...Canada in five Canadian cities (Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver/Surrey), Jeff Latimer and Laura Casey Foss compared the treatment of Aboriginal youth to that of non-Aboriginal youth on three measures: (1) the likelihood that a young person found guilty in youth court would receive a custodial sentence; (2) the likelihood that a youth given a custodial sentence would receive a sentence involving secure custody; and (3) the length of the custodial sentence (for those who received one).

The findings of that earlier article are easy to describe. Controlling for a number of other factors that are generally relevant to sentencing, the authors found that there were no differences in the treatment of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders on the first two measures (the probability of a custodial sentence, given a guilty finding; and the probability of a secure custody sentence, given a sentence of custody). However, on the third measure--the length of the custodial sentence for those who received one--there was a difference in sentence length between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders even after legally relevant factors were controlled for (statistically): Aboriginal youth received longer sentences than non-Aboriginal youth did.

If this finding is, in fact, an effect of race, then it is clearly important. Our article, however, questions this conclusion initially on the basis of what is known about Canada and the operation of the YOA in the various jurisdictions of Canada. On the basis of existing public data, there is, we believe, a presumptive case that the finding is an artefact of known jurisdictional differences. After examining the publicly available data, we then provide analyses of the same data used by Latimer and Foss (2005), demonstrating that the effect of race on sentence length is likely due to an important artefact: Aboriginal young offenders are not equally distributed across the five locations studied. The "Aboriginal" effect in these data is likely an effect of different practices in different cities, combined with different proportions of Aboriginal youth in each city sample. Simply put, Aboriginal youth are disproportionately likely to live in locations where long sentences are handed down to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young offenders.

Publicly available data and the use of custody with Aboriginal youth

Latimer and Foss (2005) report that roughly one-fifth of their overall sample comes from each of the five cities. They do not mention the number of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth at each stage (e.g., first appearance, sentencing) of the youth justice process from each city. However, the proportion of the population that is Aboriginal is likely to vary considerably across cities. Samples from the three western locations (Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver/Surrey) are each more likely to contain a high proportion of Aboriginal youth than those from Halifax and Toronto. This is relevant because under the YOA there were large differences in almost all aspects of the manner in which the system operated in the various parts of Canada (see, e.g., Doob 1992; Doob and Sprott 1996, 2004; Doob and Cesaroni 2004).

Taking estimates of the size of the total Aboriginal population in each of the five cities (from data derived from Statistics Canada based on the 2001 census), we estimated the number of Aboriginal youth whom we would expect to find in each of the five locations. (2) For example, it is estimated that in Halifax roughly 3.05% of the population is Aboriginal. Since Latimer and Foss indicate that approximately one-fifth of the sample came from each city, we estimated that roughly 247 cases with convictions were from Halifax. If 3.05% of these were Aboriginal, we would expect about seven or eight Aboriginal youth to be in the Halifax sample. Similar calculations for the rest of the jurisdictions result in an estimate of about 57 convicted cases that would involve Aboriginals. Thus, for the sample as a whole, Aboriginals in Halifax could be estimated to account for roughly 13.2% of the sample of convicted cases (7.53/57.14). Table 1 shows these calculations for the remaining jurisdictions. (3)

Table 1 also shows, based on published data from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, the proportion of secure custodial sentences (out of all custodial sentences imposed) in each of the corresponding provinces. Finally, also using CCJS data, the proportion of custodial sentences (open and secure combined) that were relatively long (for youth: four months or more) is presented.

Three conclusions can...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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