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Essay about Convictions of Adult Offenders in Canada

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Convictions of Adult Offenders in Canada On Sept. 16, 1995, after fatally stabbing her husband as he slept, 19-year-old Jamie Tanis Gladue shrieked: "I got you...bastard." In addition to getting her husband, however, Mr. Gladue disregarded the rule of law.

In the course of confirming Ms. Gladue's sentence of three years for manslaughter -- only six months of which were served behind bars -- the Supreme Court of Canada scolded the trial judge for not giving due attention to the killer's "Indianness." This ruling follows the guidelines within section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, stating that …show more content…

Yet no one argues that is because men suffer from systemic sexism in the criminal justice system. Men commit disproportionately more crimes.

Yet the court did not even examine whether natives were more or less likely than non-natives to commit crimes -- surely the first step in any serious inquiry. As it happens, if the court had tried to discover this, it would have had great difficulty. The federal Department of Justice has conspicuously dodged this politically explosive question -- while spending millions of dollars on studies documenting abuses that befall aboriginals once inside the criminal justice system.

What little data exist (which the court did not consider) show that rates of incarceration for aboriginals may not be out of line with their rates of crime. In 1995, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics completed a three-city study on police-reported crime. It found that natives were nearly five times as likely as non-natives to commit a crime in Calgary; 10.5 times as likely to do so in Saskatoon; and 12 times as likely in Regina. And these figures undoubtedly underestimated the rate of native participation in crime because police officers only listed as "native" those carrying proof of their treaty status at the moment of their arrest.

Similarly, in 1991, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (ACI) of Manitoba reported that reserves were experiencing as

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