Number of Indigenous people in our jails is shameful
Not long ago, First Nations people “caught” leaving their reserve would be arrested and thrown in jail. More recently, Indigenous children were stolen from their parents by the Canadian government, to attend residential schools, in what has been described as cultural genocide. A justice system that targets Indigenous peoples is nothing new in Canada.
Given that history, one might expect Canadians would be particularly sensitive to the systematic and disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous people. Canadians should be shocked to learn that nearly half of youth in our jails are Indigenous. We should be gobsmacked to learn that 98 per cent of girls in Saskatchewan jails are Indigenous. In Manitoba, about 80 per cent of both girls and boys in custody are Indigenous.
The situation is no less alarming with adults. Forty-three per cent of adult women in Canadian jails are Indigenous. Yet Indigenous people make up only 5 per cent of the overall population.
Some of the right things are being said. Chief Justice Richard Wagner has called the situation “unacceptable.” Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould acknowledges the causes of the overrepresentation can be traced back to the damage done by colonialism.
But if you thought something serious was being done to rectify the issues, you would be wrong.
Many of the solutions to this problem are not new and have been put into practice with success in other jurisdictions. Properly funding and applying restorative justice programs, rather than making them subject to the whims of government cuts, is an essential part of the solution.
More important, provinces need to start applying the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in R v Antic, which repeated and clarified the rules for bail, including the presumption that a person not convicted of a crime shouldn’t be in jail. That is no small matter in a province like Manitoba, where over 70 per cent of inmates are in “pre-trial detention” — they’re awaiting trial, not proven guilty of a crime.
Ontario announced changes last November to its bail policy that would have the effect of reducing the jail population during the pretrial period. All provinces ought to follow Ontario’s lead. Ending the practice of requiring cash or a promise of payment in exchange for bail — which has the effect of criminalizing poverty — would make a substantial difference.
As would requiring Crown attorneys and judges to demand only the fewest necessary conditions on a bail order. That means not telling alcoholics that in order to stay out of jail, they need to abstain from alcohol, for example, and not telling a person with a minimumwage job who relies on public transit that they need to report to an office on the other side of the city within two days of getting bail.
To call these numbers of incarcerated a crisis would be the understatement of the century. We cannot as a society be OK with this, and we cannot be OK with moving on from this, as we do with so many other headlines, without taking real action.