Escape threatens healing lodges

Canada is a safe society. Absent occasional spikes in specific crimes, it is generally getting safer, and has been for years. This is one of the best, and least understood, new stories in recent decades. Crime exists, and must be guarded against and fought. But we live in what is, by any historical standard, an astonishingly peaceful age.

There is a dark stain on Canada’s criminal justice track record, however. Crime, and more specifically incarceration rates, are much higher for aboriginal Canadians than the rest of the population. Aboriginal Canadians are locked up at a rate roughly six times the national average. They make up about four per cent of the population, but more than 23 per cent of federal inmates. There is no real mystery why: many of the country’s aboriginal communities suffer from precisely the kind of socio- economic blights — substance abuse, broken families, low education, unemployment — that any expert will point to as absolute red flags for crime. This community dysfunction results largely from generations of failed, often racist, Canadian government policies.

Recent governments, left to clean up the injustice of earlier generations, have sought to improve this grim reality by a variety of means. One is the requirement that judges consider an offender’s aboriginal heritage, and the disadvantages it may have created, when imposing sentences. Another has been the creation of specialized incarceration facilities for aboriginals. These “healing lodges” are minimumsecurity prisons that, alongside traditional counselling and vocational training, offer aboriginal-specific cultural and spiritual education and therapy, in the hopes of rehabilitating aboriginal prisoners. It’s fair to ask whether special arrangements for natives violate the principle that all prisoners should be treated the same, but that should not detract from the determination to pursue whatever measures provide the fairest and most effective means of addressing the problems of Canadian aboriginals.

We don’t know if healing lodges work. Data are mixed — some studies show a steep drop in the rate of recidivism among convicts sent to healing lodges, others show that, if anything, recidivism rates for aboriginal prisoners are worse for those sent to healing lodges instead of the conventional correction- al facilities. But the effort, at least, is worthwhile. If nothing else, it’s worth a shot.

But earnest efforts to do better can go too far. As reported by the National Post’s Jen Gerson, a man with a long history of violent crime, including assault, forcible confinement and sexual assault, escaped this month from a healing lodge in Alberta. Darrell Moosomin, a designated dangerous offender serving an indefinite sentence at the Pe Sakastew Centre, was granted a release pass to attend a powwow with an aboriginal elder, but failed to return. He was located by police on Sunday, eight days after his escape, and is now back in custody.

Healing lodges are mini mum- security f acilities. They are not designed or staffed for the full- time, round- the- clock security dangerous offenders require. Moosomin, a man the courts have found to pose such a significant threat to the public that he was ordered detained indefinitely, should have been treated with the security precautions due an offender of his nature. He had no business being housed in a minimum-security facility, even one with the otherwise noble goal of providing an environment especially conducive to recovery.

Until we have sufficient evidence to declare, one way or the other, whether healing lodges are effective correctional tools, we should continue to experiment with them, and study the results. As years pass, we will presumably amass enough hard data to determine whether they are effective. In the meantime, the continuing experiment in this form of justice should be limited to prisoners who can be properly and safely monitored in a minimum- security environment. Any other decision is putting an admittedly noble goal ahead of a government’s most sacred duty — the protection of the public from danger.

It is also unfair to aboriginals, especially those serving time in correctional facilities. Healing lodges may well provide a valuable service. They could prove to be an effective tool for rehabilitating members of a badly damaged community. Allowing dangerous offenders like Moosomin to escape from minimum- security environments threatens public confidence in a program that, properly run, could prove helpful, even transformative. What a tragedy it would be to see avoidable mistakes doom a worthy experiment to early failure.