Investigating systemic bias in Canada’s prisons
You can find the GitHub repository for this presentation at:
About me
Tom Cardoso, crime and justice reporter
at The Globe and Mail
A sentence of two years or longer lands you in federal prison. We have a massive overincarceration problem for Indigenous and Black people.
Risk assessments
Custody Rating Scale
Static Factors
Dynamic Factors
- Standardized tests.
- Designed to measure an inmate’s risk to the public and odds of being rehabilitated.
- Everywhere in corrections. Murderers, fraudsters, etc.: everyone gets one.
- Used to classify, treat, and parole the 12,000 to 14,000 inmates in federal custody each year.
- But: Evaluating risk is tricky. Tons of room for bias.
Issues in assessment
- Highly subjective to the assessor
- Tough to interpret results
- Takes years to design an assessment, and then years to find out if it works
- Over time, tools become less effective
- Cultural bias
What we found
- Black men: roughly 24% more likely than white men to end up in maximum security.
- Indigenous men: roughly 30% more likely to have the worst reintegration score.
- Both: actually less likely to reoffend after controlling for reintegration scores.
- Even worse for Indigenous women.
Compared to white men, and after controlling for factors like age, offence severity and criminal history, etc.…
How did this come together?
- A single freedom of information request, for a massive database of 50,000 inmates. 750,000 rows in all.
- Went for broke. No one had attempted a prison FOI on this scale — academics, legal experts warned it couldn’t be done.
- After some analysis, realized I needed a more complex approach to account for multiple variables.
- Landed on a basic modelling technique, multivariate logistic regression.
- Informed by traditional reporting: interviews with 90+ sources, reviewed hundreds of pages of inmate records, dozens of academic studies.
Response
- Published first story on a Saturday morning. By Monday afternoon, the House of Commons’ public safety committee had announced a study of systemic racism in prison risk assessments.
- Prime Minister acknowledged findings a few days later.
- Lawyers using our reporting at parole hearings.
- Last month: Class-action human rights lawsuit filed against the federal government on behalf of tens of thousands of inmates.
Takeaways
- File big-picture, ambitious data FOIs. Most won’t work out, but some will.
- Experiment with new techniques. Learned how to model data for this story.
- Constantly try to disprove your own findings. Especially on big stories.
- Write a methodology story. Be transparent about your process and analysis limitations. Most people won’t read it, but the ones who do will appreciate it.
- Data is just a tool. Still need to report. Find documents, build sources, pick up the phone, etc.
Stories
- Bias behind bars: A Globe investigation finds a prison system stacked against Black and Indigenous inmates (Oct. 24)
- How we did it: How The Globe uncovered systemic bias in prisoners’ risk assessments (Oct. 24)
- A shot in the dark and 185 megabytes of data: How I investigated a system of bias in Canada’s prison system (Oct. 24)
- ‘This needs action’: NDP, experts call for solutions to racial bias in federal prison risk assessments (Oct. 26)
- Fight against systemic racism in prison wins all-party support (Oct. 26)
- More needs to be done to fight systemic racism in federal prisons, Justin Trudeau says (Oct. 27)
- MPs ask Bill Blair for timeline to address systemic racism in prisons (Nov. 2)
- For Indigenous women, systemic racial bias in prison leaves many worse off than men (Dec. 31)
- Inmate risk assessment tool still in use 16 years after report raises concerns about bias against women (Jan. 3)
- Proposed class-action suit against Ottawa suggests inmates face systemic bias in risk assessments (Jan. 12)