Indigenous youth represent five percent of the Canadian youth population but account for nearly half of youth in custody. Black youth in many jurisdictions are detained at rates several times higher than their population share. Youth from low-income neighborhoods cycle through the justice system while their wealthier peers committing similar offenses rarely see the inside of a courtroom. These patterns persist across decades and jurisdictions with such consistency that they demand explanation. Whether these disparities reflect systemic discrimination that funnels certain youth toward justice involvement, or underlying differences in offending rates driven by social conditions, or some combination that neither perspective fully captures, determines what solutions might actually address the problem.
The Case for Recognizing Systemic Discrimination
Advocates point to evidence of bias at every decision point. Police patrol low-income and racialized neighborhoods more intensively, creating more opportunities for contact. Officers stop, search, and arrest Indigenous and Black youth at higher rates even when controlling for alleged offense. Prosecutors charge marginalized youth more severely and offer worse plea deals. Judges detain them pretrial more often and sentence them more harshly for similar offenses. School discipline policies criminalize behavior that in other contexts would be handled internally, funneling marginalized youth into what researchers call the school-to-prison pipeline. For Indigenous youth, the overrepresentation represents ongoing colonialism, with the justice system continuing what residential schools began: removing Indigenous children from families and communities. From this view, the disparities are not natural or inevitable but produced by systems that treat marginalized youth as more dangerous, less deserving of second chances, and appropriate targets for control. Addressing overrepresentation requires confronting bias, changing policies that disproportionately impact certain communities, reducing police presence in schools and neighborhoods, and investing in alternatives to prosecution.
The Case for Addressing Root Causes Beyond the System
Others argue that overrepresentation reflects real differences in circumstances that produce higher rates of justice involvement. Poverty creates conditions where crime becomes more likely: lack of opportunities, exposure to violence, family instability, inadequate education. Intergenerational trauma from residential schools, ongoing discrimination, and systemic exclusion from economic opportunity affect Indigenous communities in ways that manifest in various social problems, including higher rates of substance use and violence. Neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage experience more crime, which means more police presence, which means more arrests. From this perspective, blaming the justice system for disparities ignores that these youth face challenges that increase both offending and likelihood of being caught. The solution is not primarily justice system reform but addressing poverty, improving education, providing mental health services, creating employment opportunities, and supporting families and communities. While bias certainly exists and should be addressed, treating overrepresentation solely as discrimination obscures the underlying social conditions that must change for disparities to decrease.
The Intergenerational Trauma Cycle
For Indigenous youth, overrepresentation cannot be separated from history. Residential schools deliberately severed connections to culture, language, family, and traditional ways of living. Survivors returned to communities traumatized, often unable to parent effectively because they were denied normal family relationships during childhood. Their children inherited that trauma. Child welfare systems continued the pattern of removal, with Indigenous children vastly overrepresented in foster care. Youth who grow up disconnected from culture, cycling through placements, experiencing abuse in systems meant to protect them, enter adolescence without the stability, identity, or support that might prevent justice involvement. Whether the justice system can address problems it helped create, or whether solutions must come from Indigenous communities rebuilding what was destroyed, represents a tension without easy resolution.
The Question
If marginalized youth appear in the justice system at rates grossly disproportionate to their population, does that prove the system discriminates, or does it mean these youth face circumstances that make justice involvement more likely regardless of how fairly the system operates? Can justice system reforms alone reduce overrepresentation, or must broader social inequities be addressed first? And for Indigenous youth whose overrepresentation stems directly from historical policies that targeted their communities for destruction, what does justice require beyond simply processing fewer of them through courts?