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A review by suetrav
Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada by Harold R. Johnson
4.0
I really enjoy this style of non-fiction. Part autobiography and part research.
This was definitely eye-opening for me. I am fully aware that there are issues with Indigenous people and the RCMP/criminal justice system and this book does a great job of explaining why. I agree that justice should be less about deterrence and more about redemption, especially in the northern (smaller) communities.
There were a few eye-openers for me in this book. 80.6% of men and 71.2% of women in Canada use alcohol at risky levels? Really? I actually went and looked at the Chief Public Health Officer's report he cites in the book. I had no idea the numbers were so high. He says "The stereotype of the lazy drunken Indian is simply false. In fact there are, per capita, more Indigenous people in Canada who are completely abstinent than there are among the non-Indigenous population. Thirty-five percent of Indigenous people in Canada do not use alcohol at all, compared with only 18% of Canadians."
This observation could also be applied to the over incarceration of black people in the USA. "We send people out of the community to correctional centres and penitentiaries, and they learn quickly to depend on the institution. There is no need to work, and everything they need for shelter and sustenance is provided. They learn not to be responsible. They have no power to change their circumstances, so anything that happens to them is beyond their control. The jailhouse culture infects our communities, resulting in increased dependence, hopelessness and violence, and the infection results in more charges being laid, more need for police and courts and more people being sent to jail, adding another spiral to the cycle."
The author actually has some good ideas on how to start fixing the problem of over incarceration but states that the justice system is "too large, too cumbersome and too entrenched to ever change." Talk about depressing! The poverty, HIV/AIDS infection rate, meth addiction and suicide statistics he cites for Saskatchewan are disheartening. He does leave us with a bit of hope at the end of the book with a call to Indigenous Peoples to work on creating their own justice systems as "it could not be any worse than what we have now."
This was definitely eye-opening for me. I am fully aware that there are issues with Indigenous people and the RCMP/criminal justice system and this book does a great job of explaining why. I agree that justice should be less about deterrence and more about redemption, especially in the northern (smaller) communities.
There were a few eye-openers for me in this book. 80.6% of men and 71.2% of women in Canada use alcohol at risky levels? Really? I actually went and looked at the Chief Public Health Officer's report he cites in the book. I had no idea the numbers were so high. He says "The stereotype of the lazy drunken Indian is simply false. In fact there are, per capita, more Indigenous people in Canada who are completely abstinent than there are among the non-Indigenous population. Thirty-five percent of Indigenous people in Canada do not use alcohol at all, compared with only 18% of Canadians."
This observation could also be applied to the over incarceration of black people in the USA. "We send people out of the community to correctional centres and penitentiaries, and they learn quickly to depend on the institution. There is no need to work, and everything they need for shelter and sustenance is provided. They learn not to be responsible. They have no power to change their circumstances, so anything that happens to them is beyond their control. The jailhouse culture infects our communities, resulting in increased dependence, hopelessness and violence, and the infection results in more charges being laid, more need for police and courts and more people being sent to jail, adding another spiral to the cycle."
The author actually has some good ideas on how to start fixing the problem of over incarceration but states that the justice system is "too large, too cumbersome and too entrenched to ever change." Talk about depressing! The poverty, HIV/AIDS infection rate, meth addiction and suicide statistics he cites for Saskatchewan are disheartening. He does leave us with a bit of hope at the end of the book with a call to Indigenous Peoples to work on creating their own justice systems as "it could not be any worse than what we have now."