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B.C. top court broadens sentencing law aimed at reducing indigenous incarceration rates
Some additional background. In Canada, indigenous people have a lot of problems. They tend to be poor, especially if they live on reserves. Many of them have drug and alcohol abuse problems, and they commit a lot of crime, especially violent crime. There's a lot of teen pregnancy, and in general, many of them live what most people consider to be highly dysfunctional lives.
It has recently become accepted wisdom that this is definitely entirely due to their historical mistreatment, especially their attendance at residential schools, which were designed to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into Western culture. The evidence supporting this is weak.
I have a few questions about this and similar cases.
Why are prison sentences so low in Canada to begin with? You often hear cases where someone kills multiple people and they get sentenced to under ten years in prison. After accounting for credit for time served and parole, they're often only in prison for a few years. Is there evidence supporting this approach to reducing crime?
Is there any reason why the optimal sentences for indigenous convicts are lower than for non-indigenous convicts?
Does it really make sense to blame the offender's dysfunctional background on his indigenous ancestry?
Does it even make sense to blame his criminal behaviour on his dysfunctional background?
Why are crime rates among the indigenous increasing?
This law has apparently been in effect since 1995, so this is not exactly news.
The question is not whether the law is optimal; it is whether it is just. The law says: "(e) all available sanctions, other than imprisonment, that are reasonable in the circumstances and consistent with the harm done to victims or to the community should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders." I don't know enough about the history of treatment of Aboriginals in Canada, nor enough about the actual effect of the law on actual sentencing, to opine one way or th other.
Surely that depends on the individual. Here is the operative law:
It does not seem to me that there is a whole lot to see here, but perhaps there is; perhaps there is research that attempts to show the effect of the provision on actual sentences is large.
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