Black and Indigenous offenders twice as likely to be put into maximum security prison: auditor general

Christopher Nardi - 

OTTAWA — Correctional Services Canada places a disproportionately high number of Black and Indigenous offenders into maximum-security institutions, who then remain there longer than other offenders, according to a new federal auditor general report.


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tA correctional officer looks on at the Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ont., on Tuesday, May 10, 2016, during a tour of the facility.

“Overall, we found that Correctional Service Canada failed to address and eliminate the systemic barriers that persistently disadvantaged certain groups of offenders in custody,” says Canada’s Auditor General Karen Hogan in a report published Tuesday.

“Disparities were present from the moment offenders entered federal institutions.”

The findings in the report are both stark and show little improvement over the years for Black and Indigenous offenders in the country’s carceral system, despite previous auditor general (OAG) reports highlighting many of the present issues in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

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In this report, Hogan found that Indigenous and Black offenders were way twice likely to be assigned higher security levels when admitted into prison than other criminals. When entering custody, offenders are assigned one of three security classifications: minimum, medium or maximum.

“Offenders’ initial security placements affect their potentials for parole and the lengths of the sentences that they serve in custody. Offenders initially placed at minimum security are more likely to be granted parole by the time they are first eligible for release than those at higher levels,” reads the report

Between April 2018 and December 2021, 15 per cent of Black men and 11 per cent of Indigenous men were admitted into a maximum security prison. That is above the average of nine percent of all offenders assigned a maximum security rating over the same period, according to the OAG.

During that time, Indigenous men accounted for over 36 per cent and Black men accounted for nearly 15 per cent of all maximum security offenders, meaning they represented over half of all of Canada’s maximum security carceral population.

Indigenous women also represent a disproportionate amount of maximum security carceral population admissions (70 per cent) during the same period. Only Black women are well under the average (less than one per cent) of offenders with the highest security rating.

Many of these issues are longstanding and were found in previous audits, Hogan worried.

“Indigenous and Black men were placed at maximum-security institutions at twice the rate of other offenders and made up 51 per cent of maximum-security placements,” the OAG concluded.

“We note that overrepresentation of Indigenous men and women at higher levels of security is a long-standing issue. We made similar observations in our 2016 audit,” the report added.

The OAG also found that though the government has a security classification tool called the Custody Rating Scale, CSC employees regularly and disproportionately overrode the results to give Indigenous offenders a higher security level.

“For Indigenous women, most overrides placed them to a higher security level: Corrections staff overrode up 53 per cent of minimum-security placements, compared with 27 per cent for non‑Indigenous women. For Indigenous men, corrections staff overrode up 46 per cent of minimum-security placements to higher levels, compared with 33 per cent for non‑Indigenous offenders,” reads the report.

Black men and women were on the other more likely to have their security recommendations lowered during an override.

The OAG also published three other reports Tuesday on the government’s ability to process disability benefits for veterans, access to federal benefits for hard-to-reach populations and a follow-up audit on Ottawa’s gender-based analysis plus system.

The first found that veterans applying for disability benefits for the first time waited a median of 39 weeks for a decision, which is more than double Veterans Affairs Canada’s service standards of 16 weeks.

The second concluded that both the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) had “not done enough” to connect hard‑to‑reach populations with the benefits meant to support low‑income Canadians. Despite new outreach activities by the government since 2018, the OAG found that ESDC and CRA had only “limited” evidence their efforts were paying off.

The third, a follow-up of a 2015 audit of the government’s analytical system to determine the “gendered” impacts of its decisions, programs or policy, found that there are still issues in certain departments and agencies’ ability to perform gender-based analysis plus (GBA Plus) properly.