Black prisoners in Ontario’s jails are being assigned to harsher living conditions than other prisoners, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that claims to predict their behaviour. A class action lawsuit says the province was aware its use of the software could disproportionately target Black prisoners, but went ahead with it anyway.
The Security Assessment for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) program has been operating quietly in Ontario’s jails since early 2021. SAFER inputs a prisoner’s personal information—including arrests, charges, and disciplinary records—into an algorithm. The program assigns each prisoner a score from 0 to 100 that determines whether they’ll be placed in minimum, medium, or maximum security detention.
Critics of the program argue that the data that SAFER is fed is racially biased: they cite documented patterns of police and courts handing out more severe punishments to Black people because of anti-Black racism. SAFER then uses that data to make harsher risk assessments of Black people who are sent to jail.
The ministry responsible for Ontario’s prisoners agrees. It wrote in internal training documents viewed exclusively by The Breach that “Indigenous and racialized individuals face systemic discrimination in our justice system … As a result, assessments like SAFER would likely contribute to the overrepresentation of Indigenous inmates in maximum security.”
Despite this, the ministry has been using SAFER for five years. And while the province has included several measures in its rollout of SAFER to reduce the number of Indigenous prisoners in maximum security, it does not appear to have taken such steps for Black prisoners. “We are continuously evaluating to determine if it is necessary to make similar adjustments for other groups,” the same training document from the Ministry of the Solicitor General says.
Hellbound and Down 