Why haven aboriginal incarceration rates dropped?
The Supreme Court of Canada’s Gladue decision is 10 years old and the expectation that it would lead to a decline in the aboriginal jail population is as wrong now as it was then. The Gladue ruling was based on the trial of an aboriginal woman and billed as a realistic response to the high number of native offenders in Canadian jails. It’s an old story. Aboriginal people are over-represented in prison. Reportedly, they make up less than four per cent of the Canadian population but account for about 25 per cent of those jailed. In laymen’s terms, the ruling was intended to reduce those numbers to politically acceptable levels by recognizing and considering native plight and the “systemic or background factors which may have influenced (them) to engage in criminal conduct.” The message to the country’s courts was clear: Find alternatives to lockup. Critics cringed at the potential to subvert justice, calling it the “Gladue discount,” a get-out-of-jail-free card. History is clear that Fir
