Desistance for Whom? Indigenous Peoples and their Social Environment in Emerging Adulthood

• In Event: Emerging Scholars on Emerging Adulthood: Explicating the Relationship between Social Environment and Offending

Abstract

Despite concerns about the overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples in criminal legal systems across Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, empirical attention is rarely given to examining whether criminological theories of offending generalize to Indigenous Peoples. To explore how societal norms, relationships, and community structure impact Indigenous Peoples, the age-graded theory of informal social control was used to understand whether sources of social support prevent their official involvement in the criminal legal system. Current explanations of crime based on socioeconomic (e.g., living, employment, skills) and interpersonal (e.g., family, companions) disadvantages may be distinct, particularly as these factors are more prevalent among Indigenous offenders, potentially resulting in their over-classification as high-risk. Addressing these nuances, this study measured sources of informal social controls and offending trajectories between ages 18 and 25 among Indigenous and White participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study in British Columbia, Canada. Moderation analyses were used to examine whether informal social control was equally informative of patterns of desistance over the life-course for Indigenous and White participants. This study considers whether universal risk and protective factors should be assessed in culturally-informed ways to prevent the over-classification of Indigenous offenders as high-risk.

Authors

• Ashley Kyne, Simon Fraser University

• Evan McCuish, Simon Fraser University