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"Prisons poisoning natives" - First Nations rethinking "corrections and policing" for their communities

July 20, 2008 - 8:30am | by brianbeaton

Be sure to read the article, "Jail - a lazy response to poverty" that follows the first article.

From the Toronto Star

Prisons poisoning natives - Jails turn out to be 'gladiator schools' for the many aboriginals who end up there

Sandro Contenta, Feature Writer - July 20, 2008

HOBBEMA RESERVES, Alberta–On the walls of Jonathan Napoose's family home are portraits of Jesus Christ and embroideries of the Last Supper, vestiges of the Catholic upbringing he received from his mother.

On his torso are signs of an altogether different allegiance; tattoos, or "patches," identifying him as a top-ranking member of the notorious Aboriginal gang, the Redd Alert.

He counts the knife scars on his head, right cheek, arms and stomach and stops at a dozen. He says he usually gave more than he got, and tells of bashing bones, ducking bullets and narrowly skirting death after a brutal introduction to a baseball bat.

"I made a name for myself because I was really vicious," says Napoose, an articulate, 27-year-old resident of the Samson Cree reserve, south of Edmonton. "I would basically volunteer to beat people up."

What makes Napoose's story unusual is that a year ago he quit Redd Alert, a street gang affiliated with the Hells Angels, after his second stint in a federal penitentiary. What makes it all too common is that prison turned Napoose into a more dangerous gang member than when he walked in.

He entered as a foot soldier, or "striker," and became — during two tours and 5 ½ years in Edmonton's maximum security prison — one of Redd Alert's four governing council members. He rose through the ranks on the inside by selling drugs and dispensing pain, distinguishing himself in riots and a gang war.

"The term gladiator school — basically, that's what prison is," says Napoose. "When I walked into the Edmonton max I was 20 years old and 160 pounds. By the time I walked out...I was six foot, 220 pounds, tattered up, mean, and basically I could deal with a lot of people and a lot of people didn't want to deal with me. I was just a scary person."

Napoose's prison experience raises questions about a new crime law expected to fill troubled penitentiaries with even more Aboriginal people.

The overrepresentation of Native Canadians in the country's prisons is seen as a national disgrace by many observers. They make up 19 per cent of inmates in federal penitentiaries but only three per cent of the Canadian population.

The figures for young Aboriginal Canadians are starker: They represented 33 per cent of young people in custody in 2003, but just 5 per cent of Canada's population, according to the federal justice department. In Ontario, young Aboriginals were at least twice as likely to receive a custodial sentence than non-Aboriginals in 2006, according to provincial data analysed by Jonathan Rudin, of the Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto.

A well-known plethora of social and economic ills has been blamed: High rates of poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and family break down, low levels of education, a biased criminal justice system, and a collapse of traditions caused partly by former federal policies, such as forcing children into abusive residential schools.

Criminal justice experts say the federal government seems poised to make matters worse with a new "tough on crime" law and a proposed anti-drug bill. The first imposes longer mandatory sentences for gun-related crimes, the second new mandatory sentences for drug possession or trafficking. The government also wants to toughen penalties for young offenders.

"Whenever you crack down on crime you tend to get disproportionately what police call the low hanging fruit, those people who are easiest to arrest and prosecute," says Craig Jones, director of the John Howard Society, which helps reintegrate offenders in communities.

Even RCMP officials, noting the influence of Aboriginal gangs in Western Canadian prisons, are raising the alarm. Chief Superintendent Doug Reti, director of the RCMP's National Aboriginal Policing Services, witnessed the negative effect of prisons during years of service in violence plagued Hobbema, a once oil-rich cluster of four Cree reserves.

"Many of the youth we were dealing with, if they were not gang members going into jail, they certainly were coming out," Reti told a Senate committee studying the new crime law earlier this year.

Says sociologist Jana Grekul, a University of Alberta gang expert: "Prisons are a breeding ground for the propagation of gangs."

Reti told the Senate tougher mandatory sentences would do little to deter young Natives from crime. He urged alternatives to jail — so-called restorative justice programs, which use traditional Aboriginal methods to resolve conflicts, are available in Hobbema — and early intervention.

"When a kid turns 12 years old and you end up charging him, sometimes it is too late by that point," he says.

Police first noted the Hobbema gang problem in 2001. Today, 13 street gangs, including Indian Posse, Redd Alert and Alberta Warriors, deal drugs and wage turf wars. Most observers, including Hobbema's RCMP officers, largely blame the prison system for seeding the reserve's gang troubles.

In the early 1990s, Correctional Service of Canada concentrated Aboriginal gang members at Manitoba's Stoney Mountain prison. Gang recruiting became so intense that inmates refusing to join banded together to form Redd Alert.

Prison officials tried to break the power of the gangs by dispersing members to prisons across the country. The policy backfired, as recruiting suddenly spread to many more penitentiaries. Once released locally, gang members continued recruiting in communities previously untouched by the phenomenon.

Violet Soosay was the warden at Hobbema's Pe Sakastew minimum security prison in the late 1990s when gang members reached the facility. She watched them recruit inmates and bully others from participating in "healing" programs that try to reconnect offenders to their Aboriginal roots. Once out, they targeted Hobbema.

"I don't have faith in the prison system at all," says Soosay, who opposed the transfer policy and quit as warden in 1999. She now runs restorative justice programs for the Samson Cree Nation, the largest of Hobbema's four Aboriginal communities.

Drive by shootings quickly became a nightly threat to Hobbema's 12,000 residents. In 2001, RCMP officers arrested 3,500 people, a thousand more than last year. Hobbema has Canada's highest ratio of gang members per 1,000 residents: 18.75 compared to Toronto's 1.15, says Toronto-based gang expert, Michael Chettleburgh.

The challenge became all the more acute when the drive-by shooting of 2-year-old Asia Saddleback reverberated across the country in April. The toddler had just finished a bowl of soup at the kitchen table when a bullet pierced the wall of her home, and her stomach. Surgeons saved her life but couldn't remove the bullet.

Two youths aged 15 and 18 have been arrested, both described by police as gang members. They allegedly were shooting at two young members of the Saddleback family sitting on the front porch. Police won't say what the dispute was about.

On May 13, the day she turned two, a cranky Asia seemed fully recovered, restlessly demanding the attention of her mother, who was busy organizing her birthday party. Candice Saddleback initially announced she would leave Hobbema, but now is determined to stay.

"Why should I let those kids chase me and Asia from the only home that we know?" says Saddleback, 25, a single mother of two children.

Saddleback describes Asia's shooting as a tipping point. Residents have mobilized to take back control of the streets from what police say are as many as 250 gang members.

The Samson Cree council struck a community task force that imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on youths (gangs use drug "runners" as young as 9 years old).

Residents have been whitewashing gang graffiti on walls and fences, and are tearing down 29 burnt out houses, often used by gangs as crack dens or to stash weapons. Once fearful of being targeted as "rats," residents are increasing calling an RCMP hotline with tips.

The RCMP, which has 41 officers working the reserves, has stepped up patrols. Officers run a cadets program that teaches leadership skills and are handing out coupons for free burgers to youths doing something positive, like participating in the clean up program. And, they're planning a gun amnesty.

The shooting also sparked collective soul searching. Many now point to Hobbema's oil wealth as the source of their downfall. It began in the early 1950s with the discovery of Alberta's biggest oil deposit at Pigeon Lake.

By the late 1970s, Samson reserve residents were receiving oil royalties of $500 a month — a windfall that sparked a baby boom. A few invested their money. But most, like light-headed lottery winners, went on extended binges of drinking, traveling and gambling.

"People didn't know how to manage money. They got lost in those days of affluence," Soosay says.

Once strong family ties broke down as partying parents left children to fend for themselves. Today, almost half of Samson families are headed by single parents.

"Kids were raising kids," Soosay says. "So what we have now is a generation of those children having children with little or no parenting skills, and little or no (knowledge of) traditional teachings."

By the time the oil and monthly payments dried up in the early 1990s, addictions were high and poverty had returned. Samson council owns Peace Hills Trust, a bank with $500 million in assets, and has a $387 million heritage fund. Yet the reserve has a housing shortage, poor roads and broken street lamps that allow gang members to better hide their activities.

When youths turn 18, they continue to receive a one-time payment, often more than $100,000. Most follow the example of their parents and, like Candice Saddleback, admit to "spending it foolishly." At the top of everyone's list is a new SUV, and dealerships sprouted in nearby Wataskiwin to feed the habit. Street gangs feed a different habit.

"Drug dealers would come into the community and start giving free drugs to 16 year-olds," Soosay says. "And when they reached the age of majority they came to collect."

In 1999, at the age of 19, Napoose had finished partying away the $127,000 he had received. He joined the Redd Alert, attracted, he says, by the lure of money and the "ghetto glamour" seen in rap music videos.

His childhood was plagued by domestic violence and alcoholism. He spent several years in and out of a young offenders' detention centre in Edmonton, where he says inmates taught him valuable street skills, such as stealing cars.

"I went in a dumb criminal and I came out a smart one," he says.

Two years later, after disarming an attacker with a knife and stabbing him 17 times, Napoose became a resident of Edmonton's maximum security prison. He earned his "full patch" ranking — a large tattoo on his back of a stylized cross with the words, "ghetto soldier" — by wielding "shanks and pipes" in a 2001 prison turf war against the rival Alberta Warriors.

At his home in the flat Hobbema countryside, Napoose spreads out on the kitchen table a stack of photos of himself and muscle-bound, tattoo-coated Redd Alert leaders posing in prison hallways or courtyards. He rhymes off a list of those since killed or maimed.

"This individual was stripped of his colours. He had his patch carved off his back with razor blades," he says, adding the former member had botched a dope deal.

Napoose says inmates join gangs for protection and access to drugs. In one nine month period in prison, he made $25,000 selling narcotics, mostly speed.

Money never changed hands on the inside. A trusted family member would set up a bank account and inmates were given the number. When a coded phone call confirmed the deposit, Napoose handed out the drugs.

Visiting family members, sometimes using body cavities, often did the smuggling. At one point, Redd Alert members were paying an Edmonton prison guard $2,000 for every batch of drugs he brought in, Napoose says.

When a stash arrived, it was party time.

"For maybe a week, two weeks, everybody's high, everybody's having a good time," Napoose says.

"Can you imagine the effects of speed on people within a maximum institution? It's very f------ crazy. People don't sleep, people don't eat, they see shadow people, they get paranoid, they hear people, they might schiz out, check-in, stab someone up or lash out at the guards," he adds.

Napoose began thinking of going straight when his sister committed suicide and he wasn't allowed out of prison to attend her funeral. He was released in 2006 and turned his back on the gang. He says a contract for his assassination was issued, but a Redd Alert leader intervened to have it rescinded.

"I'm with a new gang now; it's my wife and it's my kids," says Napoose, who has four children, three with his current spouse. "They saved me."

He scrapes together a living selling firewood and doing odd jobs. He hopes to one day use his street credibility to convince Hobbema youths to stay clear of gangs, and prisons.

"Our kids are our future," he says. "If we can't help the youth then I think the prospects for Hobbema are very grim.

For More Information on this series from the Toronto Star ...

From the Toronto Star

Jail 'a lazy response to poverty'

Jul 19, 2008 04:30 AM

Imagine pockets of cities where so many residents are in jail and prison, and for so long, that by the time they are released their incarceration will have cost more than $15 million. Imagine these people being released and returning home to the same place and conditions where the trouble began and, within two years, 4 in 10 are back behind bars.

It is a costly human migration pattern, and it is real.

It what is believed to be a first in Canada, the Star has mapped incarceration costs by neighbourhood and hometown using one-day snapshots of sentencing and address data for inmates in Ontario jails and federal prisons. Both were obtained in freedom of information requests.

The maps, combined with socio-economic data from the Census, show familiar patterns. The people in jail come from our most troubled neighbourhoods. In Toronto, the high-incarceration areas – including Regent Park, Kingston-Galloway, Jane-Finch and Jamestown – are the same neighbourhoods at risk for everything from diabetes to unemployment.

It is where the poor live.

In the GTA, there are postal areas where it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to jail inmates serving sentences of less than two years, based on a daily cost of $160 per inmate.

Torontonians in federal prisons – where it costs $255 a day per inmate and sentences are longer than two years – will cost Canadians $535 million before their sentences are up.The provincial data includes the first three digits of an inmate's postal code. The Correctional Service of Canada did not release postal code information and instead provided only home towns for federal inmates.

But assuming federal and provincial inmates from Toronto come proportionately from the same neighbourhoods, the one-time incarceration bill for offenders from the 10 most costly postal areas surpasses $15 million each. The most expensive, M8V in Mimico, figures to cost almost $31 million.

Criminal justice experts see these numbers not only as a measure of wasted human potential, but also of wasted taxpayers' dollars. They urge investments in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They see new laws from the Conservative government – which add more minimum sentences for gun crimes and propose the same for a host of drug offences – increasing federal incarceration costs, which are already $2 billion a year.

"I don't think anybody's getting a slap on the wrist for even possession of guns, but are the sentences being handed out acting as a deterrent?" asks Patrick LeSage, former Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court. "If you look at the proliferation of guns around now, I think it's very, very doubtful. The root causes of crime and violence aren't resolved by putting people in jail."

Toronto police chief Bill Blair also thinks increasing incarceration is unwise.

"We have to have a whole menu of options available to us because they (those prone to crime) are all human beings, they're all different. Some of them are going to respond positively if you give them better opportunities, better choices...we have to have hopeful redemption for those individuals to get them on the right path."

Jail, he says, should be reserved for "truly dangerous" criminals. "We're not talking hundreds of thousands here, we're talking a relatively small number of people."

And even those people may not be dissuaded by the threat of longer sentences.

During his former life as a career criminal and mid-level coke dealer, addicted to heroin, Greg Simmons didn't think about how much time he might serve. "I didn't care," says Simmons, now a prisoners' rights advocate living in Toronto. "I could do time."

Simmons, in terms of jail costs, was a million-dollar inmate. His longest sentence was 13 years, for a laundry list of serious crimes, including robbery, trafficking, weapons, fraud and forgery.

Few would argue that violent criminals shouldn't serve prison time. But mandatory minimum sentences keep them in longer and overcrowding has restricted access to rehabilitation programs. Many, like Simmons, come out more hardened than when they went in.

In the U.S., studies have found that neighbourhoods with high incarceration also experienced increased levels of crime, thanks in part to the social instability created by imprisoning so many residents.

CRITICS SAY THE new federal measures are similar in approach, though not in reach, to the laws that have given the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the developed world – seven times that of Canada's. And the new laws come even as U.S. jurisdictions are reversing some of their toughest laws, concluding they were a costly dead end.

In response to the U.S. prison boom, Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center in New York began mapping jail costs by city blocks and areas in New York City, Louisiana, Arizona, and Texas. His work documents neighbourhood-to-prison migration patterns of mostly men, mostly of parenting age, from hard-up neighbourhoods.

Incarceration, says Cadora, began looking more like a condition of social distress than public safety policy. "In some ways, I think of incarceration as a lazy response to poverty. It's a way of not dealing with poverty, it's a benign neglect."

The center has helped persuade several state governments to reduce jail populations through early release of low-risk inmates and alternatives to prison for those who violate minor release conditions. The money saved is given directly to the communities the inmates come from.

"We pushed this message that this was a migration policy, and you have to start to realize that that's what's going on," says Cadora. "By turning that into money maps, we say there are dollars spent for particular places in huge amounts, and that if we actually think about the opportunity costs of alternative investments in those places, would actually beg the question, `What are getting for a return on those investments.'

"If we start to think about it like that, we'll solve it. We can do that. We can actually change policies and come up with alternatives."

Among these alternatives, for example, are early interventions aimed at preventing and curbing juvenile delinquency.

Dr. Fraser Mustard, a Toronto-based early childhood development expert, says studies have consistently shown that early childhood development programs – often attached to primary schools, for both parents and children – can cut future anti-social or criminal behaviour by half. Yet Canada ranked dead last among 14 industrialized countries in a 2006 OECD study on investment in early childhood education and care.

"It's basically because we are a highly individualistic society and don't realize that we actually have a social responsibility to families," says Mustard, founder of the non-profit, Council for Early Child Development.

A 2003 COST-BENEFIT study by American researchers indicated that for every $1 spent on early intervention initiatives, many more dollars were saved in court and prison costs in the long run. The programs they detailed in their report include:

* Nurses partnered with first-time pregnant women, making visits before birth up to the baby's second birthday. A 15-year follow-up study of one program determined that for every dollar spent, $2 was saved on criminal justice and victim costs.
* Preschool programs for children from poorer families. One program involved 2.5 hours of supervised learning five days a week, for children younger than 5, for 30 weeks, as well as weekly home visits. In the long term, children from low-income families were less likely to dropout, had fewer reports of delinquency and higher rates of employment. An analysis showed the cost benefit to be $1:$7.
* The Seattle Social Development Project involved classroom coaching for teachers aimed at reducing classroom behavioural problems, school parenting workshops and social and emotional skills programs for the children. Aggressive behaviour in boys was reduced, as was self-destructive behaviour in girls and alcohol use in both sexes. Cost-benefit estimated to be $1:$4.

It all seems to make perfect sense, but, as the authors note, "Although we know a great deal about what to do, we do not use this knowledge well." The will to bring about systemic changes in an ethnocentric society is often missing, particularly when public safety is a manifest concern, they wrote.

"The news here is that the problem is a political problem, not a scientific or technical one."


$70 billion — estimated total cost of crime to Canadians in 2003
$47 billion – amount borne by victims, including stolen property, pain and suffering and loss of income.
$13 billion — amount spent on criminal justice system, including police, courts and correctional services
$10 billion — amount spent on security devices and protective services

Source: Department of Justice

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From the Prince Alberta Herald ...

Policing of and by aboriginals needs changes: FSIN

MATTHEW GAUK - 19/07/08

The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations has called for more self-administered police forces and even "peacekeepers" in First Nations communities.

This comes right on the heels of a federal report obtained by The Canadian Press showing a decline in aboriginal officers working on-reserve, mostly related to the RCMP. The report, expected to be released in full later this year, says only 55 per cent of RCMP officers working in First Nations communities are aboriginal, down from 77 per cent in 1996.

"It's somewhat surprising," said Glen Pratt, an FSIN vice-chief, adding that the recommendations from the Neil Stonechild inquiry urging more aboriginal involvement in policing don't seem to be working.

There are many reasons why fewer aboriginal people are joining the police force, Pratt said.

"Our people don't seem to move up the ladder as quickly as others," Pratt said.

"There's frustration when there are people putting in 20 years in the force and they're still where they started in many cases."

He also pointed to the bad press the RCMP has received lately, such as the Taser-death of immigrant Robert Dziekanski in Vancouver last year.

Educated young aboriginal people have a lot better opportunities these days, said Pratt, and they "can pick and choose where they want to work."

Pratt said the RCMP should seek feedback from First Nations communities as to why their current recruitment strategies aren't working and how to improve them.

Other sectors have shown great success in recruiting aboriginal people, said Pratt, using Casino Regina as one example.

The RCMP's national recruiting strategy does have one component focusing specifically on aboriginal people "to ensure that the RCMP's workforce is representative of the community it serves," according to its website.

In the 2007-08 training period, 41 aboriginal cadets graduated from Depot Training Academy in Regina, according to Depot spokeswoman Marie Patterson.

However, these cadets can be placed across the country and won't necessarily work in First Nations communities.

Sgt. Carole Raymond, RCMP spokeswoman, acknowledged they're not hitting their recruitment requirements for aboriginal people. But the report's findings are not necessarily reflective of the actual situation, she said, noting that completion of the questionnaire the report was based on wasn't mandatory and that some officers choose not to identify their race.

Pratt believes the best way to improve the situation is to create more self-administered police forces.

As of last spring, there were 95 First Nations communities in Ontario served by nine self-administered police forces.

Currently, there is only one of these in Saskatchewan: the File Hills First Nation officially got its own police force in May of last year.

This way, Pratt said, police aren't just responding to calls about crimes on the reserve and then driving out there - they're already on the reserve and can be there to prevent those crimes in the first place.

Pratt believes the hesitancy in many communities to go this route stems from insufficient funding from the government for the self-administered forces.

He returned Thursday from the annual meeting of the Assembly of First Nations in Quebec City, where he said a resolution was passed demanding the federal government apply the same standards and equity to the self-administered police forces as they do to the RCMP.

The peacekeepers Pratt is pushing for would live in the community and be trained in "mediation" and "intervention," rather than confrontation.

This means that instead of going to an out-of-control house party and arresting everybody, the peacekeeper would have relationships in the community such that he or she should either know about the party ahead of time and be able to stop it or go to the house as it's happening and ask that the party be ended.

"This is meant to enhance policing, not replace it," Pratt said.

"Right now it seems like there's more to fear from police than from the community. It shouldn't be like that. The community should have trust in the police."

mgauk@paherald.sk.ca

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