Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

2022/06/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Another ongoing issue, one not easy to resolve but one would hope to see some ongoing progress:

The federal auditor general says Canada’s prison service has not given offenders timely access to programs to help ease them back into society, including courses specific to women, Indigenous people and visible minorities.

Auditor general Karen Hogan found Black and Indigenous offenders experienced poorer outcomes than any other groups in the federal correctional system and faced greater barriers to a safe and gradual return to the outside world.

Hogan pointed out her office raised similar issues in audits in 2015, 2016 and 2017, yet the correctional service has done little to change the policies, practices, tools and approaches that produce these differing outcomes.

Hogan says disparities were present from the moment offenders entered federal institutions.

The process for selecting security classifications saw Indigenous and Black offenders assigned to maximum-security institutions at twice the rate of other groups of offenders.

They also remained in federal custody longer and at higher levels of security before their release.

The audit found that timely access to correctional programs continued to decline across all groups of offenders. Access to programming, which teaches crucial skills like problem solving and goal setting, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of men serving sentences of two to four years who were released from April to December 2021, 94 per cent had not completed the correctional programs they needed before they were first eligible to apply for day parole.

“This is a barrier to serving the remainder of their sentences under supervision in the community,” the report says.

The prison service needs to find a different way to organize programming, because “that timely access is so critical to an offender’s successful path forward,” Hogan said Tuesday at a news conference.

Correctional service efforts to support greater equity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace also fell short, leaving persistent barriers unresolved, the report says.

Close to one-quarter of management and staff had not completed mandatory diversity training a year after the deadline.

In addition, the prison service had not established a plan to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of its offender populations, which has particular relevance for institutions with high numbers of Indigenous and Black offenders, the report says.

Hogan noted the correctional service has acknowledged systemic racism in the system, initiating an anti-racism framework to identify and remove systemic barriers.

The service has agreed to act on the auditor general’s recommendations to remedy the various issues she identified.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino stressed efforts toward “rooting out racism in all of its forms” by diversifying the prison service’s workforce, improving our training and collecting data to inform policies. “And we know we’ve got a long way to go.”

Mendicino noted he recently directed the correctional service head to create a new position of deputy commissioner for Indigenous corrections, saying it will ensure the overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in the system, especially women, is addressed.

Source: Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

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New data provides a rare glimpse at ‘substantial’ Black overrepresentation in Ontario’s jails

2021/05/27 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Nearly one out of every 15 young Black men in Ontario experienced jail time, compared to one out of about every 70 young white men, and incarcerated Black people were more likely to live in low-income neighbourhoods, a new study of hard to come by race-based inmate data shows.

Using a snapshot of every Ontario inmate released in 2010, self-reported race data, home address data and 2006 census demographics, researchers from the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, McMaster University, St. Michael’s Hospital and ICES, a non-profit clinical research institute, have provided a rare glimpse at “substantial” Black overrepresentation in jails.

“The key thing here is really just the extent to which young Black men experience incarceration in Ontario,” said lead author Akwasi Owusu-Bempah. “It’s hugely troubling, especially in light of what we know about the consequences of criminalization, of incarceration for their futures and the futures of their families and their communities. We know what it does. Incarceration derails lives.”

The jail data, provided by the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, held details of 45,956 men and 6,357 women who were released from provincial correctional facilities, which house accused awaiting bail or trial, and offenders sentenced to less than two years.

Overall, 12.8 per cent of men identified as Black and had an incarceration rate of 4,109 per 100,000; 58.3 per cent identified as white, for an incarceration rate of 771 per 100,000, and 28.9 per cent as “other,” for a rate of 1,507 per 100,000.

“Other” includes Indigenous, another group vastly overrepresented in jails and federal prisons but not the focus of this study.

For women, the rates were much smaller for all groups but, overall, Black women were incarcerated at a rate of 259 per 100,000, white women had a rate of 96 per 100,000 and the rate for “other” was 248 per 100,000.

Young men between the ages of 18 and 34 had the highest rates of incarceration in all groups, but young Black men had rates ranging around 7,000 per 100,000, compared to about 1,400 per 100,000 for younger white men.

Neighbourhood demographic data gleaned from the forward sortation area of postal codes showed Black men and women were more likely to come from low-income areas of the province. Black men spent more days incarcerated than white men and had higher rates of being transferred to a federal prison.

“This study demonstrates that incarceration is heavily concentrated among young Black men who come from economically marginalized neighbourhoods,” concluded Owusu-Bempah, an assistant sociology professor at U of T, and co-authors Maria Jung, an assistant criminology professor at Ryerson, Firdaous Sbai, a doctoral sociology student at U of T, Andrew S. Wilton, an ICES researcher, and Fiona Kouyoumdjian, an assistant professor in McMaster’s department of family medicine.

At the root of the higher rates are “historical and contemporary social circumstances of Black people in Canada,” note the researchers. These include 200-plus years of slavery and anti-Black racism, and disparities in many systems, including education, employment, child protection and justice.

Black people experience higher rates of child apprehensions and school suspensions and expulsions, and are more heavily policed, the authors said in highlighting disparities found in numerous studies, and also groundbreaking reporting done by the Star around Toronto police arrest and charging patterns and carding, when police stop, question and document citizens in non-criminal encounters.

Lower incomes for Black people have resulted in Black families living in areas that are “underserved by transit, libraries, schools and hospitals,” and those neighbourhoods tend to have higher levels of crime and crime victims, and concentrated law enforcement, the paper notes, citing academic work done by David Hulchanski on Toronto.

In the United States, the “American experience” with race and incarceration “shows us that concentrated incarceration has negative consequences at the individual, family and community levels, including social problems relating to poverty, mental health, education, employment and civic involvement,” the researchers wrote.

That ends up distorting “social norms, leads to the breakdown of informal social control, and undermines the building blocks of social order which are essential for community safety,” the paper concludes.

The often claimed but false trope that Canada is better on race and racism than the United States is also examined at the outset of the paper, which is published in the journal Race and Justice.

While not directly comparable, the authors later note that 2016 data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed Black men were jailed in state and federal institutions each day at a rate of 2,417 per 100,000. In the Ontario study, the annual incarceration rate in 2010 for Black men was 4,109 per 100,000.

That, the authors wrote, helps to “contextualize the extent of Black over-incarceration in Ontario.”

Owusu-Bempah, in an interview, said that “when we think about mass incarceration and we think about this kind of concentrated incarceration as an American phenomenon, I think we can see very clearly here that the levels of overrepresentation that we see in the United States is here in Canada.”

The age of the Ontario data — now over a decade old — speaks to how rare it is to come across race-based Canadian data, the researchers noted in an emailed response to Star questions.

“While these data are from 10 years ago, our ongoing involvement in the criminal justice system indicates that the overrepresentation of Black people persists today,” said the research team. “We think that monitoring and publicly reporting on the overrepresentation of Black people on an ongoing basis is important.”

In order to examine Ontario jail demographics, the researchers used gender and birthdates to link the provincial jail data to health administrative data held by ICES that was used in a 2018 study that looked at use of health care during incarceration and following release from jail. That study found the access rates of all types of health care were significantly higher for incarcerated people.

There is also a huge financial cost involved in jailing people. The Star has twice used inmate postal code data, length of incarceration data and daily cost of housing an inmate to show that in some Toronto city blocks, tens of millions of dollars are being spent to jail their citizens.

Preventing and reducing incarceration could free up money that could be reinvested in those neighbourhoods.

The authors of this report are part of a growing chorus of researchers, academics and advocates calling for more racially disaggregated justice data in Canada, which lags behind the U.S. and U.K.

More data around Canadian incarceration populations in provincial and territorial jails that identifies areas and groups experiencing high levels of incarceration, the paper concludes, “will help inform targeted initiatives to prevent criminal justice involvement” and “mitigate” the impacts on people and communities.

Source: New data provides a rare glimpse at ‘substantial’ Black overrepresentation in Ontario’s jails

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UK: Muslim community shuns women released from prison, says report

2019/07/17 Leave a comment

Of note. Likely varies within the different Muslim communities:

The Muslim community in Britain shuns women who have been to prison while forgiving convicted men, “no matter what they’ve done”, according to a report.

Female former prisoners told researchers, Muslim experts in the criminal justice system, that they suffered a “conspiracy of silence” after being released from jail, having to hide or move away in order to not bring shame on their families.

“Our situation is made that much more worse because we are women and within our community being a woman caught up in crime is one of the most unacceptable things that can happen to a family, regardless of the reasons. There is a more forgiving attitude towards Muslim men who offend,” say the former convicts in a foreword to a report by the Muslim Women in Prison rehabilitation project, which calls for a “cultural shift in the community’s approach to women’s criminality and also a fundamental shift in the institutions in their treatment of Muslim women”.

The Muslim Women in Prison project worked with 55 women on their release from HMP New Hall and Askham Grange, two Yorkshire jails, helping them reconnect with their families – or to start a new life if that was impossible.

One woman, speaking at the launch of the report in Bradford on Monday, described how her family would make her hide upstairs if they had visitors, following her release from prison five years ago after serving seven and a half years of an indeterminate public protection sentence.

In a film made to accompany the report, the mother of one jailed woman said that Muslim men could be convicted of “10 crimes – they could even kill someone” and they would be accepted back into the community, while her daughter and others were ostracised.

The report describes how women of Islamic faith serve an “unfair community sentence” upon release, when they are shunned by their community – “in contrast to the liberal and sympathetic treatment that Muslim men are often given”.

The authors, Sofia Buncy and Ishtiaq Ahmed, say that “izzat” (honour) plays a disproportionate role in British Muslim life: “Defamation of the family name, particularly by a female going to prison, can be the ultimate calamity on the good name, status and the social standing of the family.

“This can potentially result in marginalisation of the family by others – people no longer wanting to associate with them. Worse still, people may not wish to sustain existing or new marriages ties into the family, thus ruining family aspirations.”

One father told them: “What would people say if we took her back? I have other daughters of marriageable age. Who would want to ask for their hand knowing she lives in the house?”

One client at Bradford’s Khidmat Centre, where Muslim Women in Prison runs its resettlement programme, said: “People are usually very unforgiving if you’re a Muslim woman coming out of prison. A lot of the time we are cut off by family and community so no one else wants to bother with us either. Men are just able to come back out and fit in no matter what they have done.”

Other women told researchers that the Islamic faith was “sometimes unjustifiably used to maintain family norms and traditions which are based more on cultural and patriarchal constructs”.

Imran Hussain, a Bradford Labour MP who is the shadow justice minister, hailed the report as “groundbreaking”.

“It’s fine civil servants in London writing their reports about different communities … but this is a report where communities themselves take ownership of some very difficult and complex situations,” he said.

But Julie Siddiqi, a veteran campaigner, said the “elephant in the room” was that Muslim community leadership was still very male-dominated. She said: “If we are talking about community-led solutions, if we think that one-third of mosques don’t even have a space for women to pray, we have a long way to go … Unless we change the leaders in our communities, this work isn’t really going to get embedded properly.”

The proportion of prisoners in England and Wales who are Muslim has increased from 8% in 2002 to 15% in 2018, despite Muslims making up 5% of the general population. The proportion of Muslim women in jail increased from 5.2% in March 2014 to 6.3% in March 2017, when there were 251 incarcerated, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Source: Muslim community shuns women released from prison, says report

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Study: The Growing, Disproportionate Number Of Women Of Color In U.S. Jails : NPR

2016/08/20 Leave a comment

In Canada, 15 percent of those admitted to provincial/territorial prisons are women. For Indigenous peoples, the number is 20 percent for federal admissions, 24 percent for provincial/territorial admissions (Indigenous females accounted for a higher proportion of female admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody (36%) than did Aboriginal males (25%):

To be sure, the jail population is mostly male. Women represent 15 percent of the jail population in smaller counties, and slightly less in larger counties. But according to the study, the overall population of women in jails has ballooned since the 1970s, from just under 8,000 to nearly 110,000 nationwide in 2014, with low-income women of color disproportionately represented — 64 percent of women in jails across the country are women of color.

And while local jail populations are among the fastest growing correctional populations for both men and women, the U.S. Department of Justice reports that from 2000 to 2010, the female jail population grew at a faster rate than the male population.

….Swavola said existing research does not clearly explain the fast growth of the women’s population in small-county jails, but she pointed out that smaller counties can have fewer resources for social services, mental health resources and employment opportunities. “In those communities, they rely on incarceration to deal with people with mental and behavioral challenges,” says Swavola.

Laurie Garduque, director of Justice Reform for the MacArthur Foundation, which funded the study, says in many places around the country, jails have essentially become warehouses for the poor. Like men, most women in jail ended up there for nonviolent offenses. The study found that in Davidson County, Tennessee, for example, 77 percent of women were booked into jail on misdemeanor charges. The most common charge was failure to appear after receiving a citation.

“Much of the problems that bring women into the criminal justice system…tend to be low-level offenses or nuisance behavior that do not pose a risk to public safety,” says Garduque.

In their analysis, the researchers also found that 32 percent of women in U.S. jails suffer from serious mental illness, including major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Garduque says the trauma of being in jail can make it harder to cope with existing mental health problems. She says police officers, corrections officers and other employees in the criminal justice system need better training on how to interact with people with mental illnesses, and that this new research shows that mental health programs need to be more accessible outside of jail.

“Our aim here is not to improve mental health programs in jails,” says Garduque. “Our aim is to provide those resources on the community-based level to prevent women from penetrating the system.”

What’s more, many women enter the jail system having already experienced significant trauma. “There is a history of physical and domestic abuse for a lot of our moms,” says Samuel Luddington, deputy director of programs at Children of Inmates in Miami, which helps incarcerated parents stay connected with their children. Luddington says the current system wasn’t set up to provide that sort of care.

As for life after jail, re-entry programs that are developed with gender in mind are among the most effective, says Swavola, the co-author of study. For instance, Connecticut tried out a pilot probation program along those lines from 2007 to 2010. The project was based on the Women Offender Case Management Model developed by National Institute of Corrections. It was designed to take into account risk factors that girls and women tend to face at higher rates, such as domestic violence and mental illness. and partner abuse. It also encouraged women to have a voice in their own case management.

A review of women on probation who participated in the Connecticut program found those women were about 11 percent less likely to be arrested again after one year compared to women who did not participate in the program.

Source: Study: The Growing, Disproportionate Number Of Women Of Color In U.S. Jails : Code Switch : NPR

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ICYMI: Indigenous people overrepresented in justice system a ‘sad reality’: Jody Wilson-Raybould

2016/08/16 Leave a comment

The numbers are indeed shocking – our equivalent of US incarceration rates for Blacks:

The overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canada’s justice system, both as offenders and victims, is a “sad reality,” Attorney General and Justice Minister Wilson-Raybould said in a speech at a Canadian Bar Association conference in Ottawa on Friday.

While Indigenous people in Canada make-up 4.3 per cent of the population, they represent more than 25 per cent of inmates, Wilson-Raybould said of the most recent findings by Canada’s prison watchdog.

“This is totally unacceptable,” she said.

The justice minister also pointed to the following findings:

  • Between 2005 and 2015, the Indigenous inmate population grew by 50 per cent compared to the overall growth rate of 10 per cent.
  • Indigenous women comprise 37 per cent of all women serving a sentence of more than two years.
  • Incarceration rates for Indigenous people in some parts of Canada are up to 33 times higher than for non-Indigenous peoples.

She called the statistics “shocking.”

Source: Indigenous people overrepresented in justice system a ‘sad reality’: Jody Wilson-Raybould – Politics – CBC News

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The Cost of Multiculturalism: Canadians Turn Blind Eye to Race Despite a Staggering Black Incarceration Rate – Atlanta Black Star

2016/04/25 Leave a comment

A reminder:

Black Canadians are jailed more than their white counterparts and part of the issue is that Canadians don’t believe they have a race problem. They stay silent on the issue.

Howard Sapers, a Canadian correctional investigator, presented an annual report to the parliament that showed Blacks in the country continue to be disproportionately imprisoned. Since Sapers started his position in 2005, he said has seen the Black prison population increase steadily. In total, the number of Black inmates has grown 69 percent.

Torontoist reports African-Canadians account for 10 percent of the federal prison population even though they only make up 3 percent of the general population. A similar statistic rings true for American prisons. Blacks make up 37 percent of the prison population and 13 percent of the general U.S. population.

Despite Canada’s Black imprisonment rates not being that far off from American rates, African-Canadian rights advocate Anthony Morgan says Canadians don’t think they face racial issues. Instead, the silence about the alarming rates of Black incarceration stems from the idea that it only affects Americans.

“It has a lot to do with what I’ve called Canadian racial exceptionalism,” he tells Torontoist. “If America is having a conversation about the hyper-incarceration of Black males, in order to maintain our sense of moral superiority, we can’t look into those issues as we experience them here in Canada.”

Though Morgan admits that rates of Black imprisonment are a little higher in America than in Canada, he says myths about Canada’s embrace of multiculturalism also plays a part.

“The truth of the matter is,” Morgan tells the publication, “when you look in our prison systems, if you go to our courthouses, if you go at children’s aid offices, to school detention halls, it is overwhelmingly Black kids who are being criminalized and punished. I think the generalized silence has to do with what we want to believe about ourselves as Canadians.”

Source: The Cost of Multiculturalism: Canadians Turn Blind Eye to Race Despite a Staggering Black Incarceration Rate – Atlanta Black Star

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Indigenous peoples: In Canada, justice is not blind

2016/02/19 Leave a comment

The high numbers regarding indigenous incarceration rates are shocking. Comparable to Black incarceration rates in the USA:

While admissions of white adults to Canadian prisons declined through the last decade, Indigenous incarceration rates were surging: Up 112 per cent for women. Already, 36 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of men sentenced to provincial and territorial custody in Canada are Indigenous—a group that makes up just four per cent of the national population.

This helps explain why prison guard jobs are among the fastest-growing public occupation on the Prairies. And why criminologists have begun quietly referring to Canada’s prisons and jails as the country’s “new residential schools.”

In the past decade, the federal government passed more than 30 new crime laws, hiking punishment for a wide range of crimes, limiting parole opportunities and also broadening the grounds used to send young offenders to jail. At the same time, it has been ignoring calls to reform biased correctional admissions tests, bail and other laws disproportionately impacting Indigenous offenders. Instead, it appears to be incarcerating as many Indigenous people as possible, for as long as legally possible, with far-reaching consequences for Indigenous families.

But the problem isn’t just new laws. Although police “carding” in Toronto has put street checks, which disproportionately target minority populations, under the microscope, neither is racial profiling alone to blame. At every step, discriminatory practices and a biased system work against an Indigenous accused, from the moment a person is first identified by police, to their appearance before a judge, to their hearing before a parole board. The evidence is unambiguous: If you happen to be Indigenous, justice in Canada is not blind.

“What we are doing is using our criminal justice system to defend ourselves from the consequence of our own racism,” says Toronto criminal lawyer John Struthers, who cut his legal teeth as a Crown attorney in remote, northern communities. Rather than treat trauma, addictions, he says, “we keep the doors closed.”

Source: Cover preview: In Canada, justice is not blind – Macleans.ca

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