From Incarceration to Restoration: National Responsibility, Gender and the Production of Cultural Difference

Abstract

The Criminal Code of Canada contains a sentencing provision aimed at offering alternatives to incarceration for Aboriginal peoples. One of the intentions of this provision is to take national responsibility for the over-incarceration of Aboriginal peoples. Using official documents, the objective of this article is to address the possible meaning of national responsibility that is shaped by the emergence of this legal intervention. The objective is to explore how even as it attempts to address national responsibility in law, the nation remains fundamentally committed to an understanding of colonial history in which it is not guilty of wrongdoing and hence arrives at an official stance that suggests that the Canadian state is not responsible for the continued ramifications of colonialism. This article also demonstrates that the practices of control and containment which are central to the criminal justice system require cultural difference paradigms as their ideological impetus.