Province gets C+ in report card on justice system

Saskatchewan’s high crime rates and disproportionately high rates of Indigenous people in custody have contributed to the province landing near the bottom of a national criminal justice system report card.

“There are significant and very serious concerns with the justice system in Saskatchewan and they are persisting,” said Benjamin Perrin, a co-author of the report, who is a law professor at the University of British Columbia.

With a C+ grade, Saskatchewan scored ninth out of the 13 provinces and territories for the second year of the report, released this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. The assessment is based on analysis of data from Statistics Canada.

Saskatchewan has the highest violent crime rate and property crime rate of any province in the country.

It also has one of the highest levels of Indigenous incarceration in Canada: In 2016, there were 4.7 times more Indigenous people admitted to prison than there were in the overall population, Perrin said.

“It should continue to shock us. It’s absolutely unconscionable that we see these astronomical rates,” he said.

The province also has lower than average access to fairness and justice, measured by its relatively low legal aid spending per crime.

“Indigenous peoples are less likely to have legal representation and as a result they’re more likely to have poor outcomes in the criminal justice system,” Perrin said.

“So they’re more likely to be charged, to be found guilty, to be sent to prison and to spend longer periods of time incarcerated. When you combine lower than average legal aid expenditures per crime with the already serious crime levels and the disproportionate level of Indigenous incarceration, it’s a really serious concern.”

Indigenous people also are far more likely to be victims of crime such as homicide or sexual assault, he said.

“We just cannot turn our eyes away from what is a very longstanding and very challenging critique of our criminal justice system.”

In Saskatchewan, 31 per cent of charges laid are stayed or withdrawn, thereby unnecessarily clogging the court system and inconveniencing people with charges that ultimately go nowhere, Perrin said.

“There needs to be a hard look at how charges are laid in Saskatchewan and a lot more work done at the front end rather than waiting for cases to be very close to trial before the plug gets pulled on them.”

High rates of stays and withdrawals tend to occur in provinces that do not require charges to be vetted by Crown prosecutors, he said.

Ontario does not require charge approval from Crown prosecutors and has a 43 per cent rate of stays and withdrawals, while Quebec has a strict requirement of review by Crown prosecutors and has a 7.4 per cent rate of stays and approvals.

A Saskatchewan Justice spokesperson confirmed that Saskatchewan gives police the discretion to lay charges, although they sometimes consult Crown prosecutors on particular cases.

On the plus side, Saskatchewan has among the highest clearance rates for violent and non-violent crime, it has a relatively low average daily inmate cost and confidence in the police is above average.

It is also efficient, having a lower than average median criminal case length (74 days), and more Criminal Code incidents per police officer than is typical in Canada.

The justice ministry did not have a general response to the report as of Wednesday afternoon.