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Record W7093363603 · doi:10.25316/ir-20505

Reducing the Overrepresentation of Indigenous People in Canada’s Criminal Justice System through Attention to Colonialism and Its Consequences

2025· dissertation· en· W7093363603 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueVIUSpace (Vancouver Island University Library) · 2025
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicIndigenous Health, Education, and Rights
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIndigenousCriminal justiceColonialismIntervention (counseling)Economic Justice

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The significant overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canada’s criminal justice system has been a persistent problem for decades and is still a problem today, despite efforts by various governments to tackle the issue. However, a recent follow-up study on Indigenous offenders who managed to stay crime-free for at least three years following their participation in VisionQuest’s substance abuse treatment program in British Columbia found that it is possible to overcome the problem of overrepresentation. The program is unique in that it aims to assist Indigenous offenders in their efforts to lead crime-free, substance abuse-free, and productive lives, by paying special attention to the challenges imposed upon them by the consequences of colonialism. With this in mind, the central research question posed by my dissertation work is: What elements, among the self-reported program intervention and non-program experiences of Indigenous offenders who have participated in the VisionQuest program, best assist them in overcoming the challenges and consequences of colonialism in their efforts to lead crime-free lives? As my dissertation describes, I approached the question by conducting semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with ten clients and ten staff members from the VisionQuest program. Collectively, the results of the interviews provide confirmation of the significant consequences and challenges faced by Indigenous offenders. More importantly, they provide confirmation of why our attentiveness to the consequences and challenges of colonialism is so critical to assisting Indigenous offenders in leading crime-free lives. The findings should be helpful in informing those leading substance-abuse programs on how they might enhance their capacity to assist Indigenous offenders in remaining crime free. Equally importantly, the findings may inform governments and the criminal justice community about how they might better address the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous people in the Canadian criminal justice system. Keywords: overrepresentation, Indigenous, colonialism, substance abuse, recidivism, criminal justice

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.123
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0030.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.238 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it