Indigenous People Crime And Punishment

Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment examines criminal sentencing courts’ changing characterisations of Indigenous peoples’ identity, culture and postcolonial status. Focusing largely on Australian Indigenous peoples, but drawing also on the Canadian experiences, Thalia Anthony critically analyses how the judiciary have interpreted Indigenous difference. Through an analysis of Indigenous sentencing remarks over a fifty year period in a number of jurisdictions, the book demonstrates how judicial discretion is moulded to dominant white assumptions about Indigeneity. More specifically, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment shows how the increasing demonisation of Indigenous criminality and culture in sentencing has turned earlier ‘gains’ in the legal recognition of Indigenous peoples on their head. The recognition of Indigenous difference is thereby revealed as a pliable concept that is just as likely to remove concessions as it is to grant them. Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment suggests that Indigenous justice requires a two-way recognition process where Indigenous people and legal systems are afforded greater control in sentencing, dispute resolution and Indigenous healing.

Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment examines criminal sentencing courts’ changing characterisations of Indigenous peoples’ identity, culture and postcolonial status. Focusing largely on Australian Indigenous peoples, but drawing also on the Canadian experiences, Thalia Anthony critically analyses how the judiciary have interpreted Indigenous difference. Through an analysis of Indigenous sentencing remarks over a fifty year period in a number of jurisdictions, the book demonstrates how judicial discretion is moulded to dominant white assumptions about Indigeneity. More specifically, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment shows how the increasing demonisation of Indigenous criminality and culture in sentencing has turned earlier ‘gains’ in the legal recognition of Indigenous peoples on their head. The recognition of Indigenous difference is thereby revealed as a pliable concept that is just as likely to remove concessions as it is to grant them. Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment suggests that Indigenous justice requires a two-way recognition process where Indigenous people and legal systems are afforded greater control in sentencing, dispute resolution and Indigenous healing.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to comprehensively explore Indigenous people’s contact with criminal justice systems in a contemporary and historical context. Drawing on comparative Indigenous material from North America, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it addresses both the theoretical underpinnings to the development of a specific Indigenous criminology, and canvasses the broader policy and practice implications for criminal justice. Written by leading criminologists specialising in Indigenous justice issues, the book argues for the importance of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to criminology, and suggests that colonialism needs to be a fundamental concept to criminology in order to understand contemporary problems such as deaths in custody, high imprisonment rates, police brutality and the high levels of violence in some Indigenous communities. Prioritising the voices of Indigenous peoples, the work will make a significant contribution to the development of a decolonising criminology and will be of wide interest.

Canada's criminal justice system has had a troubled relationship with Aboriginal people. This discord can be seen in disproportionally high rates of incarceration and in the limited recognition given by the conventional system to the needs and values of Aboriginal communities. To compound matters, many remote communities are served by fly-in circuit courts, which visit the communities once a month, pronounce judgement on the cases presented to them, and then leave. Ross Green looks at the evolution of the Canadian criminal justice system and the values upon which it is based. He then contrasts those values with Aboriginal concepts of justice. Against this backdrop, he introduces sentencing and mediation alternatives currently being developed in Aboriginal communities, including sentencing circles, elder and community sentencing panels, sentence advisory committees, and community mediation projects. At the heart of the book are case studies of northern communities, which Green uses to analyse the successes of and challenges to the innovative approaches to sentencing currently evolving in Aboriginal communities across the country. He concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the Canadian criminal justice system can facilitate or obstruct such innovations. This book is based on the author's scholarly research; field trips to the communities profiled; interviews with judges, prosecutors, community leaders, and participants in sentencing circles, sentencing panels, and mediation committees; and the author's personal experiences as a defence lawyer in northeastern Saskatchewan. This book is aimed at those concerned with criminal justice as well as practicing lawyers.

Critical assessment of available Canadian research literature (generally 1972-1983) describing the impact of selected components of the criminal justice system on native people in Canada.

There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. In this book Nielsen and Robyn present an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and socially injurious consequences that exist today.

Following the Second World War, liberal nation-states sought to address injustices of the past. Canada's government began to consider its own implication in various past wrongs, and in the late twentieth century it began to implement reparative justice initiatives for historically marginalized people. Yet despite this shift, there are more Indigenous and racialized people in Canadian prisons now than at any other time in history. Carmela Murdocca examines this disconnect between the political motivations for amending historical injustices and the vastly disproportionate reality of the penal system a troubling contradiction that is often ignored.