Contact us if you experience any difficulty logging in. Seldom are narratives about Indigenous peoples counterbalanced with explorations of resilience, resistance, agency, and power (Schwan & Lightman, 2013). Criminal justice models are witnessing the increasing ownership of the administration of law by Indigenous communities (see, e.g., the Children’s Koori Court in Victoria, Australia, and the initiatives of the Mohawk band at Akwesasne, the first of its kind in Canada). Sharing links are not available for this article. Poverty, multi-generational trauma, social dislocation, and family in strained and deprived circumstances have led to Indigenous young people being housed outside their family home either in foster care, secure custody, or in some instances both (Canadian Council of Provincial Child and Youth Advocates, 2010). Login failed. 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. Find out about Lean Library here, If you have access to journal via a society or associations, read the instructions below. An inductive approach was used for the analysis of the raw data. overrepresentation   of   Indigenous   youth   in   the   criminal   justice   system   is   a   result   of   the   Canadian   government’s   failure   to   address   social   issues   stemming   from   colonialism as well as the lack of concrete sentencing measures to address systemic The following comment by one of the Oshkawbaywuss (helpers/apprentices) is indicative of a widely held belief among participants: But one piece is racism and stereotypes … like police have stereotypes in their head every single Indigenous person is a criminal or lazy or a drunk … so I think that has a lot to do with how they treat them (youth) even if it is a minor crime they treat them like they are a huge murderer. CASs should commit to fully implementing the relevant Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC)’s Calls to Action. The e-mail addresses that you supply to use this service will not be used for any other purpose without your consent. View or download all content the institution has subscribed to. McGuire, P.D. For the past few decades, there has been growing publicity about the over-representation of Indigenous and other minority children in our child welfare systems across Canada. There is a growing consensus that the overrepresentation of Indigenous young people is not due to a single factor, such as increased offending or the discriminatory practices of police, but by a complex mix of massive over-policing, racist law, order politics, a greater level of offending, and social disorganization (Corrado et al., 2014). This debate has been ongoing since the early 1980s, with seemingly no end in sight. 1“Aboriginal Peoples” is a collective name for all of the original peoples of Canada and their descendants (National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO). Combatting over-representation of Indigenous youth in the Queensland criminal justice system through 'justice reinvestment' Hage, Tamara, and Fellows, Jamie (2018) Combatting over-representation of Indigenous youth in the Queensland criminal justice system through 'justice reinvestment'. Dean is the MLA for Esquimalt-Metchosin. Over the past five years, the rate of Aboriginal youth (aged 10-17 years) under justice supervision decreased by 13.1 per cent (from 170.2 to 147.9 per 10,000) compared with a 34.8 per cent decrease among non-Aboriginal youth (from 16.2 to 10.6 per 10,000). Even the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2012 noted that Canada needed to take urgent measures to address the “discriminatory over-representation” of Indigenous children who were in “out-of-home” care. Their parents were burdened with significant psychological issues, which meant they could not care for themselves or others, did not have the ability to develop healthy relationships and, in some cases, passed on the neglect and abuse they themselves had suffered as children (Bania, 2017). View or download all the content the society has access to. I went to Pow Wows since I could walk…. Jackson (2015) suggests that the same prejudices may be true of the Crown in terms of formal charging versus extrajudicial sanctions, given the fact that appropriate community-based Indigenous-specific programming may not be available. However, existing studies indicate that children from families who are Black and from other visible minority groups, including those who are new Canadians, experience higher percentages of referrals for investigation, over-monitoring and higher numbers of decisions resulting in out-of-home placements. Colonialism has led to distrust of all government agencies, but in particular in terms of the police who participated in assimilationist policies (Perry, 2009). Several theories have been put forth to explain the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in Canada including (a) differential criminal processing due to cultural conflict and racial discrimination, (b) higher Indigenous offending rates, and (c) the commission of offences by Indigenous people that more likely warrant a prison sentence (Bracken, 2008). The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided by the Department of Justice (Canada) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Indigenous youth — just 8 percent of Canada’s youth population — … 2The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream Canadian society. Participants noted that the loss of Indigenous traditions, culture, and ceremony has meant that many young people “are not bound in your culture which makes a big difference.” As one participant shared, “I have a total disconnect from my heritage.” There was a sense from participants that Indigenous young people no longer have culturally appropriate direction, support, or an understanding of their own history as Indigenous peoples. The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) notes that systemic discrimination may be diagnosed by looking at numerical data, policies, practices and decision-making processes and organizational culture. Stewart, Riecken, Scott, Tanaka, and Riecken (2008) argue that, “Identities form the foundation from which Indigenous youth negotiate their many interactions with the larger dominate culture in which they find themselves immersed” (p. 181). This is particularly true regarding the intergenerational trauma of residential schools, which has included “the loss of generations of family networks and parental remodeling” the disruption of families and communities, and the loss of knowledge, language, tradition, and identity (Barker, Alfred, & Kerr, 2014). Oh no we are just getting to know you”: The relationship in research with children and youth in indigenous communities, Do law reforms matter? CASs should comply with government requirements to collect, tabulate and report human rights-based data. In 2016-2017, Indigenous female youth accounted for 60 percent of all female youth admitted to provincial and territorial corrections systems (Statistics Canada, 2018a). The email address and/or password entered does not match our records, please check and try again. The circles’ members agreed that Indigenous young people (particularly those who are marginalized and struggling) need to “Go back to roots including (learning) the connection to land, (the) use of Elders.” As one of the helpers suggested, “(it’s important that they) Go back to the land, canoe through swamp, fish, make connections there is a teaching behind each bush, each fish, learn about their clans…. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds you have access to journal via a society or associations, read the below... 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