The Decibel - A made-in-Canada solution to help Indigenous people in prisons

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Indigenous people are over-represented in Canada’s federal prisons. One in three men in federal prisons identify as Indigenous, and the number is 50 per cent for women prisoners.Officials have long said that healing lodges – minimum-security rehabilitation centres for Indigenous people – work, but there are only 10 in Canada. And while politicians pledge to build more, they haven’t in recent years. Reporter Patrick White discusses what’s behind the delay.Join host Menaka Raman-Wilms for a conversation live on Twitter this Wednesday, October 26th, at 2pm ET. She’ll be chatting with the Globe’s personal finance reporter Erica Alini, Globe columnist Rob Carrick and money expert Melissa Leong about the latest interest rate hike from the Bank of Canada and what it means for young people’s money. We’ll cover rent, saving, debt and investing with practical tips you can use.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Canada has a problem when it comes to its prison population. 30% of people in federal prisons are Indigenous, but Indigenous people make up only 5% of the country's population. There is a Made in Canada solution to help fix this. They're called healing lodges. If you talk to those people who've gone through the healing lodges, they sing the praises of those healing lodges and will often say that the healing lodge really saved their life. Patrick White is a reporter at The Globe. healing lodges and will often say that the healing lodge really saved their life.

Patrick White is a reporter at The Globe, and for years, he's been writing on Canada's prison system. He'll tell us why healing lodges work and why the government hasn't built more of them. This is The Decibel. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks very much for having me. Let's just, I guess, start with the basics here. When we think of a typical prison, I think lots of us think of, you know, intense security, tiny cells, people behind bars. How are healing lodges different from the typical federal prison?

Yeah, I wasn't sure of that either. So I went to Edmonton where there are two healing lodges located pretty close to downtown. One of them is Stan Daniels Healing Center, which is a healing lodge for men. It's located in an old RCMP barracks. So it actually does from the outside appear like a prison. I was kind of surprised to see that after hearing about the philosophy behind healing lodges. But once you go inside, the door is unlocked. There is higher security on my kid's school than this place heading inside. And inside it is like a school. There's kind of a central desk where there's kind

of a flurry of activity where inmates go to get some medication, where shipments come in. And then you proceed past this flurry, which is kind of like the principal's office. And it appears more like a residential complex. There are leather couches, there are TVs, there's a pool table, there's a dartboard. One of the things that really set it off, I found, compared to normal prisons, is there were children's toys and children's books. So they really encourage the residents there to bring their families in, and they really encourage family engagement of that sort. And you mentioned the philosophy behind Healing Lodges there. What is the philosophy? I mean, I think the philosophy is pretty basic. It is that indigenous correctional services for indigenous people should be provided by indigenous people and by indigenous groups.

It isn't just different ownership. There's a unique system with Healing Lodges. Depending on the Healing Lodge you go to, they have a very different correctional practice that they undertake at Stan Daniels Healing Center in Edmonton and its companion healing center in Edmonton, which is Buffalo Sage, which is a healing center for women. They have one called, a correctional practice called Spirit of the Warrior, where they, it's kind of a therapeutic program that takes a couple of months to go through for all the residents. And they're encouraged to explore intergenerational trauma. They're encouraged to explore their parents' history, their grandparents' history, and really look at the full spectrum of reasons why they ended up in the place they ended up. Residents there will go to sweat lodges,

they'll go to sun dances, and this is all done by elders. So the correctional practice there is really, really different than you're going to see in a conventional prison. This may seem obvious, but I guess why do these healing lodges exist in the first place? Why do we have this separate system for Indigenous offenders? There are quite a few task forces that were struck in the 1980s and early 1990s that tried to look at the problem of why, at the time, in the late 1980s, about 9% of federal offenders identified as Indigenous. And at the time, only 3% of the Canadian population was indigenous. So they really wanted to look at why there was this real discrepancy, why there was this over-representation of indigenous people in the prison population, and also why indigenous people

tended to just fare worse in prison. They were held in solitary confinement more. They didn't get parole as early. The use of force was higher against indigenous people. All these trends continue to this day. And one of the things they came up with after consulting with First Nations groups across the country was that indigenous groups wanted control of a criminal justice system that was taking in more and more, especially young indigenous people. It's good to put that into perspective because I think our current numbers, right, I think we're at something like 30% of the prison population is indigenous and when indigenous people make up only 5% of the Canadian population.

So drastic numbers there. Yeah, that was something I found really interesting. Though the prison population was at 9%, there was this real urgency around trying to solve the problem in the 1980s and 1990s. But it was a little depressing to see that there seemed to be much more urgency then than there is now. And like you said, one in three people in federal prison identifies Indigenous. And for women, it's 50% of women in federal prison identify indigenous. 50%. Yeah. Yeah. That just, we just passed that very grim milestone earlier this year.

So Patrick, this seems like a really different approach, these healing lodges. I guess the question is though, how well do they actually work? There've been a number of studies on this and they all come to slightly different conclusions. At best, they have a much lower recidivism rate. That's a reoffending rate. who are released from comparable minimum security facilities, at worst, it's about the same. So in the worst of the studies found that the reoffense rate for healing lodges and minimum security facilities are about the same. But at a healing lodge, they tend to take in higher risk offenders than comparable minimum security facilities.

So you're getting higher risk people and putting them out at low risk. Minimum security institutions tend to take medium risk people and put them out at a low risk. So the progress that each individual offender is making at those two comparable institutions is better for healing lodges, if you want to look at it that way. Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like this actually works better than regular prison and helping people to not re-offend again. Yeah. I think most people in criminology and the correctional services industry would say, yes, these work better. And definitely, if you talk to those people who've gone through the healing lodges, they sing the praises of those healing

lodges and will often say that the healing lodge really saved their life. Wow. Can you tell me who did you talk to and what did they say about that? I talked to probably six people at Buffalo Sage and about four or five people at Stan Daniels, all of who said similar things that they were, would have really been lost without the healing center. I talked to one guy, Conrad Johnson at Stan Daniels, and he told me a number of interesting things. In 1995, he was involved in a pretty notorious gang shooting on the streets of Winnipeg. He was 15 years old, but because of the degree of attention that the shooting had, he was tried as an adult, got a life sentence.

So at age 15, when the sentence came, he was about 17. At 17, he's in prison basically for life, or at least under correctional service watch for life. Those first 10 years, he barely survived being in prison. He was attacked at a maximum security prison and stabbed over 30 times. He had a number of gang members come at him, as he said. Finally, in 2005, he gets to a healing lodge. And I've seen part of his correctional record. The violent streak that marked his record for the first 10 years is just, it's erased. As soon as 2005 rolls around and he gets in a healing lodge, the correctional record shows that he is a completely changed person after that.

We'll be back in a moment. So how many healing lodges are there actually in Canada today? So there's 10 healing lodges. Four of them are owned and operated by the Correctional Service of Canada, which goes against the original intent really of what the healing lodges were supposed to be. They were all supposed to be owned and operated by indigenous group. Another six are owned and operated by indigenous groups. And these are mainly nonprofits or individual First Nations that run them. One has been built fairly recently. In 2019, there is a new women's healing lodge that opened in Winnipeg. But prior to that,

it had been about eight years since a healing lodge had opened. And do we know why it took that long? When the first healing lodges popped up in the mid and late 90s, there was one CSC-run healing lodge and a couple, including Stan Daniels in Edmonton a couple of indigenous run healing lodges they decided to look at the outcomes for offenders who went through there and decided they work pretty well so in 2000 and 2001 the correctional service released a few documents saying we are now working on 22 separate agreements for new healing lodges there was this kind of vision presented for a network of healing lodges that would go from coast to coast, all indigenous run.

And a couple of years later, that program was scrapped. And we don't know exactly why it was, but those 22 indigenous run healing lodges is now down to six that actually exist in the country. Okay, so you're saying there was a vision kind of coast to coast to have a lot more of these places across the country. That hasn't happened. It sounds like they are pretty effective institutions here. Why aren't there more of them? I did talk to somebody who heads indigenous initiatives at the Correctional Service of Canada. He gave me a couple of different reasons.

He said they do get approached occasionally by First Nations who are interested in healing lodges. One of the reasons they often don't work out is these First Nations tend to be, some of the ones that have come to them, in remote areas of the country. Offenders coming out of conventional prisons don't tend to want to go to really remote areas of the country unless it's where they're from. So he found that there just weren't enough people to attend those healing lodges in remote areas. So that was one reason that they didn't tend to work. He also found that a lot of First Nations

had a different idea of healing lodges than the correctional service has. The correctional service has a very prescriptive idea. There has to be a certain level of security. You have to be able to keep certain populations separate from one another. A lot of the First Nations that were coming to the correctional service had this kind of holistic idea of a healing lodge. And they wanted a place that was a women's shelter, addictions counseling. More than just a healing lodge. More than just a healing lodge. And for the correctional service, they were not keen to have all of these populations,

both offender populations and vulnerable populations under the same roof. And you can see why. I mean, these things kind of seem like solvable problems. I would imagine you can kind of work through those issues. It makes me wonder, are these expensive facilities to run and to build? They are not expensive facilities to run and build compared to conventional correctional service of Canada prisons, which are hugely expensive to build

and hugely expensive to operate. I've talked to a group who's trying to set up a healing lodge here in Toronto, and they said the correctional service of Canada is willing to pay them about $180 per bed filled in their facility. Across the entire correctional service, the rate the service pays for conventional prisons is about $330 a day. So you're getting just about a 50% discount on healing lodges. Okay.

Yeah. So, I mean, it seems economical there. So a facility has so many beds and then the facility gets funding based on the number of beds that it has then? Is that correct? Yeah. The healing lodges I've been able to talk to about this, I'll say that it is basically, yes, a per DM payment that they get for each bed filled.

So say Stan Daniels has 73 beds are filled, they get paid a pretty high rate. If capacity is 50%, which it has been for much of the pandemic and more recently, then Stan Daniels is bringing in a much lower level of income, which has been proven to be a big problem for a lot of the healing lodges. So if you found that these healing lodges are not to full capacity, like what's going on here? Why are these beds not occupied? One of the main reasons is during the pandemic, a lot of the prisons across Canada were completely locked down. So the offenders were not getting programming. They were not getting education. They were not getting all of the things that would allow them to cascade down from maximum to medium to minimum security. So if you were in maximum security at the beginning of the pandemic, you're probably going to be

stuck there. Healing lodges generally only accept minimum security prisoners from prisons. So the flow of prisoners or residents into all of the healing lodges completely dried up. And as you say, that's tied to their funding, that if they're not getting people in there, so they're not getting as much funding then. Yes. So that drying up of residents completely dried up the funding. CSC, to their credit, did offer to top up some of the losses that they incurred over the course of the pandemic, which was a real lifeline to places like Stan Daniels, but there was still a financial loss over the course of the pandemic, which was a real lifeline to places like Stan Daniels, but there was still a financial loss over the course of the pandemic. Yeah. Okay. So just to recap, they cost less than

traditional prisons. These facilities help lower re-offending rates for indigenous offenders. I guess I wonder about the politics of all this though. What could be behind the inaction at that level? Because it sounds like they're not getting built even though they do the job. Yeah, that is the million-dollar question on this one. Why has that expansion idea that was out there in about 2000, why is it just completely stalled out? The liberal government in mandate letters for the Correctional Service Commissioner in 2018 and again this year has directed the Correctional Service to build more healing lodges essentially. The Correctional Service though is under a lot of political pressure to expand that network.

I have to ask you about Miles Anderson, Patrick. Miles Anderson is the person who committed that awful stabbing in early September in Saskatchewan. He was in a healing lodge last year before being released. And, of course, he was also in prison for over a decade before that. That's important to remember as well. But I think this kind of incident with him could really cast a shadow on this program. What's the role of public opinion here in terms of whether governments actually act on building more healing lodges? That's a real tricky one for governments. Healing lodges have been

the target of kind of soft on crime campaigns over the years on a number of occasions. A few years ago, it was found out that Terry Lynn McClintock was at a healing lodge. The conservative opposition put up a big stink in the commons. She was eventually removed from that healing lodge and put in a minimum security institution. And just to remind people, Terry Lynn McClintock was one of two people charged with the murder of eight-year-old Tory Stafford in 2009 in Ontario. A gruesome, awful crime. All of these people are on sentences where they will end up in the public again.

They will be your neighbors. They will be out in the community. Do we want those people to receive the best correctional services when they're behind bars, the most therapeutic services that this country has to offer? Or do we want them to go directly from what some people seem to want, a solitary confinement cell, directly out into the streets? Just lastly here, Patrick, if we look at the big picture, how do these healing lodges and building more of them, how would this factor into the larger discussion of reconciliation in Canada today? Well, it's right there in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's call to action.

They asked the federal government to establish more healing lodges across the country and remove any barriers that were preventing healing lodges from being constructed. So right there, the federal government can satisfy some demands for reconciliation by working on this network and expanding it. And more broadly, putting some autonomy and control for the criminal justice system in the hands of Indigenous people seems like an act of reconciliation to me. Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. All right. Thanks so much.

Before we go, I want to invite you to join us for a live conversation on Twitter this afternoon, Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern. I'll be chatting with personal finance reporter Erica Alini, columnist Rob Carrick, and money expert Melissa Leong about the latest rate hike and what that means for young people's money, rent, savings, debt, and investing. Really hope you can join us. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland,

and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.