Do you have a pale, fair, medium or dark complexion? We learned this week that, according to the Services correctionnels du Québec (SCQ), the question is a very useful way of classifying people who have been imprisoned in the province. The information was made public in a note from the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS), thanks to an access to information request.
The Minister of Public Security, Geneviève Guilbault, defended the practice following the publication of the study. She reportedly told Sun not detecting any sign of racism in practice and assured that it is only information collected and used internally, with other physical characteristics, “for very specific situations where it is essential to identify someone, eg an escape or a risk of escape ”.
Let us take the minister at face value. It might also be useful, according to this logic, to also classify the texture of the prisoners’ hair on a similar scale to four levels: straight hair, wavy, curly and frizzy. We could even create a scale for the noses, from aquiline to camus. What if the state collected the bra sizes of prisoners to better distinguish them in profile, in case of escape or risk of escape?
The practice of SCQ is absurd, but not only that: we are also dealing with obscurantism. It is indeed important to have precise demographic data on people who have been put to justice in Quebec in order to know on which parts of the population the effects of the penal system are the most important. When Statistics Canada collects data on different “visible minorities”, it is not about measuring biological characteristics like skin tone, but about understanding identities and social differences. Census data shows us where poverty and wealth are concentrated in the country, for example, and how discrimination influences inequalities.
It would be relevant to know which racialized communities are the most targeted by criminal justice in Quebec. But because the SCQs invented their own system rather than following the census, we can only come to approximations. There are 13% of visible minorities in Quebec and 33% of “average” and “dark” among those who have been imprisoned in Quebec, according to the IRIS study. If the two categories were equivalent, we could calculate that visible minorities are 2.6 times more represented in our prisons. But since there are certainly minorities categorized as “clear”, this is a gross underestimation of reality. We therefore know that criminal justice disproportionately targets minorities in Quebec, but not to what extent, nor precisely which ones. Hooray for social pseudoscience!
What difference does this imprecision make? This can be seen by looking at the more accurate figures made public on Aboriginal people, which are the subject of a separate statistical census. Still according to the IRIS study, we see that Aboriginal people make up 6.6% of admissions to correctional services while they only make up 2.3% of the population. They are therefore 2.9 times more represented among people who have been put to justice, a figure that allows us to contextualize all the testimonies on the difficult relations between the police officers and the Native communities collected during the Viens commission, for example.
With precise data by community, we can also see that 40.5% of all Aboriginal people in court are Inuit. There therefore seems to be a particularly glaring problem in the relationship between the Inuit communities and the criminal justice system. Does the over-representation come from particularly aggressive police practices in Nunavik? Has the increased judicialization of people experiencing homelessness in Montreal had a major impact on this data? We should search, ask more questions. With this staggering statistic, there is cause for concern, even investigation.
Likewise, the study shows that the penal system disproportionately punishes people who are already precarious. Thus, 85% of newcomers admitted to the SCQ have little education (primary or secondary level only). In addition, 50% of men and 68.5% of women new to the courts in 2019-2020 drew their income from social assistance, while only 5% of the general population benefited from it. These figures, which are not new, should prompt us to reflect urgently on the consequences of concentrating police surveillance on the poor.
The statistics also allow us to understand the real effect of discrimination in employment according to the criminal record on the ability of former prisoners to successfully reintegrate into society after their incarceration. As recidivism rates are much higher among people who have been put to the law and cannot find a job, one can wonder whether the prejudices of employers towards people who have a record do not constitute a problem for public safety. Especially since 85% of the convictions in Quebec do not target “offenses against the person”: the automatic association between criminalized person and “violent” person, which remains in the imagination, does not therefore pass the test of the facts.
Ah, the facts! When we collect them in a sensible way, how much “clearer” social reality appears to us! You will excuse me for the bad pun.