Critics urge change as Indigenous incarceration surges in province
65% of federal inmates in Sask. are First Nations, figures reveal
Efforts to slow the rate of incarcerated Indigenous people over the last 50 years have not worked because they’re aimed in the wrong direction, says retired Crown prosecutor Harold Johnson.
“Changes have to be made in the community. Changes have to be made with regard to policing and arrests and at sentencing, not by the time they get to being incarcerated.”
On Tuesday, federal Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger announced that rates of incarceration of Indigenous people have reached an all-time high and Indigenous peoples represent 30.04 per cent of all federally sentenced inmates.
The number of Indigenous people incarcerated federally has increased 43.4 per cent since April 2010, while the non-indigenous inmate population fell 13.7 per cent.
If this trajectory continues, Indigenous people could comprise 33 per cent of the overall federal inmate population in three years, Zinger said in a media release.
Numbers provided by his office on Wednesday show 65 per cent of federal inmates in Saskatchewan are Indigenous.
At the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, 75 per cent of maximum security inmates, 64 per cent of medium security inmates and 47 per cent of minimum security inmates are Indigenous.
Johnson, now an author and trapper living in the La Ronge area, is also an observer of the justice system after spending decades working within it.
In his book Peace and Good Order, Johnson traced the start of the steady climb in the number of Indigenous people incarcerated back to the 1960s. He noted that nothing changed in the 1990s after legislation was passed to encourage judges to pay attention to the unique circumstances of Indigenous people coming before court.
Johnson said nothing changed after the Supreme Court of Canada reminded judges of this through the 1999 Gladue decision and again when the Supreme Court reaffirmed it in the Ipeelee decision in 2012.
Sen. Kim Pate said she wasn’t surprised by the numbers in Zinger’s announcement. When she was the head of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, the organization signalled concern that the numbers continued to rise and would not drop unless different approaches were taken, not just by corrections, she said.
“I am concerned that it really signals the need for the government to do something radically different than what they have been doing.”
Pate noted in a media release that proposed Senate amendments to Bill C-83 would have “breathed life” into underused parts of the Correctional and Conditional Release Act which allowed for Indigenous inmates to be sponsored by groups to serve their sentences in Indigenous communities. Those amendments were not included in the bill that passed in the House of Commons. Few agreements outside of the creation of healing lodges have been implemented, she said.
To Johnson, the ethos of the justice system itself needs to change. It needs to move away from “deterrence” toward “redemption,” whereby people earn their way back into society, he said.
“We’ve learned that land-based healing works, compared to other treatment centres that have two to five per cent success rates. We saw a 70-plus per cent rate of success of land-based healing, especially if you couple that with trauma counselling.”
He doesn’t believe solutions that come from outside will be the answer, Johnson said, noting that the problem of rising methamphetamine use in southern parts of the country is creeping into the North and communities are trying to figure out how to respond.
“The answers will come out of the community. The people will figure it out.”