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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article traces the development of a criminal justice (CJ) program at the University of Winnipeg and places that development in the context of the growth of criminology and criminal justice fields in Canada. The CJ program at the University of Winnipeg began as a distributed and interdisciplinary major, but through a process of self-reflection and discovery, CJ faculty attempted to build a program that was theoretically oriented while not losing sight of its applied roots. The journey can best be described as a mitigation of the protective-services orientation - a somewhat pejorative description of CJ levelled by critical scholars of crime, law, and society. We situate the development of a CJ program at the University of Winnipeg alongside shifts in the traditional liberal arts model of post-secondary education in Canada and reflect upon some of the emerging challenges that face similar departments in the current socio-economic and political climate. The article attempts to open up debate and dialogue about the nature of CJ education in Canada and offers the University of Winnipeg as a case study of the development of the discipline in Canada in a post-secondary context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examine the offending trajectories of Aboriginal youths under a probation sentence in Manitoba, Canada, and compared them to those of non-Aboriginal juvenile probationers. The results from growth-mixture analyses indicated that, for both sub-samples, a two-group latent trajectory model best represented the shape of the developmental progression in criminal behaviour from early adolescence to middle adulthood. While a small proportion of the offenders showed serious and persistent offending behaviour over their life-course, the majority of the juvenile probationers engaged in relatively less frequent and/or serious criminal activity over time. The size of the chronic high-offending trajectory group was slightly larger among the Aboriginal offenders (18.7%) than among the non-Aboriginal offenders (12.3%). Additional analyses revealed that the Aboriginal offenders were more likely to come from an impoverished background, characterized by an unstable familial environment, substance use, and negative peer associations. These criminogenic risk/needs contributed to their serious and persistent pattern of criminality. In contrast, accommodation problems predicted increased odds of membership in the chronic high group of the non-Aboriginal offenders. The article concludes with a discussion of potential implications and suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses Carol La Prairie's (1992; 2002) hypothesis that the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the Canadian criminal justice system is, to a considerable extent, due to their disadvantaged urban living conditions. Specifically, it investigates the sources of the high level of police-reported Aboriginal crime in Winnipeg in 2001. Geocoded crime incident data from the incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey and Census data for the City of Winnipeg are combined in a neighbourhood-level ecological analysis of urban Aboriginal crime. The results indicate that a substantial part of the elevated level of police-reported Aboriginal crime is explained by the structural characteristics of the neighbourhoods in which Aboriginal people tend to live. These results confirm La Prairie's hypothesis and point to the importance of considering community conditions in understanding and preventing crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminologists have shown much interest in the distribution, causes, and consequences of fear of crime, but few studies have examined trends in fear. Using data from the Winnipeg Area Study from 1984, 1994, and 2004, and official crime data from the Winnipeg Police Service, we examine trends in fear of crime and compare them to reported crime. Fear of crime is evaluated by using an index compiled from five offence-specific indicators that asks how worried people are about becoming victims of theft, burglary, armed robbery, fraud, and sexual assault. Bonferonni procedures and regression methods are used to assess differences in fear of crime. The results show that respondents report low levels of fear of crime over the 20-year period. The results also indicate a lack of correspondence between fear of crime and official measures of crime. These findings challenge the use of fear of crime measures by policy makers seeking to evaluate criminal justice initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]