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Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI ⋆ The Breach
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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.
Nana Yanful, a human rights lawyer with a focus on racial justice, slammed the government’s decision not to curb the number of Black prisoners in maximum security, as it has done for Indigenous prisoners. “They are knowingly contributing to a program that will further exacerbate the conditions of confinement for Black folks,” Yanful said in an interview. “They just don’t care that this is going to impact them more negatively than non-Black incarcerated people.”
At jails in Ontario like the one pictured, over 80 per cent of prisoners are awaiting trial, and are legally innocent. Source: CBC News
Safer for whom?
Shauna first learned about SAFER in 2024 while trying to schedule a visit with her partner, who is incarcerated in an Ontario jail. (The Breach has changed Shauna’s name and withheld the name of her partner’s jail, as she fears he may face retribution if identified.) “When I was inquiring about how to visit, I was told that I would have to wait to find out his score,” Shauna told The Breach.
“That’s when I got a phone call from him. He told me they run some program in there—he didn’t know the name of it—where they assign you a security level.” Shauna’s partner, who is Black, said her ability to visit him in-person would depend on his SAFER score. “If he’s in max, it would be one video visit a week. If he was in medium, I believe it was two in-person behind-glass visits.”
Shauna said her partner learned about SAFER from other prisoners. When The Breach asked if he had inquired about his SAFER score, she said, “He’s been requesting it for about a month now, and he keeps being told, ‘Yeah, they’ll bring it.’ He’s even requested it from sergeants, and nobody has come to him with it yet.”
Security designations determine what level of access a prisoner will have to visits, programming, and living spaces. The class action lawsuit describes the conditions in medium- and maximum-security spaces: “more restrictive cells and environments, with less access to movement, activities, programs, and amenities.” It says prisoners’ freedoms are severely limited in these settings.
The class action lawsuit, filed in 2025 by Koskie Minsky LLP, is based on the unequal detention outcomes the SAFER assessments have produced. Black people are the most likely group to be placed in maximum security. While Black people make up only 5.4 per cent of Ontario’s population, they represent nearly 27 per cent of all prisoners housed in maximum security detention from 2022 to 2025, according to government data analyzed by University of Toronto criminologist and professor Scot Wortley. By contrast, white people comprise 63.3 per cent of Ontarians, but only about 41 per cent of prisoners held in maximum security are white.
A chart from Dr. Scot Wortley’s data analysis on Ontario’s jails shows racial disparities in security classifications.
Black women are particularly...