Inside and Outside the System : Artists Against Prisons

Women represent a mere sixteen percent of admissions to correctional programs federally and provincially, although they form 50.4 percent of the Canadian population.² 2 - Covadonga Robles Urquijo and Anne Milan, “Female Population,” Statistics Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-503-x/2015001/article/14152-eng.htm. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples are overrepresented in Canadian correctional programs: twenty-six percent of admissions are Indigenous, whereas only three percent of the Canadian adult population identifies as such.³ 3 - Canada,” World Prison Brief, Prison Studies, http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/canada Statistics Canada does not provide further information on the racial background of the Canadian prison population, though we do know that “Black Canadians now represent the fastest growing group in federal prisons, and are vastly overrepresented behind bars.”⁴ 4 - Catherine McIntyre, “Canada Has a Black Incarceration Problem,” Torontoist, https://torontoist.com/2016/04/african-canadian-prison-population/ In short, racialized and Indigenous men embody a significant overrepresentation within the population of incarcerated people in Canada.