Report Of The Commission On Systemic Racism In The Ontario Criminal Justice System

Champion sprinter Donovan Bailey said it, and this book confirms it. While racism may not be as blatant in Canada as in the United States, it does exist. Members of visible minority groups are discriminated against in employment, housing, and access to public services. The increasing visibility of hate groups and calls to restrict immigration mark the growing tension. Racist attitudes against Asians and Blacks, in particular, have seeped into the criminal justice system. Ironically, since 1960 it has been illegal in Ontario to track crime by race, making it difficult for researchers to collect data. The media, our primary source of information, has sensationalized crimes where minority groups are implicated. Clayton Mosher uses historical data and media reports to expose racism in Canada's social, legal, and criminal justice systems. He considers the social contexts of discrimination, legislation directed against minority groups, law enforcement, and court outcomes. At last, we are offered an objective assessment of racism in Canada. Discrimination and Denial is essential reading for judges, lawyers, police officers, social policy makers, and community leaders. Interpretations of recent events, such as the shooting of officer Todd Baylis by a fugitive alien and gang-style slayings in Toronto's Chinatown, are guaranteed to heat up the embers of public debate.

This book about crime, law, power, and social issues in Canada includes contributions from academics, legal practitioners, journalists, and social activists who have been studying and struggling for years against the abuse of power in myriad realms of Canadian life and represents the first systematic effort in Canada to integrate a variety of topics related to power into a single collection aimed at identifying and exploring common themes, issues, problems, and remedies.

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.

The essays in this collection explore the link between "race" and "crime" in the Canadian context, examining how individuals are racialized in the legal system, and describing how racialized groups and individuals are criminalized.

This volume examines racism within the process of criminal justice. In every society criminal justice plays a key role establishing social control and maintaining the hegemony of the dominant economic classes. The contributors to this anthology argue that the differential treatment of people of colour and First Nations peoples is due to systemic racism within all levels of the criminal justice system, which serves these dominant classes. Ideological and cultural changes are preconditions for the success of anti-racist policies and practices within the criminal justice system and within other state institutions. Recommendations for transformations in justice policy and practice are provided.

On 3 September 1996, Bill C-41 was proclaimed in force, initiating one significant step in the reform of sentencing and parole in Canada. This is the first book that, in addition to providing an overview of the law, effectively presents a sociological analysis of the legal reforms and their ramifications in this controversial area. The commissioned essays in this collection cover such crucial issues as options and alternatives in sentencing, patterns revealed by recent statistics, sentencing of minority groups, Bill C-41 and its effects, conditional sentencing, and the structure and relationship between parole and sentencing are clearly presented. An introduction, editorial comments beginning each chapter, and a concluding chapter draw the essays together resulting in a timely, comprehensive and extremely readable work on this critical topic. Broad in scope and perspective, this major new socio-legal study of the law of sentencing will be illuminating to students, members of the legal profession, and the general reader.