Incarceration doesn't further reconciliation
Correctional system harms Indigenous community, writes Pierre E. Hawkins.
There are harmful parallels in the discredited Indian residential school system and Saskatchewan's current correctional system.
Nearly 80 per cent of inmates in our jails are Indigenous. By focusing on punishment and disproven notions of deterrence, our correctional system perpetuates the problems that lead to crime and suppresses Indigenous prosperity. Reconciliation demands better.
I work with inmates every day. Nearly all of my clients are Indigenous.
They come from a variety of backgrounds, but a few threads run through nearly all of their stories. Most of my clients speak of their struggles with addiction and mental illness, and those of their families. Many speak of poverty. Many mention the harm that residential schools did to them, their parents, and/or their grandparents.
Typically, you can draw a straight line from family residential school trauma, to addiction and mental illness, to poverty, and then to the offences that have landed my clients in jail.
The policies that created residential schools aimed to strip away many of the positive benefits that Indigenous kids received from family and community — to strip the “Indian out of the Indian.” The schools were meant to deprive children of their families, cultures, and communities. They aimed to tear children down so they could be rebuilt in the ideal image of the church and the state. In many cases, this resulted in trauma, alienation, and self-loathing.
Following the discovery of 215 children in unmarked graves in Kamloops, the people of this country are seeking action. The path forward, to be undertaken in consultation with Indigenous communities and under their direction, must aim to expose truth, and to reconcile that truth with our institutions as they exist today.
We must identify how our modern-day institutions continue to keep Indigenous people and communities from healing and prospering. We must expose the ways our approaches to punishment and incarceration perpetuate into future generations the same kind of harm that residential schools caused in the past and is still felt today.
Our correctional system is built and operated to warehouse people removed from society, to punish them, to “scare them straight” by creating a jail setting so horrible as to be inhumane. In other words, our prisons remove people from their communities, traumatize them, and tear them down, without any real possibility that they will be reformed. Rather, this approach drives them to reoffend. It also drives them into street gangs.
The parallels between the correctional system and the residential school system are not lost on Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars. Some refer to Canada's prisons as the “new residential schools.”
The correctional system's approach also doesn't work. It does not meaningfully try to address the addiction, mental health, and educational challenges that lead people to commit crimes. We put traumatized people who commit crimes into environments of unspeakable violence and subjugation, expecting them not to reoffend. This approach is delusional.
If the objective of the correctional system is to make society safer, then the system is one of the greatest public policy failures of our time.
It doesn't have to be. We can interrupt this cycle of trauma and violence by reforming this system that now serves as a catch-basin for the problems caused by residential schools and other harmful policies.
We should invest in a prison system that aims to heal those in it, not harm them further. We should seek out programs which promote empowerment, betterment, rehabilitation, and reintegration.
We should provide meaningful addictions and mental health treatment and begin to repair the damage that residential schools have done. We should reform the physical environment of jails to reflect this purpose. We should treat people with less judgment and more dignity.
Some believe that the government has atoned for its sins and that we should all move on. In fact, we have not only failed to fix damage; we are still causing the harm. We must do better.