The Sentencing of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Youth under the Young Offenders Act: A Multivariate Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the sentencing of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth under the Young Offenders Act, using youth court data from five major cities in Canada. Three separate sentencing decisions are examined using logistic and multiple regression analyses: (1) the imposition of a custodial sentence versus a non-custodial sentence, (2) the use of secure custody versus open custody, and (3) the length of the custodial sentence. First, there is no evidence that Aboriginal youth are more likely than non-Aboriginal youth to receive a custodial sentence. Sentencing judges appear to base the decision to impose custody on traditional factors such as criminal history and the severity of the offence. Second, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that Aboriginal youth are more likely than non-Aboriginal youth to receive a secure custody sentence. Lastly, there is evidence to suggest, however, that Aboriginal youth are likely to receive a longer custodial sentence than non-Aboriginal youth, regardless of standard aggravating factors such as criminal history and offence severity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".