Something’s askew with the court-sanctioned initiative to avoid incarceration for aboriginal offenders, basically because aboriginal people are over-represented in our prison system.
Thus, as few would counter the fact that aboriginal people also over-represent those convicted of crimes for which incarceration is typically handed down, the focus is then shifted to the “mitigating circumstances” under which the crime was committed – dysfunctional childhood and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) being the most widely utilized, as they admittedly should be.
Furthermore, offenders’ aboriginal heritage typically indicates great injustices endured at the hands of Anglo-Saxon colonizers and abusive residential school staff.
Could it perhaps be that formidable anger lays behind crime which is exacerbated by FAS?
And the “First Nations” label repeated ad nauseam by politicians and the mainstream media can easily politicize and thus (unintentionally) legitimize the anger and its fruits, e.g. when a Vancouver bus driver’s face gets seriously sucker punched.
In a nutshell, Canadians who were toddlers, or not even born, when so many aboriginal people suffered severe abuse are in essence made to act as figurative lightning rods by some form of twisted compensatory justice – lenient, non-incarceration sentences for aboriginal violent offenders who were not even born when the major injustices were perpetrated upon their elders and ancestors by the colonizers and residential schools.
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.
White Rock
