When Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office a decade ago, he pledged “a total renewal of the relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples.” His Liberal Party committed to implementing recommendations from a government commission, which included eliminating within 10 years the over-representation of Indigenous people in custody.
With Trudeau due to step down as Liberal leader on Sunday, that overrepresentation has worsened. Indigenous people, who comprise 5% of Canada’s population, account for about one-third of federal inmates - compared to just over one-fifth in 2015.
High rates of Indigenous imprisonment are a problem in several Western nations. In the United States, Indigenous people are incarcerated at double the rate of Americans overall, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit think tank. In Australia, incarceration rates are 15 times higher for aboriginal peoples.
The problem is, it’s probably true that a greater than average proportion of certain minorities find themselves in legally questionable circumstances more of the time. This is because they’ve always been treated poorly, and had to adapt to survive.
And now those communities have generational problems and familial mental health issues because the fundamental base of their society and community has been damaged, leading to a vicious cycle of maltreatment and increased criminality.
In general, the solution is rehabilitation, not imprisonment. But it’s going to have to be a multi-generational multi-community effort, because for any specific criminalised individual, there’s no guarantee that one person can be rehabilitated; they might be too far gone.
Don’t get me started on the ham-fisted idea of taking children from affected families and raising them away from “bad influences”. It sounds like a great rehabilitative step on paper, but the evidence shows that it’s almost always the wrong thing to do. And it’s usually a convenient way to destroy families, community morale and culture foreign to those who would take the child away, anyway.
I mean, ideally it would be nice to rewind the clock and get all colonial Europeans out of the Americas (and elsewhere) so that the damage never happened in the first place, but those ships have long since sailed. Literally and figuratively.
The real reason that none of this is being fixed is that it’s cheaper and easier to simply lock up those who fall foul of the law. There’s racial profiling in there too, sure, but that’s all part of the cheap and easy part.
A real fix needs time, money, intelligence, compassion and effort, and those are in woefully limited supply. Sometimes deliberately so.