Racialized men less likely to get paroled in Canada when eligible: newspaper

OTTAWA, May 10 (Xinhua) -- Racialized men are less likely to get paroled in Canada when eligible, Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail said in a recent article.

"An analysis of seven years of federal prison data has found that Indigenous, Black and other racialized men are 26 percent, 24 percent and 20 percent less likely than their white peers to be paroled in the first year they're eligible," said the article published in late February.

The analysis, carried out by the newspaper, found that throughout the process of incarceration and rehabilitation, which the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) is mostly responsible for, "the odds (of being released) are notched further and further against racialized people."

"By Law, nearly all non-life prisoners who have reached the two-thirds mark of their sentence have to be released back into the community to complete the remainder of their sentence, with varying levels of restrictions," the article said. But in reality, "you're better off being white."

The analysis has reflected "systemic and institutional racism" in Canada's parole process, which is "based on fundamental inequality," Sarah Turnbull, professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo, was quoted as saying by the article.

"These things have been going on for a really long time. The institutions have known about it," Turnbull said, adding that differences in parole outcomes have lingered partly because the conditional release system -- the final step in a prisoner's return to society -- is far less scrutinized.

In 2020, the newspaper did a similar analysis on the CSC's risk assessment tools used to assess a prisoner's risk to public safety and odds of reoffending, and they were found "systemically biased against Black men, Indigenous men and Indigenous women."