By R John Hayes
Windspeaker Staff WriterEDMONTON
One of the most widely reported statistics in recent years is the one that says that a 20-year-old Aboriginal Canadian is more likely to have spent time in a prison than to have graduated from high school. On the prairies, 40 per cent of federal inmates are Aboriginal, drawn from less than five per cent of the population. In provincial prisons, the numbers are even higher - approaching 60 per cent in some Manitoba prisons.
"It is striking when you go there," said Maureen Collins, executive director of the Edmonton John Howard Society, a community crime prevention agency working with people affected by crime. "The Aboriginal population is dreadfully over-represented in the prison population as well as in the courts."
"The numbers are true, and they are a terrible reflection of the problems there are in the Native community," said Curtis Fontaine, executive director of the Native Clan Organization, Manitoba's correctional agency dealing with the penal system and community corrections. "The situation is especially bad on the prairies." Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as a region, push the national statistics up a long way.
"On the prairies, Aboriginal people are a higher percentage of the population," Fontaine said. "And in the East, the Native people have had much longer contact with mainstream society, have assimilated more. They are a little more advanced in that area. We're probably still going through the culture shock; it will last a few generations."
Fontaine also explained that the prairies had more residential schools, which deprived children of healthy parental role models and further fractured the community and family structure upon which Native life was built.
"The problems are handed down, generation to generation," he said. "Children grew up with no proper parental role models, then they become poor parents, then their children will pass on the illness. Dysfunctional parents rear dysfunctional children. It is a cycle, and it will take two or three generations to break the chain.
"Winnipeg has the 'honor' of being the Aboriginal street gang capital of Canada," he continued. "It's like a food chain here, with the Aboriginal gangs feeding the top-dwelling bike gangs, such as Los Bravos, who are trying to hook up with the Hell's Angels. Members of Aboriginal gangs like the Warriors graduate to the Bravos after a while. The Warriors are bad news, though - they're into crime, booze cans [after-hours illegal drinking clubs], prostitution, drugs, they're getting into weapons. The problems are becoming institutionalized in our Aboriginal community."
"There's no question now that alcohol and drugs are easily obtainable in the community," said Pat Shirt, executive director of Poundmaker's Lodge in St. Albert, Alta. "Alcohol and drug treatment has not been as available. People having trouble in their lives sometimes turn to alcohol and drugs to take care of the pain, but the alcohol and drugs just add a tendency to violence to the mix, and violence is what puts people in jail."
Bill Green, the assistant warden at the maximum-security Edmonton Institution, confirmed this.
"Ten to 12 per cent of the Aboriginal people in federal institutions are in for murder, and 75 per cent are in for other Schedule One offenses," he said. Schedule One offenses are defined as violent crimes. "Thus, 85 per cent of Native prisoners are there because of a violent crime."
"The majority of Native people in jail are there because of alcohol and drugs," Shirt said. "It's hard to determine who is and who isn't going to get in trouble with alcohol and drugs. You are more likely, probably, to find alcoholic kids coming out of poverty or other dysfunctional family situations, but there's no direct connection that you can count on."
It's not just alcohol and drugs, however, that directs Aboriginal people into jail. There are factors within the system that tend towards over-representation, as well.
"The system just does not serve Aboriginal people well, at all," Collins said. "We see that Native people are more likely to receive jail time; they're more likely to be convicted of crimes involving violence or the use of weapons, which makes the sentence longer; and they're much less likely to apply for things like legal aid and, at the other end of things, are less likely to apply for early release.
"There's a real feeling that the system is there to actively harm the Aboriginal people in the system," she continued. "Culturally, the rules don't work for you."
Collins, though, has some feeling for the correctional system, which is asked to be all things to all people. It is designed to mete out punishment by incarceration, protect society by isolating likely criminals and rehabilitate the inmates while in the system.
"It's too tall an order for the correctional service," she said. "It's too tall an order for anyone."
That doesn't stop the service agencies and the system from trying.
"We have a Native liaison project in the Edmonton max, which we hope gets people to live their lives differently while they're in jail so, when they get out, they're ready to be healthy and productive," Shirt said. "Alcohol and drug treatment programs have had a lot of success in Indian country. There are a lot of sober activities now; there are way more sober Native people now. Some people still drink, but there are fewer of them."
"We provide counsel in prisons, as well as half-way houses and assessment and treatment programs for sex offenses, and other things," Fontaine said. "We try to improve our clients' understanding of the system, and their access to support, where appropriate."
"What kids have told us: it's important, if you're a Native kid, to develop some awareness of who you are," Collins said, "and that means understanding their own culture, Native spirituality and the roles of Elders. This is almost something lost that needs to be found.
"It doesn't have to be honored to be effective," she continued, "but it is very important to get a sense of what impact their roots have on them. It is also vitally important to see positive role models."
The Warriors gang in Winnipeg, though, are not the role models that Fontaine and others want young Aboriginal kids to see, nor do they want the rest of society to assume that all Native people are members of gangs.
"These gangs are maybe 10 per cent of the youthful population, but the other 90 per cent look Native, too," he said. "So they have a hard time because of the 10 per cent. Security people will follow any Native person around a store, for example, and many are institutionally mistreated or harassed.
"The Warriors protest that they're not a gang, but they are," he continued. "The people who are locked up in jail are primarily gang members. Non-gang members are recruited in there, and have to join for their own protection. Gangs control most of the illicit substances on the inside.
"The Headingley [ a prison in Manitoba] riot was precipitated by drugs and the Manitoba Warriors," he said. "That hasn't got much coverage, but it'll come out when these people start to go to trial."
Gang membership, culture shock, drugs, alcohol, dysfunctional families, broken-down communities, loss of spirituality - all these things are cited as contributing factors to the high number of Aboriginal people in the jails. Workers are trying to get at each of these factors, but taken together, there is a huge problem in the Native communities, especially on the prairies. As they said, it will take generations.