Overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in Canada’s Criminal Justice System: Perspectives of Indigenous young people

Abstract

The central purpose of this study was to provide a platform for Indigenous young peoples’ opinions regarding the overrepresentation of Indigenous young people in the criminal justice system. Specifically, the study sought (a) their thoughts on broader issues that contribute to the overrepresentation of young people, and (b) strategies on how to reduce the overrepresentation of young people in the future. Results mirrored themes and findings from the research literature. However, the results are themes that are derived from the lived and observed experiences of Indigenous young people and the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Métis communities.

Women Offender Assessment: Can Gender-Informed Variables Improve Prediction of Institutional Outcomes?

“…Staff must address the Gladue decision (R. v. Gladue, 1999) in accordance to policy and consider as part of their professional judgement the unique systemic or background factors that affect the lives of Indigenous people (CSC, 2018a). The factors voiced by Indigenous youth that contribute to the social history of Indigenous people include the impact of colonialism and residential schools, a loss of tradition/culture, racism/stereotypes, family disruption/breakdown due to forced removal of Indigenous children, and a loss of identity/sense of self (Cesaroni, Grol & Fredericks, 2018).…”

Whipping and jailing: The Kapuria jail, indigenous self-government and the hybridization of punishment in Colombia

“…Through the analysis of this example of hybridization of punishment, we also want to contribute to the study of punishment of indigenous peoples in postcolonial societies in at least two ways: first, most of the studies on punishment of indigenous peoples in postcolonial societies have focused on their criminalization and overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, particularly prisons, as a form of discrimination and oppression, originating in colonial times, that continued after the independence of the former colonies (Anthony and Blagg, 2019; Blagg and Anthony, 2019; Cesaroni et al, 2019; Cunneen, 2006, 2014; Edney, 2002; Hogg, 2001; Mebane Cruz, 2015; Snowball and Weatherburn, 2007). Nevertheless, the study of the hybridization of indigenous and state punishment in postcolonial countries (for instance, through the indigenization of state prisons and the spatial and symbolic introduction of the jail of the White men to ancestral territories), though promising, is still incipient.…”

Are Conflicts Property? Re-Examining the Ownership of Conflict in Restorative Justice

“…Yet RJ research and literature remain beset with the problem of what Gavrielides (2014: 223) has identified as the ‘the scarce extant literature on the interaction of restorative justice with race’. The over-representation of racial, ethnic and Indigenous peoples in the justice system most directly raises the question of how these communities and individuals are to ‘own’ the conflicts of what Georges-Abeyie (2001) has called the ‘petit apartheid’ of criminal justice practices that demonstrate such over-representation is not explainable through corresponding differences in offence rates or ‘risk factors’ between groups (Cesaroni et al, 2019; Cunneen, 2006; Mitchell, 2005; Uhrig, 2016).…”