Magic Statistics

Political iconoclast Christopher Hitchens will speak on “The Busybody State” in Winnipeg on 26 April.  The thought-provoking and often-infuriating libertarian/socialist is appearing under the auspices of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

That would be a good reason to visit Winnipeg, if you need one.  Cost is $75, including dinner at the Fairmont Hotel.  Click here for the details and online registration.

I'd attend if I were going to be in the vicinity.  Mr Hitchens is an outspoken atheist, so (surprise!) I don’t agree with him on religion.  His defence of liberal freedoms is second to none, however, and that appears to be the subject of the evening's speech.

The Christopher Hitchens Web page has links to many of his commentaries.  

CBC Manitoba recently commissioned a survey of Winnipeggers’ attitudes about racial issues and race relations in the city. Over 1000 Winnipeg residents were telephoned last month and asked about a wide range of race-related topics, including immigration, justice, community, etc. The survey results indicate that Winnipeggers are, on the whole, tolerant and accepting people. CBC can hardly believe it.

The results of the telephone survey were surprising, and sometimes shocking. In general, the survey suggests Winnipeg is a tolerant city.

CBC thinks it’s “surprising” and “shocking” that a survey of Winnipeggers finds them to be a tolerant and even welcoming bunch of folks. Does CBC believe Winnipeg is full of close-minded bigots? What’s really “surprising” to me is that the president of the company that was hired to conduct the survey takes the same view.

"To tell you the truth, I was surprised to the degree in which Winnipeg society seems to be well integrated between racial minorities and the majority population," says Scott MacKay with Probe Research. "There are not any massive glaring issues when it comes to relations, at least sort of on a citizen-to-citizen level [period missing in original]

"There are some more important issues … with institutions, but it seems that Winnipeg is a very tolerant and open society when it comes to dealing with racial minority groups. I was kind of surprised by that."

Mr MacKay seems to agree with CBC in thinking Winnipeggers biased and intolerant. That’s pretty bad, I think–but it gets worse. After a rudimentary description of the survey’s methodology, almost half of the story is given over to discussion of its shortcomings. Here Mr MacKay really gets out of hand.

While efforts were made to ensure the population surveyed reflected Winnipeg's population, MacKay notes that it's important to acknowledge that certain segments of the population are always underrepresented in telephone surveys.

For example, MacKay said, such surveys can't reach the people who are most economically disadvantaged, because they don't have phones. In addition, Statistics Canada indicates Winnipeg residents in that category tend to be visible minorities and aboriginal people.

"[This] means that we probably have an under-expression of some of the people who have faced the most serious discrimination," MacKay said. "There's nothing really we can do about this, but it's important for us to acknowledge that there, in fact, may be more racism than we've been able to measure."

That is so wrong for so many reasons. The survey gathered no data from people who don’t own telephones, so, as a professional statistician, Mr MacKay knows nothing about them. His survey collected no information about their experience of discrimination, so any generalisations he makes about that are speculation. Mr MacKay has taken off his statistician’s hat and put on a political commentator’s hat. He has no special expertise in the latter area, unfortunately, so his opinion on discrimination experienced by Winnipeggers who do not have telephones is just as serviceable as that of the next guy.

He is also incorrect in saying “there’s nothing really we can do about this”. Of course there is: Go out and find the people who don’t own phones and ask them the survey questions. What he really means here is “CBC didn’t pay us enough money to track down Winnipeggers who don’t have telephones and interview them face to face”. Admittedly, that would have been far more expensive than hiring interviewers to sit in the Probe Research office for a week or so talking to Winnipeggers over the phone. Still, let’s be clear: The issue is money, not inability to gather the information. At Census time, Statistics Canada somehow manages to find and interview, not only Canadians who don’t have telephones, but even those who don’t have a home. It can be done.

MacKay also noted that an appropriate proportion of the survey's respondents were aboriginal – compared with the proportion of Winnipeggers who are aboriginal – but the aboriginals who responded to the survey tended to be more affluent and better educated that statistics indicate is true in the larger aboriginal population in Winnipeg.

"The fact that we probably did not represent the lowest, sort of bottom end of the socioeconomic strata of Winnipeg, especially in some of these minority groups, and the fact that we have sort of a higher level of respondents in the same groups as far as education and income go, are important to consider … because in some ways the experiences and attitudes we're seeing will be affected by that sampling," MacKay said.

Mr MacKay is raising doubts about the credibility of his own company’s survey. After this admission that the survey results are suspect (not to mention the earlier impromptu lapse into socio-political commentary), I wonder why anyone would hire Probe Research to conduct a statistical survey. They don’t believe their own findings. CBC agrees with Mr MacKay: The survey is highly questionable.

In other words, although the Race and Racism in Winnipeg poll showed relatively low levels of racial intolerance in the city, the poll may not have reached the people on the receiving end of the worst discrmination [sic] and racial intolerance.

If CBC had coughed up enough cash for a survey covering all Winnipeggers in the first place, extraneous speculation wouldn’t be necessary.

All surveys have limitations and shortcomings. The unprofessional way to relate them to users, as just seen, is to guess about what might have been found if the limitations did not exist. So, what is the professional way to explicate them? Let’s take an example. Statistics Canada does the Labour Force Survey (LFS) every month in all the provinces and territories, except Nunavut. This survey is the source of many of Canada's most salient economic statistics, most notably, the unemployment rate.

The LFS is done entirely by telephone, so it excludes all households that do not have phones. Does Statistics Canada ever speculate about what the unemployment rate might be if those without telephones had been included? Of course not. If it did that, it would devalue its own statistics and undermine the credibility of its own survey.

The latest Yukon LFS results are posted here (pdf document). Page 11 includes text describing some aspects of the LFS, including limitations. Here’s the bit pertinent to the present discussion:

In the Yukon the LFS sample is designed to represent approximately 83% of the working-age population (Yukoners 15 years of age and older). Yukoners living in unorganized areas, full-time members of the armed forces and people living in institutions are not represented in the sample.

That’s the end of discussion of the limitations of the Yukon LFS sample frame. It would be easy to speculate about the labour force experience of Yukoners who live in “unorganized areas” (i.e., very small communities or out in the bush) or institutions. However, Statistics Canada has no basis on which to conjecture because it gathered no information from those people.

The professional thing to do is simply to state what the limitations are and refrain entirely from supposition about possible effects on the findings.

via Chris’ blog. Chris, who lives somewhere in Manitoba, has posted some neat nature photos at his site.

Canadian aboriginal persons are incarcerated in numbers well above their proportion of the overall population. Comprising 3 percent of the national adult population, aboriginals account for about 20 percent of those receiving jail sentences.

In 2003/04, Aboriginal people accounted for 21% of admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody, 18% of admissions to federal custody, 18% of admissions to remand, 16% of probation admissions and 19% of conditional sentence admissions. At the same time, Aboriginal people represented 3% of the Canadian adult population.
. . .
Aboriginal people had higher levels of representation in sentenced custody compared to their representation in the adult population, most notably in Manitoba (68% versus 11%), Alberta (39% versus 4%), Saskatchewan (80% versus 10%), British Columbia (20% versus 4%) and Ontario (9% versus 1%).

Here are the data for the northern territories: Yukon, 73% versus 20%; Northwest Territories: 88% versus 45%; Nunavut: 97% versus 78%.

Source of above statistics: "Correctional Services in Canada, 2003-04", Juristat, Vol. 25, no. 8 (Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada, catalogue no. 85-002), pp. 14-15 [not available online]

Most explorations of reasons for the disproportionate representation of aboriginals in Canadian jails are based on the assumption that aboriginal persons are victims of discrimination. Aboriginals are over-represented because of cultural and historical differences between aboriginals and non-aboriginals. The criminal justice system fails to take into account the damage aboriginals have suffered in the history of their relations with non-aboriginals. If this experience were to be recognised and appropriate adjustments made to the system, so this line of argument contends, the disparity would be rectified.

[O]ver-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system has been due to a combination of "culturally insensitive" and discriminatory policing ("over-policing" as well as "under-policing") and criminal justice processing (e.g., sentencing), and a high rate of offending (and victimization) in "Aboriginal communities," which itself is the result of historical colonization, exploitation, and consequent social, economic, and cultural deterioration of such communities.

Policy proposals arising from this perspective typically advocate radical restructuring of Canada's justice system. Policing of aboriginal communities should be taken over by independent aboriginal police services. Separate and fundamentally independent aboriginal justice institutions that respect aboriginal culture, experience, and social needs should be set up to ensure that Canadian aboriginals are treated fairly in the courts.

The problem at the root of aboriginal over-representation directly arises from aboriginality itself. Therefore,

the “white” criminal justice system is, and will always be, inherently incapable of responding appropriately, effectively, and acceptably to these Aboriginal realities.

An article recommended to me by a colleague looks at the data from a different angle, challenges the assumptions, and contends that those policy proposals do not address the root conditions and therefore will not mitigate the problem. The article, entitled "Exile On Main Street: Some Thoughts on Aboriginal Over-Representation in the Criminal Justice System", by Carol La Prairie of Justice Canada and Philip Stenning of University of Toronto, is the source of the above and all subsequent quotations. (Full source information is given at the end of this post.)

Aboriginals are not the only identifiable demographic group that is over-represented in Canadian prisons. Males, young people, the unemployed, and those with low levels of education are imprisoned in numbers far beyond their proportion in the overall population. These factors (with the exception of male) are also found in the aboriginal population to a much greater extent than in the non-aboriginal population. Aboriginal Canadians are more likely to be young (aged 15-24), unemployed, and have low levels of educational attainment; they are also more likely to have low income and to have been raised by a single parent. In fact, the demographic profile of the general aboriginal population resembles that of the prison population to a far greater extent than does that of the overall Canadian population. Prison inmates share demographic characteristics that are shared by the general aboriginal population.

In the provinces with an exceptionally high proportion of aboriginals among those sentenced to custody, one also finds that aboriginals are over-represented among residents of low-income, high-crime, inner-city neighbourhoods.

[T]he concentrations, demographic compositions, and socio-economic circumstances of Aboriginal populations in the Prairie cities are very different from those in other large Canadian cities. The cities with the largest proportions of Aboriginal people living in extremely poor neighbourhoods are Winnipeg (41.2 percent), Saskatoon (30.2 percent), and Regina (26.9 percent). The cities with the smallest are Toronto (15.8 percent), Vancouver (17.1 percent), and Edmonton (19.4 percent). In the eastern cities, similar proportions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people live in poor neighbourhoods, but in Prairie cities the proportion of Aboriginal people living in these circumstances is three or four times that of non-Aboriginal people. In Vancouver and Edmonton, it is twice as high.

This is the basis for the contention that over-representation in criminal activity is connected with the characteristics of the area in which it occurs rather than racial or ethnic discrimination.

[P]olice and other criminal justice officials are called upon to respond to patterns of crime and victimization in certain neighbourhoods (notably poor inner-city neighbourhoods), which make it understandable, if not inevitable, that the most disadvantaged people in those neighbourhoods (be they Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people) will more frequently come to the attention of the police and, consequently, be statistically over-represented in the criminal justice system.

It is also important to note that most aboriginal crime is intra-racial: Aboriginals are over-represented among victims of crime as well as perpetrators.

If this view is correct, then policy prescriptions involving justice system modifications designed to encourage or require “cultural sensitivity” toward aboriginal people will not address the issue of over-representation. Moreover, when one realises that most aboriginal crime is committed against other aboriginals, “sensitivity” toward offenders may entail insensitivity toward victims.

The conditions out of which aboriginal crime arises are not unique to aboriginal people. Circumstances such as young age, low education, unemployment, and inadequate parenting occur more often among aboriginals, but they are also widespread among non-aboriginals; and they are not amenable to improvement through changes in police and judicial institutions. Young, single, poorly educated males are over-represented in jails, irrespective of ethnicity. A separate, autonomous aboriginal justice system will not change that.

Finally, culturally sensitive approaches to aboriginal criminal justice have been increasingly emphasised for decades, but there is no evidence that they have reduced aboriginal involvement in criminal activity.

"Exile On Main Street: Some Thoughts on Aboriginal Over-Representation in the Criminal Justice System" is contained in a 2003 collection of papers entitled Not Strangers In These Parts: Urban Aboriginal Peoples, which is available online as a pdf document (3 MB in size). The article by Dr La Prairie and Prof Stenning is found on pages 179-194. A press release announcing the book’s publication is posted here.

Rev Harry Lehotsky, a courageous man, speaks out in The Winnipeg Sun about discrimination in favour of some aboriginal religious ceremonies. Aboriginal elders are invited to open public meetings with prayers, but no invitations are extended to representatives of other faiths. Christian observances have been removed from schools, but now children are being indoctrinated in aboriginal spirituality.

When the Lord’s Prayer was removed from the official opening exercises in public schools, I was OK with that. I felt that non-believing teachers forcing children to recite a prayer they didn’t understand or agree with would actually trivialize the prayer and the belief system.

But I noticed that, even as the Lord’s Prayer was removed and Christmas celebrations neutered, children were increasingly being indoctrinated through publicly funded powwows and other aboriginal spiritual ceremonies. I saw a real contradiction.

We live in a pluralistic society. I’m not against powwows, smudging, and sweats. I’m not talking about substituting one form of ceremonial observance with another. I’m talking about an acceptance and affirmation of diversity.

A question for government: Should the criteria for funding social initiatives include funding religious indoctrination to one particular form of aboriginal worship?

Some aboriginal leaders have been denied public funding and excluded by aboriginal bureaucracies because they do not want to participate in favoured religious rituals. In this connection, Rev Lehotsky reminds us that God doesn't care about outward ceremony as much as the behaviour of those who claim to worship him.

via raskolnikov at Dust My Broom, who relates from his personal experience:

What I find wonderfully ironic is when, after the cleansing rituals and respectful platitudes have been completed, the people present, the same ones who just smudged to cleanse themselves, go on to insult, backstab and lie, something I have seen more than once at a meeting and couldn’t help pondering as the last whiffs of sweetgrass disappeared amid the yelling and accusations.

This CBC Manitoba story quotes two inmates at Stony Mountain Institution who voted today. One prefers the Liberals, while the other doesn't admit to liking any of them. The Liberal supporter objects to Stephen Harper's pledge to take the vote away from prison inmates, saying that's just one more way of isolating inmates. Some would respond that inmates are supposed to be isolated, but I'm more interested in why these guys are voting at the advance poll. It's not like they'll be out of the country on election day.

via Dust My Broom.