PART 12
December 18, 2008 Ottawa Sun
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media
OTTAWA — Throughout the year, Howard Sapers conducts “daily snapshots” of the federal prison system, using the hammer of his mandate as chief ombudsman overseeing the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
He has what he calls “golden key access.”
What he asks of prison officials, and Corrections Canada bureaucrats, he must receive.
There is no such thing as a “no.”
In one of those recent “snapshots,” Sapers asked for the breakdown of the number of women in the federal prison system who, on that particular day, chosen out of the blue, were locked away in segregation cells.
All, as it turned out, were aboriginal women — as in 100%. There was not a non-aboriginal inmate among them, even though non-aboriginal women make up two-thirds of the women serving federal time. And it has not changed.
“The last time I looked, every woman in segregation, and who was considered maximum-security risk, was an aboriginal,” says Sapers. “If that’s not over-representation, and reflecting a systemic problem, what is?
“The fact that a third of the 600 women in federal prisons are aboriginal is, in itself, an over-representation.
“But not one non-aboriginal in segregation? Just aboriginal women? What’s that say?”
Howard Sapers’ office sits on the 10th floor of a non-descript edifice in downtown Ottawa, the majority of the floors leased by the Department of National Defence.
It is a highly fortified office. The entrance off the elevator is akin to a prison waiting room. The doors are locked. The glass is unbreakable. Security cameras abound.
Once inside, a picture of a recently-released inmate can be seen taped to a wall, a heads-up as a result of a death threat issued to one of Sapers’ 24 staff members — half of them correctional investigators, half of them research analysts.
“This is not an advocacy office,” says Sapers. “We investigate complaints from prisoners — some 7,000 complaints a year — and we render our conclusions.
“Obviously not all of them favour the prisoner.”
Hence, the occasional death threat.
Over the course of his tenure as ombudsman, a position he has held since the spring of 2004, the 51-year-old criminologist, and former member of the Alberta legislature, has not backed away from his criticism of Corrections Canada over its treatment of aboriginal inmates who, across this nation, represent a full 20% of the federal prison population while representing only 3% of the census.
Sapers calls it “systemic discrimination.”
He does not call it racism, and is precise with his words.
“The difference in correctional outcomes when it comes to aboriginals is quite striking, and it has been documented year-after-year during this office’s 35 years of existence,” says Sapers. “Aboriginal offenders serve more of their sentences in custody before their releases when compared to non-aboriginal offenders — and that’s whether their releases be conditional or unsupervised.
“They serve more of their sentence than non-aboriginal offenders in higher security classifications. They serve a large proportion of their sentences in segregation. They have lower program completion rates inside penitentiaries. And they have higher suspension and recidivism rates once they are released from prisons,” says Sapers.
“And it’s even more acute for female aboriginal offenders.”
Asked if racism is the reason, Sapers pauses.
“I don’t want to dodge this, because it is important. But I also want to be careful how I say it,” he says. “My conclusion is that the cause of all this is systemic discrimination.
“Now, systemic discrimination does not equal individual acts of racism. Systemic discrimination is often the unintended consequences of otherwise benign policies and procedures.
“So, it’s not like anybody set out to have differential outcomes,” says Sapers. “What you have, though, is a series of policies, procedures and interventions that were not designed to be discriminatory, but their outcomes are too often discriminatory.
“What it boils down to is cultural insensitivity.”
As an example, Sapers cites actuarial scenarios that are used to determine whether an offender is high risk — like family stability, educational achievement, family histories of alcoholism and drug addiction, mental illness, employment.
“When you begin to look at those kinds of things, and you score low, then you are deemed to be more of a risk, at least through a middle-class lens,” says Sapers.
“Then you look at the experience of aboriginal Canadians, and particularly the generation who were taken from their home communities and put in residential schools, and then you begin to see that there is a lack of family stability,” says Sapers.
“There is a dysfunction in the family because of these imposed social policies ... children being removed from their homes, families not being together because of lack of employment, and issues to deal with such as chronic addictions in some communities.
“But, when you apply the risk assessment based on that middle-class lens, what you then create when you project that assessment is a separate class of offender.
“And that kind of unintended discrimination, in turn, becomes systemic throughout the system.”
What Howard Sapers wants, and what he will likely recommend — again — when his 2007-2008 annual report is tabled, is the appointment of a deputy commissioner within Corrections Canada to deal strictly with aboriginal offenders.
He recommended it in his 2005-2006 report, and again in his 2006-2007 report to Parliament.
Both times Corrections Canada said it was unnecessary.
Tomorrow: Gladue Court