Prison problem persists

For decades, watchdogs and researchers have attempted to draw attention to the disturbing overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the country’s prison systems.

Yet despite urgent warnings from domestic and international organizations, the latest report from federal prisons watchdog Ivan Zinger makes clear the situation continues to get worse. Between 2007 and 2016, while the overall federal prison population increased by less than five per cent, the number of Indigenous prisoners rose by 39 per cent, Zinger reports.

In fact, for the past three decades, there has been an increase every single year in the federal incarceration rates for Indigenous people. While they make up less than five per cent of the Canadian population, today they represent 26.4 per cent of all federal inmates. And for Indigenous women the situation is even worse. They make up 37.6 per cent of the federal female prison population.

As Zinger writes: “The over-incarceration of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people in corrections is among the most pressing social justice and human rights issues in Canada today.”

The overabundance of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons no doubt reflects larger socioeconomic disadvantages for which there are no simple solutions. Clearly, until governments start taking more aggressive steps to address the poverty, mental-health issues and other intergenerational scars of failed colonial policies past and present, the problem will persist.

Canada’s shameful history of Indigenous injustice continues to play out graphically and painfully in our courts and prisons, which both reflect and reinforce these communities’ disadvantage. But the justice system need not deepen these inequalities; indeed, it can play a role in healing Indigenous communities and Canada’s relationship with them.

Reversing the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in our prison population is an important measure of reconciliation. Toronto Star