Making a Difference — Final Report: Examining Impact of Race & Culture Assessments

This report was published by Peacebuilders Canada.

HERE’S HOW THE AUTHORS DESCRIBE THIS REPORT:

With generous funding and support from the Law Foundation of Ontario, Peacebuilders led the Making a Difference project, which researched the different impacts that Impact of Race and Culture Assessments (IRCAs), also known as Enhanced Pre-Sentence Reports (EPSRs), can have. To do this research, we held 39 consultations with community members, community agencies, justice professionals, and subject matter experts, as well as reviewed literature, including legal cases, about IRCAs/EPSRs.

This research presented different responses about IRCAs/EPSRs. Discussing their benefits, participants, including those who have had an IRCA/EPSR prepared on their behalf, talked about how it gave them the opportunity to finally talk about and confront traumatic experiences in their lives and have their story heard, which then helped them heal the wounds left by those experiences. We also heard that IRCAs/EPSRs could be a helpful educational tool for legal professionals, who may not be knowledgeable in anti-Black racism, better understand its impacts and make more informed decisions. Some of the legal cases we reviewed also suggested that IRCAs/EPSRs may have been useful in helping judges give a defendant a more lenient sentence than what the Crown proposed.

On the limitations that IRCAs/EPSRs present, we also heard concerns from subject matter experts about the lack of or need for consultations with Black communities about whether they felt that IRCAs/EPSRs were meaningful to them. Furthermore, we heard that the stories that IRCAs/EPSRs ultimately tell can risk playing into racist stereotypes about Black people, as well as flattening the diversity and richness of what it even means to be Black.

Whether or not IRCAs/EPSRs are part of the solution, what our findings suggest is that, at the very least, they help continue these conservations.

This report is available online in three parts:

Part 1: Project Overview

Part 2: Understanding the Issues: Over-Incarceration and Anti-Black Racism

Part 3: Exploring A Response: Unpacking IRCAs/EPSRs

Categorised in: Report