I agree with you entirely that it's not the Correctional Service of Canada's fault that today 26.5% of the federally incarcerated population is of indigenous heritage. Recently my office reported the sad milestone of 25%, and it has gone up since then. There are upstream issues, broad social and structural issues that have to be addressed, but corrections owns an important piece of the solution, I believe.
You mentioned women. Nearly 37% of federally sentenced women are indigenous. That's one of the fastest growing subpopulations in federal corrections. The proportion of federally sentenced indigenous women, I believe—and, of course, Dr. Zinger is here to fact-check this for me—has doubled or nearly doubled during my tenure as correctional investigator of Canada.
You cannot disentangle all of the other issues that are part of our current discourse around the nation-to-nation relationship and this stark, dramatic, and unreasonable overrepresentation in our corrections system. The Correctional Service of Canada has identified this themselves as a priority.
In fact, identifying the problem is no longer the problem. Recently, this week in fact, I spent some time at a Gladue summit to try to address what, at least in the province of Ontario, could be done to address these issues. Gladue, of course, refers to the Supreme Court of Canada decision, a very fundamental decision. What was clear was that it's not just recognizing the impact of colonial contact; it's not just recognizing intergenerational trauma; it's not just acknowledging that there has been dislocation; it's actually then applying a lens that allows you to do analysis that will change outcomes.
In my opinion, that's where the Correctional Service of Canada is failing. The Correctional Service of Canada has developed healing lodges. The Correctional Service of Canada has an aboriginal corrections directorate. The Correctional Service of Canada engages with elders, has a national advisory committee on aboriginal issues. There are culturally specific programs. There are sacred grounds in most institutions. All of these things are positive, are important, are necessary, but they don't make that extra step.
I'll give you a specific example of what I mean. On many of the forms and the documents that the Correctional Service of Canada staff have to complete when they're in the process of making a decision, there's a box on the form for aboriginal social history, if you're dealing with an indigenous man or woman. What we see too often in that box is not an analysis of what that social history means and how it can be applied to the decision at hand. What we see is simply an acknowledgement that the social history was considered.