Professor Amanda Haynes:

In Canada, there are some examples of good practice. It is not perfect because to some extent, this is an issue that has only more recently been accepted as being problematic. Other countries are ahead of us in terms of going through the process of seeing and acknowledging it, acknowledging that it is not an inevitability and accepting that it is not because a community lives up to a stereotype of being criminogenic but because there is a pipeline to prison. It is also a case of accepting that we have a responsibility, as a society and State, to disrupt that pipeline. They are a bit ahead of us in that regard but not by much.

Canada and New Zealand are far ahead of us in terms of collecting equality data for their indigenous communities. This is not just their representation in prison but the pipeline that brings people to prison. The kind of measures that have been brought in are different depending on the country you are talking about. In New Zealand, there is much better recognition of the Maori people's indigenous forms of justice. This is not necessarily the case for all indigenous communities.

One thing that stands out in Canada - this is something the Travellers in Prison Initiative is also recommending - is the introduction of Gladue reports. Gladue reports are used in Canada in order to inform a judge about the circumstances of an indigenous person coming before the court. It provides not just the background of the person as an individual but as an indigenous person and member of an ethnic community who is highly disadvantaged and who has experienced structural racism and the impacts of that throughout their life. It is directed towards trying to ensure that prison is the option of absolute last resort for that community. The system, as it is implemented in Canada, is not perfect. It is a federal system. Different states approach it differently and resource it in different ways. At the very least, it provides the possibility, and it is being improved all the time, of ensuring that judges have a more fulsome understanding of the people who come before them, particularly when we live in a society in which stereotypes of the Traveller community and misinformation abounds and impacts all of us. This refers to even those of us, the privileged few, who have opportunities to learn directly from the community.