Episode 28: Transformative Justice with Sen. Kim Pate

Ahkameyimok Podcast with Perry Bellegarde

"The fastest growing prison population is not just indigenous people, but particularly indigenous women and even more so, those who experienced the greatest disadvantages."

Senator Kim Pate points out that almost half of the women in Canada's prisons are indigenous, despite indigenous people making up less than five percent of the total population. The cost of keeping them in the corrections system is anywhere from one-hundred thousand dollars a year to more than half a million.

Senator Pate, a veteran expert in the efforts to reform Canada's prison system, says "If we took even a fraction of money we spend on policing, prosecuting and jailing indigenous people, every indigenous person in this country could be educated to post-secondary level, have housing, access to clean water and we would see a better quality of life for everybody."

Senator Pate and National Chief Bellegarde discuss how to de-colonise the legal system, what transformative justice looks like and the challenges to reforming a system with entrenched systemic racism.

Senator Pate is an internationally recognised expert in the area of legal and prison reform. Before joining the Senate in 2016, Kim Pate spent over twenty years as Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. In that role she was awarded the Order of Canada for her work as a leading advocate for women and marginalized people in Canadian prisons, with a special focus on the over-representation of first nations women. It’s a cause she remains committed to in the Senate.

To learn more on this topic, please listen to our interview with the Globe and Mail's Tom Cardoso about his year long investigative reprting on systemic racism in Canada's prison system:

https://blubrry.com/ahkameyimok/69952721/bias-behind-bars-a-prison-system-stacked-against-first-nations-inmates/

A big thanks goes out to the Red Dog Singers of Treaty 4 Territory in Saskatchewan for our theme music.

The Ahkameyimok Podcast is produced by David McGuffin of Explore Podcast Productions.