‘A national travesty:’ Prison watchdog urges reform to tackle Indigenous over-incarceration

Canada's prison watchdog is denouncing the over-representation of Indigenous people in federal prisons as a travesty while urging significant reform, as he releases the second part of a two-year investigation.

In the conclusion of his Ten Years Since Spirit Matters report, Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger calls for the devolution of correctional power to Indigenous people to address worsening rates of over-representation.

"The steady and unabated increase in the disproportionate representation of Indigenous peoples under federal sentence is nothing short of a national travesty and remains one of Canada's most pressing human rights challenges," Zinger wrote.

His latest findings were released Wednesday with the office's 50th annual report, which says the over-representation of Indigenous people in federal prisons has been an area of steady concern since the correctional investigator's office was created.

It's a crisis Zinger has sounded the alarm over with stronger language every year.

"I am deeply frustrated and disappointed each time I report on reaching or surpassing yet another sad milestone," he wrote in this year's annual message, dated June 2023 but tabled in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

"Canada's federal correctional system needs to get on board and begin to divest itself of the authorities, controls and resources that have kept Indigenous people over-incarcerated for far too long."

CBC News contacted Correctional Service Canada (CSC) for comment but has not received a response by time of publishing.

Zinger is scheduled to speak to the findings with Indigenous leaders at a news conference Thursday morning in Ottawa.

Correctional Service panned

The original Spirit Matters report was tabled in Parliament 10 years ago. When it was released, Indigenous people made up 25 per cent of federal inmates. Today, it's 32 per cent, with things still not improving, Zinger found.

The correctional investigator's team conducted 223 interviews with Indigenous prisoners, elders and spiritual advisors, CSC staff, and executive directors of healing lodges and community-based residential facilities at 30 penitentiaries and 81 healing lodges countrywide.

The findings offer withering criticism of Canada's prison system.

"The plight of Indigenous peoples behind bars has become steadily and progressively worse," he wrote.

"Indeed, Canada's correctional population is becoming disturbingly and unconscionably Indigenized."

Zinger concluded penitentiaries are "historically and inherently colonial institutions," limiting the progress that can be made in the system as it now exists.

He found "organizational paternalism" and "incapacity for self-reflection" in the correctional system, and expressed worry CSC is "playing a game of recognition politics, where it has learned to talk the talk of reconciliation to increase its resource base, quell the concerns of detractors and advocates, and stall for yet more time."

He also noted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 2015 findings on this topic remain relevant, but mostly unfulfilled.

"Loosening the levers and instruments of correctional (some might say) colonial control is consistent with the path toward reconciliation," Zinger wrote.

Key takeaways

The special report is structured into three parts, with each corresponding to an area under investigation: healing lodges, the Pathways program, and the role and impact of elders.

From these, the investigator distilled five key findings, all of them critical:

1. CSC is failing to make changes to address, mitigate and reduce the chronic over-representation of Indigenous people behind bars.

2. State-run healing lodges are funded, resourced and occupied at significantly higher levels than their "grossly under-resourced" community-run counterparts.

3. The contributions of elders are undervalued, under-reported and under-supported by CSC.

4. Signature interventions like the Pathways initiatives or healing lodge programs have no meaningful impact on over-representation because they serve too few people.

5. CSC's pan-Indigenous approach to Indigenous corrections erases significant historical and cultural differences between and among First Nations, Métis and Inuit.

Zinger has offered a list of recommendations to implement his call for reform.

The first part of the investigation was released last year; he has released the full two-part version online, calling it a roadmap for reform.