I've tried this everywhere and I'll try it again here. I'd like to see us not call them “Gladue reports” anymore. Jamie Gladue never got the benefit of this provision, and in fact, that provision was used to hide the racism and misogyny that was visited on her. But that's another story for another day.
Paragraph 718(2)(e) of the Criminal Code, which is what we're talking about, is where the genesis of the idea of the Gladue reports comes from. Paragraph 718(2)(e) was implemented for the same reason the CCRA was implemented. Part of it was a sentencing principle not just for indigenous people but particularly for indigenous people to try to reduce the number of people who were going to prison. Now it's being applied not just to judges who are sentencing. It's supposed to be looked at by police officers who are examining whether to charge someone. It's supposed to be looked at by parole officers who are determining what programs people should have access to and their release options. It's supposed to be looked at now by the entire system. But the provisions in the Criminal Code say that where individuals have had all of these strikes against them to start with, we should be looking at a capacity-building model, not a deficit model. Some very good Gladue reports will describe all kinds of things we should be doing differently, but essentially they list all the deficits that people have had in their lives and all the horrible things they've experienced without necessarily then prescribing the remedy of how we prevent them from ending up in the system at all, or further, and then how we get them out.
I think one of the things we should do is go back to paragraph 718(2)(e) and ask what the legislative intent was. It was designed to actually reduce the numbers and encourage us all to figure out how we build capacity, whether it's in classification schemes, security schemes, or sentencing, and focus on the deficits.
If we focus on a deficit model, we take something that is a need, like housing, or something like sexual abuse, and say that actually creates a risk. We translate it into a risk factor and then you get a prison sentence. Say, we take a capacity model. There are a few examples in this country where we've done it with young people and with women, and I'd like to see more examples of it done with men as well. We actually say that if the main issue is that you were sexually abused and responded to that by reacting, by having to essentially be deputized to protect yourself—so you started to use instrumental violence as well—and you really had no place to live, then what we should be looking at is how we build those supports around you. We shouldn't send you to prison for punishment for that, but build those supports around you, and then expect some individuals to work with you to model the type of behaviour we want to see. It's much more labour-intensive, but it's way more productive in terms of lower overall human, social, and financial cost.