speak with Lisa Kerr.
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) |
