Black history, both personal and communal, now a factor in Nova Scotia sentencing

In 2016, a document prepared for provincial court outlined how historic neglect of Black communities led to disproportionate levels of imprisonment.

Jason Middleton says the inclusion of Black history in his sentencing — both personal tragedy and communal struggle — set a new path for his troubled life.

A cultural assessment completed in October 2016 led to a sentence of house arrest and probation rather than a lengthy jail term after he was convicted for a series of scuffles with police during arrests for probation violations and an assault at the lockup.

“I knew from that moment people weren’t just seeing through me, but rather they were trying to see me through. It humanized me,” Middleton said in a recent interview from his home in Yarmouth, N.S.

The 49-year-old African Nova Scotian — who also has Indigenous ancestry — grew up amid abuse and poverty and says he has frequently been sentenced to prison by the province’s predominantly white judiciary.

However, in the summer of 2016, a document prepared for provincial court known as an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment took a different approach — outlining how historic neglect of Black communities led to disproportionate levels of imprisonment and telling the accused’s story of his suffering as a child.

The assessments were pioneered by Halifax social worker Robert Wright in a landmark 2014 case. The provincial Justice Department says that since 2018, 147 such reports have been written.

Middleton’s report was the first paid for by the court system.

Wright says he and other assessors normally spend hours talking with the accused and then set their stories into the wider context of the Black experience. The reports, running to 20 pages, sometimes describe a mix of multi-generational poverty and the lack of access to treatment for childhood traumas.