by Braden Wye
As my 12-week internship at the Cree Nation Government’s Justice and Correctional Services Department wraps up, I would like to dedicate this blog to a recurring theme I’ve experienced throughout my time here — the distance of my work to the people I’m serving.
I spent my first month preparing and writing a Gladue report, in which I had to interview my client and their relatives, transcribe what they told me, and turn their words into a life story to be considered by the judge during sentencing. Gladue reports originate from a 1996 amendment to the Criminal Code and the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1999 decision in R v Gladue, both of which sought to reduce the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the prison system.1
Specifically, Gladue clarified that special attention regarding an Indigenous offender’s unique circumstances and background factors were to be considered by the judge during sentencing.2 Judges would be informed by a report which could detail, if applicable, an offender or their family’s experience with residential school and the resulting intergenerational trauma, displacement by governments or mining companies, systemic racism, and other effects of colonialism that contributed to poverty, substance abuse, or involvement with the justice system.
While writing my report, I couldn’t help but think of how my client was only a few months younger than me, yet our lives were drastically different. I was at one of the top law schools in the country, on track to becoming a member of a respected, well-paying profession. Meanwhile, he was potentially facing a lifetime of prison for a non-violent crime. My interactions with him were professional by necessity, but behind the court files I saw a human being, a young man from a small northern community with a lack of opportunity and a history of grappling with foreign encroachment.
The booths at the office from which we’d conduct our interviews
There was an inequality that permeated our relationship — not just the inherent inequality of our vastly different circumstances, but a one-sidedness to the interactions we had. As the writer assigned to his file, I had access to details about his life, his family, his offences — while he knew nothing about me besides my name. While interviews are optimally conducted in person, the logistical circumstances of the internship this year meant that I had to phone my client, meaning he did not even see what I looked like.
I sometimes wondered what he would have thought if he knew I was also 23, or that he was my first client. One challenge that experienced writers risk facing is that they become completely numbed of all empathy from having done so much emotionally draining work. Would my client thus feel more comfortable opening up to me, knowing I wasn’t some seasoned justice worker who had cranked out hundreds of reports? Or perhaps the opposite – would he be struck with despair at the fact that someone as young as me was writing a report that had the power to influence his fate, while a young Cree man like him’s only interaction with the justice system was from the other side of the dock?
The author of this blog post at the office
At the time of me writing this blog, I have no idea where my client is now, or how he is doing. His sentencing hearing took place a week after I submitted my report, but I was not privy to the outcome. My role in the entire process was essentially being assigned a client and interviewing them for a report, after which I would never hear from them again. There are likely logistical and ethical reasons for why this is done, but it certainly does create an atmosphere of detachment, especially as a non-Cree outsider brought in to do an internship. Besides the issue of Cree community members having to tell their most painful stories to a complete stranger who does not know the nuances of their culture, there is also the other side of the coin, where Gladue writers suffer burnout from the vicarious trauma they are exposed to. Retention of writers is thus a big concern.
I have no solutions to offer, or any grand theses to posit. These are just the internal thoughts of a Gladue writer, working in an office 500 kilometres away from the people whose stories I have been tasked to tell. Maybe one day, the story will be told from the other side…