“Life, on the instalment plan.”
Toronto Star: That’s the way some Indigenous inmates characterize their prison sentences. They believe they’ll be released, but they also expect to be back — again and again, for the rest of their lives. And all too often, their expectations are fulfilled.
Something is therefore very wrong with our prison system’s treatment of Indigenous offenders.
Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger explained the problem in a recent report, and also offered suggestions on how to fix it. That’s not the first time an investigator has done so; for the past 50 years, investigators have detailed annually the crisis of Indigenous incarceration and made recommendations to remedy it, only to see it grow progressively worse.
While Zinger reviews that dismal history, he focuses specifically on developments since the 2013 publication of Spirit Matters, a special report on Indigenous incarceration by former investigator Howard Sapers. Few of those developments have been positive.
For example, Canada’s efforts to reduce its prison population have met with much success, as the population decreased by 16.5 per cent in the last 10 years. But for Aboriginal people, there has been only failure: In the last decade, the Indigenous custodial population increased by 22.5 per cent.
Consequently, while nearly one quarter of federal inmates were Indigenous a decade ago — a tragedy and a travesty given that only five per cent of the adult Canadian population is Aboriginal — things are even worse now, with Indigenous inmates comprising just under one third of the prison population.
This “indigenization” of Canada’s prisons is in large part the consequence of colonialism and its legacy: Residential schools, intergenerational trauma, the child welfare system, poverty, substance abuse and homelessness. Those factors aren’t the responsibility of the prison system, but the system often exacerbates them.
Indeed, Indigenous inmates fare less well than others on virtually every metric: Aboriginal offenders are overrepresented in maximum security and segregation, are less likely to receive parole, and are more likely to engage in self-harm and suicidal behaviours. Clearly, our prison system has not worked, is not working, and will not work for Indigenous offenders as long as we continue with the business as usual approach we’ve followed for the last 50 — make that 150 — years.
Zinger therefore suggests bold, unprecedented change: “Federal powers and authorities extending to the care, custody and supervision of Indigenous offenders should be totally devolved and transferred to Indigenous communities and organizations.”
On second thought, it’s not really that unprecedented, since Parliament set the stage for the devolution of responsibility back in 1992, when it enacted the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
The act permits the government to contract with Indigenous organizations to provide correctional services to Aboriginal offenders. Such services often take the form of healing lodges, where inmates serve part of their sentences in a culturally enriched environment on Indigenous land.
Healing lodges have been more successful than traditional prisons in addressing issues like offenders’ substance use and community functioning. Yet 30 years after the act was passed, only two per cent of Indigenous inmates live in community-run lodges, and there are no lodges at all in Ontario and northern and Atlantic Canada.
Increased government financial and moral support for the lodges is therefore imperative. But since most Indigenous inmates will remain in traditional prisons for the foreseeable future, Zinger stresses the importance of transformation of the system. That means indigenizing prison leadership positions.
And it means valuing the contributions of Indigenous elders who work within the prison system, and who currently make less money, have less job security, and receive less respect than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
Most of all, it means ensuring that Indigenous inmates can have productive lives inside of prison — and outside of it. Now that would be unprecedented.