Sentencing Reform in Canada: The Impact on Aboriginal Prisoners.

The last 10 years have seen extensive reforms to the law of criminal dispositions in Canada and in 2006, the House of Commons is once again considering a new set of reforms. Despite their apparent disparate nature, these reforms have all focused on less imprisonment for non-violent crime and more imprisonment and more long-term imprisonment for violent crime. The reforms were intended to reduce the rate of imprisonment and the rate of overincarceration of first nations people. The reforms have achieved neither goal. They failed on their first goal because prisons are increasingly filled with remand prisoners, so while the rate of sentenced prisoners is decreasing, this decrease is almost completely compensated for by higher remand incarceration rates. They failed on their second goal because the focus on violent crime has had a differential and discriminatory impact on aboriginal offenders. This discriminatory impact is exaggerated for prisoners at the intersection of multiple grounds of discrimination, such as aboriginal women or aboriginal youth. The paper argues that any further sentencing reform will have to consider the human rights impact on first nations people and require some serious rethinking of the violent/non-violent offences divide. This can only be done if a systemic human rights approach is brought to bear on the analysis of appropriate dispositions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]