Décision rendue fin juillet | Une première peine adaptée aux criminels racisés au Québec

2025/08/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

Dans une décision récente rendue fin juillet au palais de justice de Longueuil, la juge Magali Lepage a condamné l’accusé Frank Paris à 24 mois de prison dans une affaire de trafic de cannabis et de haschich. Ce dernier avait déjà plaidé coupable. Jusqu’ici, rien d’inhabituel.

Or, pour déterminer sa peine, la juge a considéré la jurisprudence, une analyse de la preuve, une balance des facteurs aggravants et atténuants… mais aussi une évaluation de l’impact de l’origine ethnique ou culturelle (EIOEC), une analyse particulière qui se penche sur le parcours personnel d’un criminel à travers la loupe des barrières systémiques auxquelles il a pu faire face.

Après la lecture de l’évaluation, la juge a décidé d’accepter la suggestion de la défense, presque un an plus courte que celle de la poursuite.

Il s’agit d’une première au Québec. Aucun juge québécois n’avait considéré une EIOEC dans la détermination d’une peine jusqu’au 28 juillet dernier. La décision risque donc de faire jurisprudence dans le contexte québécois. De telles procédures existent depuis 2014, ailleurs au Canada.

Qu’est-ce qu’une EIOEC ?

Une EIOEC est un rapport présentenciel d’experts qui est utilisé pour déterminer la peine d’une personne racisée – mais qui est surtout utilisé pour les personnes noires. Elle est donc déposée après qu’un accusé est reconnu coupable, mais avant que la peine soit déterminée.

Le rapport fait un examen exhaustif du parcours de l’accusé, avec une insistance sur les « réalités propres » aux personnes racisées, à la « discrimination systémique » qu’elles ont vécue et aux défis spécifiques auxquels elles sont plus exposées (plus bas taux de diplomation, plus grande proportion de familles monoparentales et de père absent, plus grand risque de vivre dans des quartiers défavorisés et criminalisés, etc.).

On considère que ces facteurs, plus présents chez les Noirs, mènent plus facilement à la criminalité.

Comme l’explique Me Valérie Black St-Laurent, avocate et directrice des opérations chez Jurigo, « l’objectif d’une EIOEC, c’est vraiment d’informer la Cour pour contextualiser le parcours de la personne qui se trouve devant elle et pour qu’elle puisse rendre une peine qui est juste » et individualisée, comme le prévoit le Code criminel.

« C’est individualisé, mais il reste que les statistiques montrent que tout le groupe des personnes noires est victime de discrimination », renchérit Karine Millaire, professeure adjointe à la faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal.

« Il faut tenir compte du fait qu’il y a une surincarcération des personnes noires qui est issue du fait que notre système est aussi discriminatoire », dit-elle….

Source: Décision rendue fin juillet | Une première peine adaptée aux criminels racisés au Québec

In a recent decision delivered at the end of July at the Longueuil courthouse, Judge Magali Lepage sentenced the accused Frank Paris to 24 months in prison in a cannabis and hashish trafficking case. The latter had already pleaded guilty. So far, nothing unusual.

However, to determine her sentence, the judge considered the case law, an analysis of the evidence, a balance of aggravating and mitigating factors… but also an assessment of the impact of ethnic or cultural origin (EIOEC), a particular analysis that looks at the personal journey of a criminal through the magnifying glass of the systemic barriers he was able to face.

After reading the evaluation, the judge decided to accept the suggestion of the defense, almost a year shorter than that of the prosecution.

This is a first in Quebec. No Quebec judge had considered an EIOEC in determining a sentence until July 28. The decision is therefore likely to become jurisprudence in the Quebec context. Such procedures have existed since 2014, elsewhere in Canada.

What is an EIOEC?

An EIOEC is a face-to-face expert report that is used to determine the sentence of a racialized person – but is mainly used for black people. It is therefore filed after an accused is found guilty, but before the sentence is determined.

The report makes an exhaustive examination of the accused’s career, with an emphasis on the “realities specific” of racialized people, the “systemic discrimination” they have experienced and the specific challenges to which they are more exposed (lower graduation rates, greater proportion of single-parent families and absent fathers, higher risk of living in disadvantaged and criminalized neighborhoods, etc.).

These factors, more present among blacks, are considered to lead more easily to crime.

As explained by Valérie Black St-Laurent, lawyer and director of operations at Jurigo, “the objective of an EIOEC is really to inform the Court to contextualize the journey of the person who is in front of it and so that he can render a sentence that is fair” and individualized, as provided for by the Criminal Code.

“It’s individualized, but the statistics still show that the entire group of black people is a victim of discrimination,” adds Karine Millaire, assistant professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal.

“We must take into account the fact that there is an over-imprisonment of black people that results from the fact that our system is also discriminatory,” she says….

Patrick Lagacé’s biting critique of the EIOEC reasoning the judgement relied on:

La suite du paragraphe est hallucinante de déresponsabilisation : « Bien que M. Paris ait cru qu’il servait sa communauté d’une façon positive en donnant une tribune aux artistes et l’accès à l’internet, il y vendait aussi des substances illicites. En rétrospective, M. Paris croit qu’il aurait dû cesser de vendre de la cocaïne à cette époque… »

Et c’est comme ça sur 44 pages, cette « évaluation de l’incidence de l’origine ethnique et culturelle », j’en passe et des meilleures : tout est la faute de la société, rien n’a jamais été, rien n’est et ne sera jamais la faute de Frank Paris.

S’il commet des crimes, si la récidive lui tombe dessus à répétition, c’est parce qu’il est noir dans une société anti-black. Et handicapé, mais ça me prendrait une autre chronique pour vous expliquer cette intersectionnalité fascinante qui pousse aussi M. Paris à la criminalité.

Bref, je ne sais pas si les « évaluations de l’incidence de l’origine ethnique et culturelle » nées en Nouvelle-Écosse sont toujours de la bullshit, mais celle de M. Frank Paris, la première utilisée par une juge au Québec, m’apparaît comme ça et juste ça : de la bullshitpur jus.

Source: Un rapport vaguement ésotérique

The rest of the paragraph is hallucinating with deresponsibility: “Although Mr. Paris believed that he served his community in a positive way by giving a forum to artists and access to the Internet, he also sold illicit substances there. In retrospect, Mr. Paris believes that he should have stopped selling cocaine at that time…”
And that’s how it is on 44 pages, this “assessment of the impact of ethnic and cultural origin”, I pass and the best: everything is the fault of society, nothing has ever been, nothing is and will never be the fault of Frank Paris.
If he commits crimes, if recidivism falls on him repeatedly, it is because he is black in an anti-black society. And disabled, but it would take me another column to explain this fascinating intersectionality that also pushes Mr. Paris to crime.
In short, I don’t know if the “evaluations of the incidence of ethnic and cultural origin” born in Nova Scotia are still bullshit, but that of Mr. Frank Paris, the first used by a judge in Quebec, appears to me like this and just that: bullshitpur jus.



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Prison system failed to ensure security tests aren’t racially biased against Indigenous inmates

2018/06/16 Leave a comment

Significant:

Canada’s prison service is using security tests that may discriminate against Indigenous offenders and keep them behind bars longer and in more restrictive environments, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.

In a 7-2 decision, the court found that Correctional Service of Canada failed to take steps to ensure that risk assessment tests used for deciding such things as penitentiary placement and parole eligibility are valid and accurate for Indigenous offenders.

The case involves Jeffrey Ewert, a Métis inmate who was convicted of the murder and attempted murder of two young women. His lawyer argued the risk assessment tests were unreliable for Indigenous offenders, and that CSC had been aware of concerns about the tests since 2000 but had failed to confirm their validity.

The decision says that if CSC wants to continue to use the “impugned tools,” it must conduct research into “whether and to what extent they are subject to cross-cultural variance when applied to Indigenous offenders.”

“Any further action the standard requires will depend on the outcome of that research,” reads the majority decision, written by Chief Justice Richard Wagner. “Depending on the extent of any cross-cultural variance that is discovered, the CSC may have to cease using the impugned tools in respect of Indigenous inmates, as it has in fact done with other actuarial tools in the past.”

While the ruling found CSC breached its legal obligation, it did not find that Ewart’s constitutional rights were violated. There was no evidence that the assessment had no rational connection to the government objective of public safety, the decision states.

CSC has not said whether it will stop using the test as a result of the ruling.

“The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) is reviewing the decision and will determine next steps. It is important to note that culturally appropriate interventions and reintegration support for First Nations, Métis and Inuit offenders is a priority of CSC,” spokeswoman Stephanie Stevenson wrote in an email.

Record percentage of Indigenous inmates

The ruling noted the troubled history of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system, saying numerous government commissions and reports have recognized that the discrimination faced by Indigenous people, “whether as a result of overtly racist attitudes or culturally inappropriate practices, extends to all parts of the criminal justice system, including the prison system.”

Data from correctional investigator Ivan Zinger’s office show that Indigenous offenders are less likely than non-Indigenous inmates to get parole, and spend longer portions of their sentences behind bars.

It also showed that Indigenous offenders’ share of the total inmate population reached a record high of 27.4 per cent as of August 2017.

Justice Malcolm Rowe, writing in dissent, said that in his view, CSC only needed to keep complete and accurate records of the results of the assessment tools. He said Ewert should have asked the courts to review the specific decisions that CSC made about him using the results of the tools.

Ewert’s case was filed against CSC and the wardens of Kent Institution and Mission Institution, both located in British Columbia.

Addressing high number of Indigenous inmates

A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the government is taking steps to address the disproportionate number of Indigenous people in prison.

“We take the views of the Supreme Court very seriously and are examining the decision closely,” said Scott Bardsley in an email. “More broadly, the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in correctional institutions is an intolerable situation that we’re working very hard to address.”

The government invested $10 million last fall to help provide safe alternatives to incarceration and promote rehabilitation, part of $120 million set aside in last year’s budget to support the reintegration of Indigenous offenders and advance restorative justice.

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs intervened in the Ewert case. They argued that a bad risk assessment rating can mean an Indigenous prisoner is less likely to get parole, access to programs, or early or temporary release, and is more likely to experience solitary confinement and a maximum security setting.

Today, the BCCLA said meaningful changes to address over-representation of Indigenous people in prisons are long overdue.

“We are hopeful that the court’s emphasis on substantive equality in correctional outcomes for Indigenous offenders will assist over time in reducing the numbers of Indigenous people incarcerated,” said lawyer Jay Aubrey in a statement.

Source: Prison system failed to ensure security tests aren’t racially biased against Indigenous inmates

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Computer Program That Calculates Prison Sentences Is Even More Racist Than Humans, Study Finds

2018/01/23 1 Comment

Not surprising that computer programs and their algorithms can incorporate existing biases, as appears to be the case here:

A computer program used to calculate people’s risk of committing crimes is less accurate and more racist than random humans assigned to the same task, a new Dartmouth study finds.

Before they’re sentenced, people who commit crimes in some U.S. states are required to take a 137-question quiz. The questions, which range from queries about a person’s criminal history, to their parents’ substance use, to “do you feel discouraged at times?” are part of a software program called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, or COMPAS. Using a proprietary algorithm, COMPAS is meant to crunch the numbers on a person’s life, determine their risk for reoffending, and help a judge determine a sentence based on that risk assessment.

Rather than making objective decisions, COMPAS actually plays up racial biases in the criminal justice system, activists allege. And a study released last week from Dartmouth researchers found that random, untrained people on the internet could make more accurate predictions about a person’s criminal future than the expensive software could.

A privately held software, COMPAS’s algorithms are a trade secret. Its conclusions baffle some of the people it evaluates. Take Eric Loomis, a Michigan man arrested in 2013, who pled guilty to attempting to flee a police officer, and no contest to driving a vehicle without its owner’s permission.

While neither offense was violent, COMPAS assessed Loomis’s history and reported him as having “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” Loomis was sentenced to six years in prison based on the finding.

COMPAS came to its conclusion through its 137-question quiz, which asks questions about the person’s criminal history, family history, social life, and opinions. The questionnaire does not ask a person’s race. But the questions — including those about parents’ arrest history, neighborhood crime, and a person’s economic stability — appear unfavorably biased against black defendants, who are disproportionately impoverished or incarcerated in the U.S.

A 2016 ProPublica investigation analyzed the software’s results across 7,000 cases in Broward County, Florida, and found that COMPAS often overestimated a person’s risk for committing future crimes. These incorrect assessments nearly doubled among black defendants, who frequently received higher risk ratings than white defendants who had committed more serious crimes.

But COMPAS isn’t just frequently wrong, the new Dartmouth study found: random humans can do a better job, with less information.

The Dartmouth research group hired 462 participants through Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform. The participants, who had no background or training in criminal justice, were given a brief description of a real criminal’s age and sex, as well as the crime they committed and their previous criminal history. The person’s race was not given.

“Do you think this person will commit another crime within 2 years,” the researchers asked participants.

The untrained group correctly predicted whether a person would commit another crime with 68.2 percent accuracy for black defendants and 67.6 percent accuracy for white defendants. That’s slightly better than COMPAS, which reports 64.9 percent accuracy for black defendants and 65.7 percent accuracy for white defendants.

In a statement, COMPAS’s parent company Equivalent argued that the Dartmouth findings were actually good.

“Instead of being a criticism of the COMPAS assessment, [the study] actually adds to a growing number of independent studies that have confirmed that COMPAS achieves good predictability and matches the increasingly accepted AUC standard of 0.70 for well-designed risk assessment tools used in criminal justice,” Equivalent said in the statement.

What it didn’t add was that the humans who had slightly outperformed COMPAS were untrained — whereas COMPAS is a massively expensive and secretive program.

In 2015, Wisconsin signed a contract with COMPAS for $1,765,334, documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center reveal. The largest chunk of the cash — $776,475 — went to licensing and maintenance fees for the software company. By contrast, the Dartmouth researchers paid each study participant $1 for completing the task, and a $5 bonus if they answered correctly more than 65 percent of the time.

And for all that money, defendants still aren’t sure COMPAS is doing its job.

After COMPAS helped sentence him to six years in prison, Loomis attempted to overturn the ruling, claiming the ruling by algorithm violated his right to due process. The secretive nature of the software meant it could not be trusted, he claimed.

His bid failed last summer when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up his case, allowing the COMPAS-based sentence to remain.

Instead of throwing himself at the mercy of the court, Loomis was at the mercy of the machine.

He might have had better luck at the hands of random internet users.

Source: Computer Program That Calculates Prison Sentences Is Even More Racist Than Humans, Study Finds

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,