Thank you.
Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable members of this committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you today.
I'm Angela Arnet Connidis, the director general of crime prevention, corrections, and criminal justice at the Department of Public Safety.
I am pleased to be here with my colleagues from the Correctional Service of Canada. We work in close collaboration, and your committee's study of indigenous inmates and their release and reintegration outcomes will inform our knowledge and work on this issue.
Today I would like to describe some of the work the Department of Public Safety has undertaken to improve reintegration outcomes for indigenous offenders and to promote and enhance the safety of indigenous communities.
The overrepresentation of indigenous people across the spectrum of the criminal justice system is chronic and alarming, and my colleagues have reviewed the statistics that you're all well aware of. For this reason, indigenous corrections and community safety are ongoing priorities for the Department of Public Safety. We recognize that the overrepresentation of indigenous peoples in contact with the criminal justice system is a complex issue and that it requires a continuum of policies, programs, and initiatives to address the disproportionate rates of crime and victimization experienced by indigenous people.
Public Safety itself does not have responsibility for the management of indigenous inmates in federal corrections institutions, but we work in some key areas to improve their reintegration outcomes and support indigenous communities to create safe environments. I would like to talk to you in particular about three key initiatives we have undertaken to do this: the indigenous community corrections initiative, the aboriginal community safety development contribution program, and our national crime prevention strategy.
The indigenous community corrections initiative is directly related to helping indigenous offenders reintegrate into their community. Under section 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, if an inmate expresses an interest in being released into an indigenous community, the Correctional Service of Canada can, with the inmate's consent, engage with that community to codevelop a plan for the inmate's release and integration. This approach can help improve the success of an indigenous offender's application for conditional release and the outcome of that release.
However, not all indigenous communities have the capacity to engage with the Correctional Service of Canada to provide their input into a conditional release plan, nor do they have the capacity to provide indigenous inmates with the support they need upon release. This is the problem we're trying to address through the indigenous community corrections initiative. This initiative received $10 million over five years in budget 2017. Through this initiative, Public Safety will provide contribution funding to support training and capacity-building within indigenous communities. This will help them implement community-based projects that will in turn assist in the reintegration of offenders and provide alternatives to incarceration.
The important thing about these approaches is that they will be tailored and responsive to the concerns, priorities, and unique circumstances of the particular indigenous community applying for the funding. Through this initiative, our objective is to increase the indigenous community's capacity to work with both Correctional Service of Canada and provincial corrections to provide transition support in the release of indigenous offenders and improve their reintegration outcomes.
The projects will also contribute to the knowledge development of what works and are best practices in community reintegration of indigenous offenders. This could also benefit other communities dealing with similar issues.
Eligible recipients for this funding program include indigenous not-for-profit organizations; indigenous governments; municipal governments working in collaboration with indigenous organizations and/or communities; indigenous communities themselves, and Canadian universities and colleges.
The first call for proposals was launched on October 4, 2017.
We're very much looking forward to receiving, reviewing, and awarding funding to successful submissions. With a focus on reintegration, this initiative proposes to help reverse the trend of indigenous overrepresentation in the Canadian criminal justice system and will support the healing and rehabilitation of indigenous offenders.
The second initiative I referred to is the aboriginal community safety development initiative. We usually refer to this one as community safety planning.
Community safety planning is focused on building a community's capacity to create a safe community by providing it whatever support it feels it needs to develop and implement a community safety plan. It is a uniquely grassroots approach. Public Safety officials reach out to the elders and senior council members in indigenous communities, and we offer a trained facilitator and Public Safety officials to hold sessions with the community on how to identify its safety risks and its community strengths and goals. We support the community in developing a plan for what it needs to be safe.
We pay for the facilitator, who is experienced in working with indigenous communities, and we offer support for the process, but only if the community feels it is ready and invites us in. The community itself provides the venue and hospitality for the meetings, as well as a core group of community members to do the planning. To date, we have engaged with over 100 indigenous communities. Twenty-nine of them have completed their plans and are in various stages of implementation.
After the plans, we are now operating a pilot project with as many as 10 communities, and through this we engage other federal departments such as Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Health Canada, and Justice Canada, as well as ministries and provincial governments that have a role to play in implementing components of the community safety plan.
From the perspectives of these partners, the community safety plan helps them target their funding more effectively and ensures that they are supporting projects that the community itself feels are priorities for its safety.
We are working with several indigenous communities to enhance local reintegration services and to develop capacity to enter into an agreement with Correctional Service of Canada to take on the care and custody of indigenous offenders, as allowed under section 81 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
We are hopeful that our continued work toward an integrated, comprehensive response to the communities' priority issues can replace a reactive approach to fixing problems.
By supporting indigenous communities in responding to and developing solutions to address their own corrections and community safety needs, we feel there is a greater possibility for sustainable, longer-term solutions.
The third initiative I want to discuss with you is our national crime prevention strategy. This is another key component of efforts to address the growing pressures on the criminal justice system by reducing the number of individuals who come into contact with the law. Successful interventions have been shown to reduce not only victimization but also the social and economic costs that result from criminal activities and the costs related to processing cases in the criminal justice system.
Under this strategy, Public Safety provides funding to support evidence-based crime prevention interventions with at-risk children, youth, and young adults, former offenders who are no longer under corrections supervision, and indigenous populations. The strategy has a targeted northern and aboriginal crime prevention fund that supports the adaptation, development, and implementation of innovative and promising culturally sensitive crime prevention practices. It supports the dissemination of knowledge and the development of tools and resources for indigenous and northern populations, as well as capacity-building as a means of exploring ways to develop or implement culturally sensitive crime prevention practices among indigenous and northern populations.
With regard to the crime prevention projects the department has supported since 2012, 46% of crime-prevention funding has involved indigenous people or communities.
I've talked about these three initiatives because they're most pertinent to your discussion, but I do want to let you know that Public Safety and Justice Canada share a mandate commitment to address gaps in services to indigenous people throughout the criminal justice system, and we're working closely with our colleagues to do that. As well, the extensive work and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission include 12 calls to action that implicate our portfolio, and we're working across the portfolio and with indigenous organizations and other government departments to respond to these calls.
We know that to reduce the overrepresentation of indigenous people in custody, we need to focus on the social history and risk factors present in people's lives. This study is going to help us get there.
Thank you once again for the opportunity to address you today. I welcome any questions you may have