Seite - 377 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

377COVID-19 in Canadian Prisons: Policies, Practices and Concerns Moreover, there may be concerns arising from how prison- ers’ rights under the Charter  of  Rights  and  Freedoms  (the Charter) and human rights statutes are being upheld during the pandemic.55 First, as mentioned, incarcerated individuals often belong to communities impacted by social inequality and thus are already at a higher risk and in need of enhanced protection during a pandemic. Not only does state custody not offer that protection, but it heightens the risks to their health and lives. In the words of Professor Anthony Doob, a leading Canadian criminologist and statistician, “We currently have a situation, then, that suggests quite strongly that being in a CSC peni- tentiary has the effect of putting a prisoner at a much higher risk of a very serious disease with a non-trivial mortality rate.”56 Second, the insufficient prison responses to the pandemic have, percentage-wise, disproportionately impacted women57 and individ- uals with underlying health conditions. Third, Indigenous people are overrepresented in prisons, as they make up over 30% of federally incarcerated people.58 Thus, the pandemic disproportionately affects Indigenous incarcerated individuals, especially Indigenous women. In this context, as also exemplified by Aimée Craft, Deborah McGregor and Jeffery Hewitt, this volume, Chapter A-2, and by Anne Levesque & Sophie Thériault, in Chapter D-6 of this volume, the government’s inaction is reminiscent of historic harms against Indigenous people and communities, which can be considered another form of colonial violence—something the Canadian criminal justice system has regu- larly been accused of perpetuating.59 Equality issues (under s. 15 of 55. On the need for human rights oversight of pandemic responses generally, and for prisons specifically, see “Canada’s COVID-19 Response Needs Human Rights Oversight, says Amnesty International” (March 25, 2020), online: Amnesty  International <perma.cc/RK94-2UND>; Canada, Office of the Correctional Investigator, supra note 36. 56. Anthony Doob, supra note 33, at 10. 57. Ibid. 58. Office of the Correctional Investigator, supra note 11. 59. See e.g. Elspeth Kaiser-Derrick, Implicating  the  System:  Judicial  Discourses  in  the  Sentencing  of  Indigenous  Women, (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019); Gillian Balfour, “Do Law Reforms Matter? Exploring the Victimization- Criminalization Continuum in the Sentencing of Aboriginal Women in Canada” (2013) 19:1 Int Rev Vict 85; Kent Roach, Canadian  Justice,  Indigenous  Injustice, (Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019); David Milward, “Locking up Those Dangerous Indians for Good: An Examination of Canadian Dangerous Offender Legislation as Applied to Aboriginal Persons” (2013) 51:3 Alta Law Rev 619.