Pubdate: Thu, 10 Nov 2011
Source: Windsor Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2011 The Windsor Star
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/PTv2GKdw
Website: http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/501
Author: Emile Therien

BILL UNFAIR TO ABORIGINALS

A bill now before Parliament will impose mandatory minimum sentences
for some drug and sex offences. The consequence of that legislation
will be that restorative justice (family group conferences, healing
circles), a movement that dates back to 1974, will be compromised, if
not terminated altogether.

Judicial discretion will also be a victim. Especially hard hit by this
legislation will be aboriginal Canadians.

More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court of Canada established what
has become known as the Gladue Court. That ruling called upon judges
to exercise discretion and to be sensitive to the historical plight of
aboriginal people.

The overall response by the judiciary to that landmark ruling, as
evident by the growing incarceration rate of aboriginals has been
mixed, with its application varying from one extreme to the other,
depending on jurisdiction.

In 2007-08, according to Statistics Canada, aboriginal adults
accounted for 22 per cent of admissions to sentenced custody while
representing only three per cent of the Canadian population. More than
one in five new admissions to a federal corrections facility is now a
person of aboriginal descent.

Among women offenders, the over-representation is even more dramatic,
one in three federally sentenced women is aboriginal. Yet, the federal
government spends only two per cent of its federal prison budget,
which exceeds $3 billion a year, up from $1.6 billion in 2005-06, on
aboriginals.

In some parts of the country, aboriginals are vastly over-represented
in certain charges. And, there are absolutely no signs as revealed by
the Correctional Investigator that these dreadful statistics are
abating. The Correctional Investigator, in his annual report released
in 2009, revealed that the gap between aboriginals and non-aboriginal
offenders continues to grow and that the rate for aboriginal
incarceration in 2008 was nine times the national average.

 From an incarceration point of view, aboriginals are rapidly
approaching the same status as many blacks, Hispanics, and
impoverished whites in the United States, in that the criminal justice
in that country preys on the socially, culturally and economically
disadvantaged -- fuelled by mandatory minimum sentences for low-level
drug offences and by political grandstanding, media hype, racism,
discrimination, emotion, etc.

Only after experiencing the ineffectiveness of that system and the
destructive impact it has had, especially on young black males, have
so many Americans of all political stripes now begun to question that
brutal, unfair system.

In June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada=C2's
aboriginals for this country's despicable, shameless role in the
Indian residential school program, a racist program aimed at
assimilation and, to this day, largely responsible for the high rate
of aboriginal incarceration.

His apology at the time seemed genuine. Was it?

Depriving aboriginal offenders of access to the Gladue Court, a
landmark Supreme Court decision, is simply mind-boggling,
counterproductive and flies in the face of the prime minister's
apology. Go figure.

Emile Therien, public health and safety advocate, Ottawa
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MAP posted-by: Matt