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Aboriginal Youth Issues

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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

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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.

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Although race is an important factor of Canadian law, there is limited data on its connection with the criminal justice system. Millar and Owusu-Bempah will reveal how the police suppresses data on the race of victims and offenders, which makes it more difficult to conduct anti-racism research and easier for police to implement racial profiling (2011). Also, the authors will argue that intelligence collection conducted by powerful institutions such as police, serves to their advantage rather than the public’s, due its confidentiality. Hence, the authors will explore the race data available and unavailable, but required. Millar and Owusu-Bempah draw on how contemporary studies reveal the disproportionate racial populations in Canadian incarceration,

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This article explains recent statistics about Canada's crimes going down, it also questions the false sense of security that Canadians have been hearing, that the crime rate is going down. The author provides fairly recent information and clearly states when created and updated. Information about herself is not stated other her name. The article has only one citation, to an official article that is from the same site but from a different section.

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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.

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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).

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For instance, a Queensland study on the ethnicity of young people moved on has found that Indigenous background represent the 37% of respondents, despite the fact that Indigenous youth only accounts for the 4% of Queensland youth population (Spooner 2000, 27). This over-representation may be resulted from the ‘moral panic’ framed in our society and ideal to govern the risk in our society. According to White (1999, 39), the greater surveillance and intervention of Indigenous young people in public places is due to their high levels of contact with the criminal justice system. The overrepresentation of indigenous people in the criminal justice system may cause their generalisation as a greater threat for public order compared to others in society, which may lead their representation as ‘moral panic’ and the increase in community’s anxiety of this group.

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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

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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).

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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?

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We have seen today in society of how crime rates have been rampant and how statistics show that most of the crimes were being made by minors. I believe that when most of them look at the bottom of these young offenders come disproportionately from impoverished single-parent homes that are located in the neighbourhoods desinvertido and have high rates of learning disabilities, mental health, and substance abuse and problems with the help of the system of juvenile justice that can make a great return on a successful transition to adulthood. Their ages ranged from 20 and under, most are under fifteen years of age. Juveniles tried as adults must assume the same consequences as any other criminal and are subject to state prisons with inmates much higher and that have probably committed crimes much more tortuous then you could ever have. These minors between the ages of nine to twenty according to the offence committed or of the number of times that are prosecuted and believe that it is immutable.

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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:

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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.

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Crimes will always be in society and involve many strict decisions as well as judgements to resolve them. In our society, the government dictates many polices that all the citizens have to follow to reduce crimes and to reduce the harm caused by crimes. Many people in society are not prepared from childhood to raise their voice against criminals and feel uncomfortable when they have to voice an opinion in community issues. Furthermore, a lot of acts and decisions over the past few years have become criminalized due to the expansion of the legislation of the Youth Criminal Justice Act which will help to stop and reduce the harm caused by crimes. This helps the residents of Canada to feel safe and protected through the different methods that have been issued out.

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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

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We see that violence is more prevalent in countries that have a higher income inequality. Canada’s income inequality is considerably lower than the Unites states. The number of homicides per million people in Canada 15 compared to the United States 150. At the same time, the number of prisoners per 100,000 in Canada is about 130 while being more than three times that in the United States around 400. As previously mentioned, this isn’t only due to more violence, but it is also a result of tougher sentencing.

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