Meeting the Challenges of Gladue: An Inquiry into the Use of Social Context Information in Judicial Determination of Sentences for Indigenous Offenders in Canada”
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld changes to the Canadian Criminal Code that were intended to reduce the over-incarceration of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons.
Known as the “Gladue requirements” after the case R v. Gladue, they required courts to consider “the unique background and circumstances of Aboriginal people” in sentencing. But the requirements have been criticized as ineffective, as the number of Indigenous people behind bars has continued to rise.
“Today, the number of Indigenous people in federal prison is roughly five-times their population in Canada generally,” wrote Professor Dickson in a description of her project. “One in every three federally-sentenced woman is Indigenous…and 41% of all youth in custody admissions are Indigenous.”
Professor Dickson won a SSHRC Insight Grant worth $185,823 for a project that will address the lack of research into whether the Gladue requirements reduced sentencing disparities and Indigenous over-incarceration.
“There is little Canadian or international research supporting this assumption,” wrote Dr. Dickson. She and her co-applicant, Law and Legal Studies Professor Sebastian Malette will ask how the Gladue requirements actually influence judicial decisions, and how the requirements are supported across Canada.
“The findings of this project promise to empower the scholarly, policy and Indigenous communities with greater understanding of the role and the impact of Gladue,” she explains
