Sometimes, Katharine Melanson will pore over old newspaper clippings. She’ll look at pictures of tombstones and old Census records in order to trace back an individual’s ancestral tree. She spends the day working alone, meticulously, researching or typing away, attempting to capture a person’s life story in words on a page.

Melanson is a Gladue writer; the only one in the country’s capital. She prepares court-ordered documents for Indigenous persons charged with criminal offences. 

“My job is to explain to the judge why a particular Indigenous offender is before the court within the context of the history of colonialism in Canada,” she explains.

The reports take into account what are known as Gladue factors,” she says, referring to circumstances, including poverty, racism and substance use, that a 1999 Supreme Court case recognized as deep-rooted in the lives of Indigenous people, placing them at a disadvantage with the rest of society and becoming an underlying cause of an offence.

Gladue reports include suggestions for alternatives to jail and recommendations for treatment programs in an offender’s community that would place them on a path towards healing. With the incarceration rates of Indigenous people being disproportionately high, the responsibility to produce a high-quality report is tremendous, says Melanson.

The few writers that do it are faced with an emotionally-draining mission.

Melanson, a former criminal lawyer, was drawn to the job because of a long-standing passion and feeling of duty to help offenders.

As a Métis person herself, Melanson says she’s “really lucky and privileged and blessed and honoured” to have a calling that allows her to profoundly influence a person’s life for the better.

“There’s an emotional freedom in this job to care not just  care about their offence but to care about everything in their life,” she says, contrasting it with being a lawyer, which restricts her scope to legal issues.

“Everybody has a story that deserves to be told. Everybody. Even the person who you look down on the most has a story. And most of those stories are absolutely heart wrenching and would make you cry. You’ve got to go behind the symptoms, which is what my job is like.”

To uncover who the person is exterior to the crime,  she conducts in-depth interviews. She listens to the offender. She tracks down the person’s mother, father, doctor,  probation officer if one exists and even a “great, great uncle, depending on what I thinks is important” for the report.

“I’ve gotten more adept at identifying areas that might be triggering and reading body language and knowing when to push and when not to push,” reflects Melanson.

“The most difficult tends to be when I am told information about a client’s background that my client doesn’t know about,” she says, giving an example like a mother confiding in her that the client’s dad is not their biological dad.

“That’s the hardest emotionally. I have to tell that to the client, obviously, because it’s in the report.”

The finished report is 20 to 40 pages, she says. 

Style matters

According to Jane Dickson, a former Gladue writer who runs a 10-week program to train new Gladue writers with B.C.-based not-for-profit Indigenous Perspectives Society, “writers are in a catch-22 situation.”

“In some quarters they’re expected to simply step in, research and write these reports and to do a good job in the absence of any training – which is absolutely crucial to them knowing what a good job even looks like,” says Dickson, also a law professor at Carleton University.

There is no standardized training in Canada, but Dickson and IPS are advocating to change that. Dickson’s program, which began in 2017, is currently the only to give accreditation. It is drawing a range of people, from law students to people who did not finish high school.

Her curriculum covers the bases: from the history of colonialism, to the intricacies of the criminal justice system, to understanding how to interact with a person who’s suffered trauma. At the end of her course, students write a mock Gladue report which is critiqued by her and other criminal justice professionals.

She coaches her students to avoid “fractured, repetitive narratives” and eschew bias.

“You don’t always realize when you’re not being neutral,” she remarks. “It’s, in some respects, possibly more problematic when you have a writer who thinks it is their right to judge the person.”

Dickson advises her writers: “This is not your story. This is the story of the person who is the subject of the report. Use their words to tell it to the greatest degree possible.”

Benjamin Ralston is a lawyer who’s noticed that if a report is written poorly, it can diminish its value in court.

“It’s one thing to put forward neutral information about the Gladue factors,” he says. “It’s another to start advocating for a particular outcome in which case it starts to look like a defence report and both the Crown and judges will react negatively to that.”

A bigger picture

Even if a writer nails the narrative of the story, the way Gladue is interpreted by courts is inconsistent across the country, according to Mitch Walker, the vice chairperson of the Gladue Writers Society of British Columbia, a representative body of writers that is working with governments to expand the use of Gladue.

This is one of the reasons Walker worries he “doesn’t “have the capacity to know if my work has had any kind of actual impact for the better.”

Walker is often an offender’s only confidant and he said he’s “just some stranger” to them.

“I’m a very temporary presence in that individual’s life. I come in and I ask them to reveal to me significant traumas which they may have not ever talked about, and then I leave,” Walker says.

Walker emphasizes that it’s “hard to make a living off of Gladue,” but the writers that do it are drawn because of its potential to act as a first step towards reconciliation.

“My biggest hope is that we can start to recognize it as something that isn’t just a report, it isn’t just a Supreme Court decision, it’s really a catalyst for change if we can use it correctly,” he says.

Melanson agrees. “Changing the law doesn’t solve everything. We have to change what’s in people’s hearts and to do that they have to see and have personal experiences with Indigenous people,” she says.