ipl-logo

Aboriginal Youth Issues

753 Words4 Pages

Indigenous youth have not found their place in the world. Their pasts are lost to them due to colonialism and their futures are vague and not promising. As a former Indigenous youth I can attest to the despair that one feels when there seem to be little to no options left to you. Various Canadian studies indicate that Aboriginal youth are overrepresented at every stage of the criminal justice process. In many jurisdictions, the proportion of Aboriginal youth in custody far outstrips their representation within the overall population. As a result, critics charge that the criminal justice system fails to meet the needs of these youth (A One Day, 2015).

Women and youth fare the worst when it comes to the Canadian justice system. Many Indigenous …show more content…

Lack of education, poverty, unemployment and abuse all lead to higher crime rates. Also, statistically, Aboriginals have a greater chance of conviction and subsequently, incarceration once convicted. What is needed is for the government to publicly address the critical numbers of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian justice system. Acknowledging that there is a problem is the first step to addressing this issue, up to this point the government has blithely pushed aside the problem from government agency to government …show more content…

It was at this time that girls started to go missing on the streets I haunted. We never thought much of it at the time; girls were always going somewhere: home, jail or a group home. It wasn’t until Leah that everything changed. The Prince George Friendship Centre had a Christmas party for the street kids that year. My close friend Leah was there. I had a flap (a point) of heroin and asked her if she wanted to share it with me. She said no. This was an odd answer. No street kid ever said no to free drugs. She went on to tell me that she was going to go straight and get clean. She asked me if I would walk her to the bar 4 blocks away. The man I was with at the time said I couldn’t go, that he wanted us to go home. So I said good bye to her and watched her walk away on George Street. You never think that you are seeing someone for the last

Show More
Related

  • Overview Of Behind The Scenes: UCR Edition

    731 Words  | 3 Pages

    Behind the Scenes: UCR Edition Any criminal act in Canada is regulated by the Criminal Code therefore, any discussion about “The typical starting point for any discussion of crime in Canada involves the Criminal Code. is the Criminal Code.” (Morden and Palys, 2015, p. 74) A contradiction is apparent within the Criminal Code that crime is objective and the Uniform Crime Report is subjective.

    Read More

  • Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA)

    771 Words  | 4 Pages

    In response to the concerns of having one of the highest youth incarceration rates in the world in the late 1990s, Canada introduced the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) to counteract the high incarceration rates and to put an emphasis on extra-judicial measures (EJMs) to deter youth from the criminal justice system. While the YCJA has shown success, and to have strike a balance that the Act’s predecessors were lacking, it still has underlying issues. Youth whom are most vulnerable, such as those with mental illness, homeless, abused or in poverty are most susceptible to getting involved in the youth criminal system. According to the More Less Court report by the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate, the province of New Brunswick has been

    Read More

  • Youth Criminal Justice Act Essay

    1064 Words  | 5 Pages

    People have always considered children kind, generous, caring, and playful, but never crminal offenders. The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), as Canadians know today, as we know it today, was only sometimes the YCJA. It all started as the Jjuvenile Ddelinquent Aact (1908-1984), which then evolved into the Yyoung Ooffender's Aact (1984-2003) and finally evolved into the YCJAyouth criminal justice act (2003-present). The YCJAS's prmary goal is to protect the community by holding Canadian youth accountable, rehabilitating and reintegrating youths back into society, and preventing crime amongst youth. However, is the YCJA effectively dealing with youth crime in Canada?

    Read More

  • Nsw Police Force Essay

    1513 Words  | 7 Pages

    Retrieved from https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/508315/COCE_113782_01_Dec_14.pdf. Cunneen, C., White, R., & Richards, K. (2013). Juvenile justice: youth and crime in australia. Retrieved from EBook Central.

    Read More

  • Youth Criminal Justice Act Essay

    595 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) is a Canadian law that was established in 2003, replacing the Young Offenders Act. The YCJA was created with the intention of promoting rehabilitation and reintegration of young offenders, as well as ensuring that they are held accountable for their actions. The act recognizes that youth are still developing and should be treated differently than adult offenders. In this essay, we will explore the key aspects of the YCJA and how it has affected the Canadian justice system.

    Read More

  • Racial Disparities Regarding Sentencing

    842 Words  | 4 Pages

    Prosecutors and judges know the conditions that most of these minorities face and appear to be willing to aid in their rehabilitation for a greater cause. This offer helps to rebuild relationships with the communities that have become distrusting of the criminal justice system. Prosecutors are well aware of the poverty that exist within minority communities and they have extended the hand of help for all minorities due to the socioeconomic conditions that all minorities face in society today. When racial minorities are given the opportunity for sentence reduction that shows the courts are trying to alleviate the burden that sentencing puts on families and the community. Kamalu, N. C., Coulson -Clark, M., & Kamalu, N. M. (2010).

    Read More

  • Institutional Racism In Canada

    841 Words  | 4 Pages

    However, when comparing Aboriginal adults and non-Aboriginal adults with the same education and employment characteristics, the incarceration rates among Aboriginal adults were 3.3 to 5.1 times higher. In short, these socio- economic characteristics reduced the difference in incarceration rates of adults aged 20 to 34 by half in Alberta. A similar pattern occurs in Saskatchewan (Table 7). Still, even when comparing persons with the same characteristics, incarceration rates for Aboriginal young adults remain higher than those of their non-Aboriginal counterparts.” (statcan, 2015)

    Read More

  • Aboriginal People Case Study

    1192 Words  | 5 Pages

    Given the current state of the issue, many Aboriginal People are guaranteed to be involved with the justice system at some point in their lives. According to Frideres (2016), approximately 90 per cent of Aboriginal People have been involved with the criminal justice system by the age of twenty-four as either a victim, offender or witness (p. 94). Furthermore, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) stated that Aboriginal People are “incarcerated in provincial jails at 11 time the rate of other Canadians; in federal penitentiaries the rate is five times that of other Canadians” (p. 40). Although the data may be viewed as a cumulation of individual cases, the rates of over-representation could also suggest that Aboriginal People are not more likely engage in criminal behaviour but instead are targets of a system deeply embedded with colonial attitudes. The statistics on this issue demonstrate a pattern of Aboriginal over-representation in comparison to other Canadians, which suggests that an examination of the social and historical influences on Aboriginal Peoples’ involvement with the Canadian justice system is necessary to uncover why they are disproportionately

    Read More

  • Aboriginal Family Violence

    1710 Words  | 7 Pages

    A 2011 survey showed that Indigenous Australians aged 15-64 were less likely to be participating in the labour force than non-Indigenous Australians aged 15-64 (55.9% versus 76.4%). The same survey showed that Indigenous Australians aged 15-64 were three times as likely to be unemployed when compared to non-Indigenous Australians (17.2% compared to 5.5%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2014). When comparing these rates to the occurrence rates of family violence in Indigenous Australians versus non-Indigenous Australians mentioned previously, we can see that they support the statement that a stable economy and abundant resources greatly decreases the risk of family violence. Studies in the United States have also shown that when controlling for socio-economic factors, domestic violence levels will be mostly equal among African American communities versus white communities, corroborating the idea that higher levels of poverty are associated with higher levels of family violence (Sokoloff, 2004).

    Read More

  • Criminal Justice System And Minorities Essay

    1027 Words  | 5 Pages

    Minorities and the Criminal Justice System While in recent years police brutality has received the majority of media attention, there is a far more deadly poison running through the veins of our nation’s criminal justice system. This poison is the full discriminatory power minorities fall victim to in every stage of their prosecution. This poison has led to the mass incarceration of minorities and the creation of a well-disguised form of racial control. Today, over 2 million minorities are under the control of the prison system and as such will forever be tainted by their most outstanding label, criminal (Alexander). When these American citizens are denied the basic human right of a fair and unbiased trial their lives are forever changed:

    Read More

  • Injustice By Bryan Stevenson Summary

    328 Words  | 2 Pages

    Bryan Stevenson negotiates the prejudice and intolerance within the criminal justice system, and the biases within based on economic and racial status. This book exposed myself to a deeper level of injustice inside our system than what I already had a conception of. Each story Bryan talks about hits on different subjects that opened my eyes to how our system truly treats minorities so coldly. Those of a different race, economic status, are treated far worse than we can imagine. Within the past few years racial injustices have began to gain more attention in the media, allowing awareness into the discrimination still present in our system.

    Read More

  • Battered Woman Syndrome

    1199 Words  | 5 Pages

    Indigenous people are incarcerated at much higher rates than non-Indigenous in Canada and are incarcerated for longer periods of time (Cook & Roesh, 2012, p.222). Canadians have put Indigenous communities through much heartache and pain. With the colonization of Indigenous people to residential schools, Canadians continue to stigmatize and treat Indigenous people poorly. Indigenous people are more likely to suffer from drug abuse using needles because of the intergenerational trauma suffered through their parents attending residential schools in Canada (Bombay, Matheson, & Anisman, 2014, p. 327). This puts them at a higher criminal risk than others because of what they have been subjected to.

    Read More

  • Mass Incarceration Literature Review

    1728 Words  | 7 Pages

    Within the urban communities, negative perceptions are magnified. Adolescents are more prone to be a product of their environment, especially those whose parents are incarcerated. Because of this trend adolescents are being incarcerated at an alarming rate and sentenced to adult facilities. Lambie & Randall (2013) states, the United States have imposed harsher penalties on serious young offenders, and have consequently increased rates of incarcerated youth and made it easier for youth to be treated and incarcerated as adults within the justice

    Read More

  • Haunted To Relief Short Story

    1178 Words  | 5 Pages

    Then I heard the door open to the bathroom and immediately wanted to crawl into a massive hole as I saw my blonde eye candy come into the bathroom to see if I was okay. He sat with me the rest of the night despite my feeble attempts to get him to go back out to the party. After that night we were inseparable. I went to school and then he came and stayed at my house or I stayed at his. Our friends would be shocked if they saw us apart, which was probably 3 times.

    Read More

  • Why Do Racism Still Exist

    264 Words  | 2 Pages

    For instance, enforcing certain laws and procedures is not done equally across all racial groups. The systemic bias hypothesis suggests that the high rates of Maori crime and imprisonment is in large

    Read More

More about Aboriginal Youth Issues

Open Document