The over-representation of Indigenous people in federal custody has reached a new historic high, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Office of the Correctional Investigator. 

In the statement, Correctional Investigator of Canada Ivan Zinger described the continuing trend of the increasing number and proportion of Indigenous people in federal prisons as “disturbing” and called for bold and urgent actions from corrections and government. 

Indigenous people account for roughly five per cent of the population in Canada, but when it comes to federal custody Zinger said they now account for more than 30 per cent of the federal inmate population, up from 25 per cent four years ago. 

Indigenous women now account for 42 per cent of women in federal custody. 

Zinger said despite the findings of royal commissions and national inquiries, court interventions and political promises, over the last three decades, “no government of any stripe has managed to reverse the trend of Indigenous over-representation in Canadian jails and prisons.”

“The Indigenization of Canada’s prison population is nothing short of a national travesty,” he wrote. 

Zinger calls for ‘dramatic changes’ in corrections 

There are many layers of historical and contemporary factors at play when it comes to understanding why Indigenous people may be more likely to be criminalized, according to Zinger. 

But once an individual comes into the custody of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), he said the service needs to accept its share of responsibility in the overrepresentation instead of recusing itself from responsibility. 

Zinger said, for example, that Indigenous people are more likely than others to be placed in maximum security institutions, serve higher proportions of their sentences behind bars before getting out on parole and are also returned to custody at much higher rates that non-Indigenous people. 

“In failing to close the outcomes gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders, the federal correctional system makes its own unique and measureable contribution to the problem of over-representation,” said Zinger in the release. 

Zinger said overall there’s been a decline in the number of people in prisons but that in the last decade the Indigenous population in prisons has increased by 43.4 per cent. In comparison, the non-Indigenous prison population has declined in that same time period by 13.7 per cent. 

Zinger is now calling on CSC to make “dramatic changes” to help reduce the over-representation and for the federal government to take a leadership role in directing those changes. 

CSC and Public Safety Canada have not yet responded to requests for comment.

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