QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs
Overrepresentation of Indigenous People in Prisons
September 22, 2022
Welcome, minister.
According to Public Safety Canada’s 2020 annual report, in 2019-20 Indigenous offenders represented 26.1% of the total federal offender population, while Indigenous people make up only about 5% of the total population in Canada. In the federal prison population, Indigenous people account for 32% of incarcerated people.
Since Bill C-5 in its current form will not completely eliminate mandatory minimum penalties, which significantly contribute to the overincarceration of Indigenous and Black people, how is your government instead helping to resource Indigenous communities based on the priorities they have identified? What is your plan for meaningful consultation with the people who are impacted by your government’s policies?
Thank you, senator. Again, these issues are rooted in systemic problems with the criminal justice system, especially as it regards incarceration and its undue and disproportionate impact on racialized and Indigenous peoples across the country. Those numbers have spiked in recent years. They have gone up particularly in respect of the incarceration of women.
When I talk about the systemic nature of it, it has impacts in areas that don’t naturally jump to our minds when we’re only casual observers of it, but every woman in jail means a kid growing up without their mother, or every man in jail means a kid growing up without their father. It fuels the child welfare system, which itself is broken due to the underfunding of the Government of Canada, and it’s focused too much on intervention rather than prevention.
These are things our government has been working on in a systemic way for years. Yet the results are trailing. We see positive aspects of it, like reducing or getting rid of some of the mandatory minimum penalties, which are disproportionately impacting Indigenous and racialized populations. That doesn’t mean that serious crimes do not get prosecuted, and people don’t have to pay their time in a way that is commensurate and corresponding to the crime they have committed — that’s important — but the reality is that we have a broken criminal justice system when it comes to incarceration and its impact on Indigenous and racialized people across this country. There are many measures, including closing socio-economic gaps, that are key to driving results, which are trailing, unfortunately.
