Aboriginal youth and crime in Canada

Darshan Lindsay:

Aboriginal youth are the fastest-growing population in Canada, and loose talk in corrections circles has them filling the nation's prisons in years to come.

It was this foreboding forecast Aaron McMillan used to grab the attention of aboriginal youth who packed a classroom at Thompson Rivers University this week for a workshop on prison and the aboriginal community.

The session was one of several held during a four-day aboriginal youth conference in Kamloops.

"We're not going to do it, right?" McMillan said as he issued a challenge to the group to fight the statistics that show a disproportionate number of First Nations people behind bars.

They represent approximately six per cent of the population, but make up nearly 20 per cent of the prison population.

At a women's federal prison in Abbotsford, where McMillan works as an aboriginal liaison officer, 42 per cent of the women jailed are of aboriginal descent.

Whether male or female, there was one thing most had in common, according to McMillan - substance abuse got them there.

To prove the point, he moved from the statistics to a personal story, of a young aboriginal woman jailed for manslaughter.

Now 22, she's been in prison since 15, after being raised to adult court and convicted in the beating death of an elderly woman.

The teen was supposed to be at school that day, but decided with a friend to skip and just "chill out."

The pair started drinking over the lunch hour.

The girl ended up so drunk, in and out of blackouts, that she couldn't remember all the circumstances surrounding her crime.

"I came to and I was in this house and we were robbing it. It was my idea to physically attack this woman, and then she was dead," said McMillan, reading from the transcript of an interview he recently did with the inmate.

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