‘Indians are the Majority of the Prisoners’? Historical Variations in Incarceration Rates for Indigenous Women and Men in British Columbia
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12381 |
| Author | KRIS INWOOD,EVAN ROBERTS |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12381
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 350–369
‘Indians are the Majority of the
Prisoners’? Historical Variations in
Incarceration Rates for Indigenous
Women and Men in British Columbia
KRIS INWOOD andEVANROBERTS
Kris Inwood is Professor, Economics and History, University of Guelph,
Ontario, Canada; Evan Roberts is Assistant Professor, Sociology and
Population Center, University of Minnesota, USA
Abstract: Indigenous people have experienced relatively high incarceration rates in
British Columbia, as elsewhere in North America, since the 1940s. Archival prison
records, however, show that the incidence of Indigenous incarceration was lower than for
other people before 1910. This evidence implies the crucial period for increasing incar-
ceration of Indigenous peoples in British Columbias was from 1910 to 1940. The pattern
for Indigenous women differed from that of men. Large numbers of Indigenous women
were imprisoned in the 1870s and 1880s. The British Columbia Indigenous pattern has
important similarities to the New Zealand M¯
aori in the same era. Neither Indigenous
experience is easily explained by group threat theory used to understand rising incarcera-
tion for African-Americans in this period. Indigenous incarceration in settler states prior
to the 1950s needs additional comparative research and theoretical understanding.
Keywords: British Columbia; Canada; discrimination; ethnicity; group threat;
history; incarceration; Indigenous; prisoners; racism
Indigenous people today are imprisoned much more frequently than other
Canadians despite repeated attempts at policing and judicial reform. Dis-
proportionate incarceration has deep historical roots; most policy analysts
frame their understanding within a long trajectory that has been funda-
mentally hostile to the Indigenous (Canada 2015a, 2015b). And yet, while
a great deal is known about colonialism and the ways in which it disadvan-
taged Indigenous peoples living within the boundaries of Canada, there
has been little systematic examination of their historical experience within
the prison system. The scholarly literature provides limited guidance about
whether ethnic differences in the pattern of convictions, the level of incar-
ceration, recidivism and so on, have always existed, or how they might have
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2020 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 350–369
changed. Important exceptions include Helps (2005), Ajzenstadt (2002),
and Haring (1998, pp.217–38).
This article begins with a short summary of the Canadian experience
since the 1960s. In the last five decades the Indigenous have been impris-
oned at higher rates than other Canadians, and the disparity has been in-
creasing. Has there always been inequality of this magnitude? A partial an-
swer comes from a historical case study of prisons in 19th-Century British
Columbia, which had a large Indigenous population. The experience of
imprisonment in this context differed in important ways from current ex-
perience. The historical case study suggests that the disproportionate im-
prisonment of the Indigenous, at least in British Columbia, has deep his-
torical roots but it is not immutable.
Indigenous Incarceration in Canada since the 1960s1
In 1967, the Canadian Corrections Association (1967) reported that the
Indigenous were many times more likely than other Canadians to be re-
moved from their families as children and to be incarcerated as adults.
At the same time similar patterns were being documented for Indigenous
people in the United States (May 1982). Distinctive patterns of convicting
the Indigenous included low levels of financial crime, high rates of alcohol-
related conviction, and relatively high levels of recidivism.2Analysts have
identified a broad range of contributing factors. The 1967 report observed
that a large proportion of the convictions resulted from discriminatory pro-
visions of the Indian Act, such that Indigenous people were often indicted
for behaviour that would not constitute an offence for whites. The Cana-
dian Sentencing Commission (1987) pointed to imprisonment for fine de-
fault as a proximate cause of disproportionate incarceration. The following
year a committee of the Canadian Bar Association gave a structural analysis
(Jackson 1989):
What links these views of native criminality as caused by poverty or alcohol is the
historical process which native people have experienced in Canada … the advance
first of the agricultural and then the industrial frontier, has left native people in
most parts of the country dispossessed of all but the remnants of what was once their
homelands; that process, superintended by missionaries and Indian agents armed
with the power of the law, took such extreme forms as criminalizing central Indian
institutions such as the potlatch and sun dance, and systematically undermined the
foundations of many native communities. (pp.218–19)
By the mid-1990s, improved public statistics confirmed that Indigenous
people were more than three times as likely to be found in federal prisons
and nearly five times as likely to be found in provincial jails. Indigenous
rates were higher for all categories of crime. The ethnic gap in incidence of
offending was greater for women than for men except for the most serious
crimes (Roberts and Doob 1997, pp.489–90). A growing body of evidence
showed recidivism levels to be higher among Indigenous offenders: see the
literature survey by LaPrairie (1996). All studies document an increase in
the Indigenous share of prisoners and in the incidence of offending among
Indigenous populations during the 1980s and 1990s, notwithstanding
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2020 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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