This article examines the ways in which colonial policing and punishment of Indigenous peoples evolved as an inherent part of the colonial state-building process on the connected 19th century frontiers of south-central Australia and western Canada. Although there has been some excellent historical scholarship on the relationship between Indigenous people, police and the law in colonial settings, there has been little comparative analysis of the broader, cross-national patterns by which Indigenous peoples were made subject to British law, most especially through colonial policing practices. This article compares the roles, as well as the historical reputations, of Australia's mounted police and Canada's North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in order to argue that these British colonies, being within the ambit of the law as British subjects did not accord Indigenous peoples the rights of protection that status was intended to impart.
In the past century Canada has seen the introduction of three different legislative regimes for administering juvenile justice, the 1908 Juvenile Delinquents Act (JDA), the 1984 Young Offenders Act (YOA), and the 2002 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) (Smandych, 2001). In the course of this legislative history, Canada has followed a pattern of legislative change that appears similar to many other Western countries, including England and Wales, Australia, and the United States. In each of these jurisdictions recent decades have witnessed earlier predominately child-welfare models of juvenile justice eroded and replaced with more legalistic and punitive 'justice' and 'crime-control' models of juvenile justice procedure. Despite evident similarities in the direction of recent juvenile justice developments across a number of countries, few efforts have been made to systematically compare the experiences of different countries (Bala et al., 2002), and even fewer attempts have been made to offer a cross-national comparative analysis of such developments written from a critical perspective (Muncie, 2005) that goes beyond the typically narrow-legalistic and reformist-technocratic discussions found in most publications (cf. Tonry and Doob, 2004). The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the comparative discourse on youth justice by 2 2 Russell Smandych
This article provides a theoretical starting point for the development of a more encompassing cross-cultural theory of aboriginal crime. The authors contend that any attempt to develop such a theory has to proceed on three fronts: (a) through offering a cross-cultural explanation of the problem of aboriginal overrepresentation; (b) through undertaking comparative research aimed at accounting for aboriginal offending patterns that often lie outside the official picture of overrepresentation; and (c) through developing a primarily societal-based (as opposed to individualist) cross-cultural theory of aboriginal criminality that is able to account for identified cross-national patterns of aboriginal overrepresentation and aboriginal offending. As a takeoff point for this series of interconnected and overlapping comparative research efforts, the authors undertake an examination of the state of research and theory about the causes of aboriginal overrepresentation in the criminal justice systems of Canada and Australia. In order to explain the similar patterns of overrepresentation found among aboriginal peoples in Canada, Australia, and other countries, the authors identify and synthesize a number of different cross-cultural theories of crime recently developed by comparative criminologists that can be used in working toward the development of a more encompassing cross-cultural theory of aboriginal crime.
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