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Racialized Communities Strategy Infographic

Infographic: Overrepresentation of racialized communities in the justice system

Infographic data is below

Infographic: Overrepresentation of racialized communities in the justice system

The racialization of poverty

  • A third of children from racialized communities live in poverty
  • Workers from racialized communities in Ontario are paid 77.5¢ for every dollar earned by persons from non-racialized communities
  • 19% of Ontario families from racialized communities live in poverty compared to 6% from non-racialized communities

Higher jail admissons

  • People from racialized communities are overrepresented in Ontario’s youth and adult jails
  • 4X more black Canadian boys (aged 12 to 17) in the young male jail population than what they would represent in the general young male population

Racial profiling

Racial profiling is any action undertaken for reasons of safety, security or public protection that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, religion, or place or orging rather than on reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment.

For example:

  • A landlord asks a student to move out because she believes that the tenant will expose her to SARS
  • A bar refuses to serve certain patrons because of an assumption they will get drunk and rowdy
  • A police officer assumes someone is more likely to have committed a crime
  • An employer wants a stricter security clearance for an employee after a terrorist attack
  • A private security guard follows a shopper because she believes the shopper is more likely to steal from the store

Children in state care

  • Higher proportion of children in state care
  • 41% of youth in care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto are black…
  • …even though only 8.2% of the city’s under-18 population is black

Sources:

  • Ontario Human Rights Commission. Paying the Price: The Human Cost of Racial Profiling. 2003.
  • Toronto Star. “Unequal justice: Aboriginal and black inmates disproportionately fill Ontario jails.” 2013.
  • Toronto Star. “Ontario may collect race-based data on kids in care.” 2015.
Racialized Communities Strategy Infographic

Infographic: Why we need a Racialized Communities Strategy

Infographic content is below

Infographic: Why we need a Racialized Communities Strategy

What do we mean by “Racialized Communities”?

  • Racialized communities refer to all people who do not consider themselves to be white. (First Nation, Métis and Inuit people are not considered racialized. To learn more about LAO’s Aboriginal Justice Strategy, please visit legalaid.on.ca/AJS.)

    We used to say “visible minorities” to refer to people who were non-white or non-European in ancestry, but increasingly, there are many places where people of colour make up the majority of the population.

  • Over the past 20 years, there has been an overrepresentation of racialized communities in the justice system

A snapshot of legal and social needs

  • Increased poverty rates
  • Overrepresentation in jails and prisons
  • Increased rates of homelessness
  • Lack of access to education, fair work, healthcare or police protection for people without status
  • Disproportionate rate of over-policing
  • Discrimination in school discipline
  • Barriers to employment and overrepresentation in low-paying, unstable jobs
  • People of colour make up almost 26% of Ontario’s population. Ontario is the province of choice with 3.6 million immigrants — just over half of all newcomers to Canada call it home.
  • By 2017, more than half of Toronto’s population will be people of colour
  • Nearly one in five immigrants experiences a state of chronic low income…
  • … More than twice the rate of Canadian-born individuals
  • 19% of Ontario families from racialized communities live in poverty compared to 6% from non-racialized communities

Soures:

  • Colour of Poverty Campaign (http://www.learningandviolence.net/lrnteach/material/PovertyFactSheets-aug07.pdf)
  • Giddens, Margaret, and David Cole. “The Report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System.” 1998.
  • The Homeless Hub (http://homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/population-specific/racialized-communities)
  • Kellough, Gail, and Scot Wortley. “Remand for Bail: Bail and Plea Bargaining as Commensurate Decisions.” British Journal of Criminology, 42. 2002.
  • McMurtry, Roy, and Alvin Curling. The Roots of Youth Violence. 1998.
  • Owusu-Bempah, Akwasi, and Scot Wortley. “Race, Crime and Criminal Justice in Canada.” The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration, 292. Ed. Sandra M. Bucerius and Michael H. Tonry. Oxford University Press, 2013 [reviewed online only]
  • Report of the Office of Correctional Investigator. “Case Study in Diversity in Corrections: The Black Inmate Experience in Federal Penitentiaries.” November 2013.
  • Statistics Canada. 2011 Census of Canada.