When Justice Becomes Just Us
When Crime Is Blamed On Racism
This is a post by regular Woke Watch Canada contributor, Michael Melanson.
In a recent Winnipeg Free Press column Niigaan Sinclair returns to a familiar grievance, aboriginal crime and punishment. Trying to account for the disproportionate rates of aboriginal involvement in the justice system, Sinclair points to the perennial root causes of all aboriginal problems.
"The problem is: racism is the No. 1 reason Indigenous people enter the justice system. Whether it is a young gang member, drug addict or person charged with theft, history — and in particular Canada’s policies and practices involving Indigenous communities — plays a role."
Racism or no, it is the individual who commits the crime that ends up in the justice system. In Sinclair's formulation, aboriginal people commit crimes as a reaction to the injustices they face. In saying racism makes aboriginal people commit crimes, Sinclair is saying aboriginal people have negligible personal agency and are essentially child-like in being totally reactive to external conditions.
"So, if racism plays a role in someone being charged with a crime, why can’t it play a role in justice?"
Sinclair isn't troubled by the circularity of his reasoning. Despite the remarkable efficiency of his argument, can racism be both the problem and the solution to the problem? Only if the poison can also be the cure. Sinclair is openly advocating racism. He could have referred to it as 'positivist racial discrimination' or the like but he chose the blunt and crude term. For someone endeavoring to be an anti-racist, can any amount of racism be allowed? Is a negative orientation towards racism possible when there are positive exceptions for the benificent use of racism?
"In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized in the 'Gladue decision' the historical reasons leading to an Indigenous person being charged with a crime must be considered during a trial alongside alternatives to sentencing."
Gladue Reports have since become common features in the prosecution of aboriginal offenders. Initially not intended to include violent offenders, Gladue reports have become available to just about any and all aboriginal defendants. Conditions such as a dysfunctional home and upbringing, relatives who attended Indian Residential Schools, and systemic racism are presumed to be general factors influencing aboriginal criminal behaviour. The net result is a finding of 'diminished moral culpability' which rather darkly insinuates a lack of self-possession and personal agency. If history makes a person commit crime, how can they ever stop? Gladue just says they shouldn't go to jail for committing crimes because it's not really their fault that they committed a crime. Attributing criminal behaviour to historical factors means that aboriginal people aren't expected to be responsible for their actions the way any other adult would be. One could make the argument that exceptional suffering justifies exceptional sympathy but Gladue Reports have become a generalized preconception of aboriginal offenders. Gladue Reports are an institutionalized form of the bigotry of low expectations but they also serve to reinforce the contempt for Canada's take on western civilization. Contemporary aboriginal crime becomes another indictment of colonization.
What Sinclair doesn't consider are the consequences of socializing aboriginal criminality as a problem with Canada. If an aboriginal person commits a crime because of colonialism, they are, in a sense, a victim of colonization. Committing crimes can then be seen as a misdirected cry for help. When it comes to the murder of an aboriginal woman by an aboriginal partner, however, it can mean that both are victims.
"The real work is in enabling opportunity, empowering hope, and eradicating poverty in Indigenous communities so crime isn’t a choice at all."
Sinclair glosses over the reality that for many reserves, especially the remote ones, there are no opportunities, there are no jobs outside of band governance which tends to be stitched up by the ruling clans. A purposeless life spent collecting band welfare is fertile ground for breeding crime and all manner of social pathologies. Like many of the neo-tribal elites arguing for aboriginal particularism, Sinclair doesn't actually live on a reserve. Like his father before him, Sinclair has found opportunity, hope and wealth off the reserve.
The way Sinclair rolls off the stock root causes for aboriginal crime illustrates just how abridged sociological analysis has become when it comes to trying to understand these problems. Lonnie Athens' violent socialization theory, for instance, would be a useful tool for understanding how a 12 year-old girl can join in on the gang beating of another girl but for rentierists there's no profit in veering away from fingering the usual suspects, white settlers.
The consequences of pushing a root causes template aren't considered because ideological objectives are being satisfied. If that 12 year-old girl is told that her violent behaviour is caused by things that happened to other people before she was born, the message she is hearing is that her path in life was predetermined; she's just the latest collateral victim of colonization. It's a message of hopelessness rather than hope and if her life was predetermined by things outside of her control by people outside of her culture, what good can she possibly find in our society? What moral value can she find for investing in civil society? Add to that exhortations to reject assimilation and what is left to that child except a nihilistic horizon where barbarism supplants her despair?
Sinclair's premise is that Canadian justice is fundamentally corrupted by racism and like all Critical Race theorists, he believes justice can never be blind because racism is an immutable characteristic of human nature. Presuming the impossibility of humans transcending the bias of race, Sinclair is left only with suggesting a different justice for a different race. This is a very illiberal idea that undermines one of the oldest tenets of universalism: equality before the law. As well, what happens when the notion of a racially corrupted justice system becomes a popular perception? Will the racial correctives instill public trust in the justice system or reinforce the belief that justice is wholly corrupt?
"The hen and the lamb complain about the justice of the foxes and the wolves but the foxes and wolves say, 'A justice for each of us is a justice for all.' Then they belch and proceed with the next trial."
There's an axiom and idiom in "family law" pertaining to the victims of a dysfunctional "broken system"- wherever the chips may fall, we are all just grist for the mill.
A very well written article which unfortunately will never be read by those most in need of reading it. It is also nice to know there is another reason for their social pathology beside intergenerational trauma from someone who attended Residential School.