We know from a lot of reporting and studies that
Black and Indigenous people are over represented in the justice system,
being stopped by police and finding their ways into jails and prisons.
So much of our focus is upstream at bias in policing, bias in our courts.
Tell me why you wanted to look at what happens within prisons.
As you noted, you know, so much of our focus –
just societally, generally is on everything that leads up to the moment when someone is sentenced.
But when people are going into the correctional system, they almost get sentenced a second time.
They get this battery of risk-assessment tools that are going to in part, define their future.
They're going to determine which kind of prison they go to.
They're going to determine which kind of treatments or programming they can access.
That extends too, you know, alcohol and substance abuse programs. That's also, you know, what kind of jobs can you get.
Are you sweeping the floor of, you know, the range that you're on, or are you working in an office?
Are you working in a kitchen, all that kind of stuff?
And then, of course, it also effects parole, your odds of getting released early.
Most people who go to prison, which is anyone who is sentenced to two years or more, ends up in federal custody.
Most people will actually be paroled or what they call statutorily released
before they're sentences up, so very few people actually serve all the way through to the end of their sentence.
So, it's a really interesting mechanism and process that we don't really examine very much.
I've been trying to talk to people about solutions, and, you know, where do we go from here?
One thing that we touched on briefly in the story is this idea of
what they call culturally aware assessment or culturally appropriate assessment.
So, you know, instead of having one-size fits all tool, what a lot of experts have told me they want to see is
tools that are designed from the ground up with Indigenous culture in mind.
So you might have a tool that asked questions about intergenerational trauma,
about you know, were parents residential school survivors.
You might have questions that ask about involvement in traditional culture, cultural practices like, you know, be it participating in arts.
That's you know, Indigenous art or you know, everything from talking circles to what have you?
And obviously, Indigenous culture is very different across Canada and you can't put that all into one single group,
but that's something that's been talked about for years
and virtually every single risk-assessment expert I spoke with said that that was likely the next step, was to start looking at that stuff.
You noted that artificial intelligence technology is not currently used by CSC in the risk assessments.
Do you see them incorporating AI technology into the system soon?
And do you think using AI based technology in the risk assessment by CSC
would address some of the concerns that you raised in your report?
You know, that's interesting. I've done a little bit of reporting on AI use by the government
and just the nature of algorithms being used by governments,
and I think it's – it's something that has to be approached very cautiously,
especially when it comes to sentencing and to risk assessment in prison.
These are some of the most consequential decisions you can make about someone's life.
If you get sent to a maximum security for 10 years, you're going to come out a different person
than if you went in and stayed minimum for 10 years.
That's a fact, there's no way around it.
And so I think – what I find useful and interesting about the system that Corrections Canada currently has is that
these risk assessments, you can pull them apart, and you can see what's making them work.
And you can understand what the effects are.
With an artificial-intelligence system, there's going to be a black box in the middle,
and you're not gonna be able to work out what decisions it's making.
You have a rough idea perhaps depending on the technique that you use, but you're not going to really know
why did it score me a certain way versus you a different way?
And I think that in a field that is so tied up in, you know, arbitration, legal action,
as you know, anything criminal is, it's really important that –
that any correctional service or court be able to explain their decision making.
So I think it's unlikely that we'll see any kind of,
you know, automated decision making on that scale for a long time, in corrections anyway.