ABSTRACT
Written by three noted Canadian criminologists, Jane Sprott, Cheryl Webster and Anthony Doob, this chapter examines the problem of the mass incarceration of Indigenous people in this country, underscoring how a singular reliance on sentencing judges to address this problem was misguided. Moreover, they demonstrate that the traditional means of measuring overincarceration fail to tell the entire story and by using imprisonment rates rather than proportions, they reveal some shocking statistics: imprisonment rates for Indigenous persons in 1996 were 510 per 100,000 Indigenous people (compared to 98.6 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous Canadians), whereas in 2017–2018, the numbers were even higher, 677 per 100,000 Indigenous (the numbers for non-Indigenous Canadians fell to 78.6). Thus, over approximately 20 years, while the non-Indigenous prisoner rate decreased by about 20 percent, the Indigenous prisoner rate increased by about 33 percent. During 2020, these alarming statistics for Indigenous people in Canada were also marginally higher than the overall US imprisonment rate, our “mass-incarceration” neighbor to the south. The authors provide a context for understanding these astonishing numbers and conclude with suggestions that go beyond sentencing, occurring earlier in the criminal justice process, to address this seemingly intractable problem.
