Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

220 • Truth & Reconciliation Commissioncultural abuse in the schools later turned to alcohol and drugs as a means to cope andtry to forget. The consequences for many students and their families were tragic.Grace Campbell is an intergenerational Survivor.When I was drinking a lot of things happened to me … I had to do things and alot of times I just about got killed and then, I thought it was easy. Easy drinking,easy to get the way I was living and I didn’t like it. I was selling my body and Ididn’t like it. At the time I didn’t know it but when I look back, some of thosecreeps I hung with, men and guns and everything, like you know. I was losing mydrinking buddies though; they were being murdered and dying. 134Action is required now to overcome the legacy of residential schools that has playeda major role in the over-incarceration of Aboriginal people.Call to Action30) We call upon federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit toeliminating the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in custody over the nextdecade, and to issue detailed annual reports that monitor and evaluate progressin doing so.Community programsIn 1996, Parliament legislated principles that would allow offenders who mightotherwise be imprisoned to serve their sentences in the community. A centrepieceof these reforms was Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, which instructs judgesthat “all available sanctions other than imprisonment that are reasonable in the circumstancesshould be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to thecircumstances of aboriginal offenders.” 135In 1999, in R. v. Gladue, the Supreme Court stated that Section 718.2(e) of theCriminal Code was enacted in response to alarming evidence that Aboriginal peopleswere incarcerated disproportionately to non-Aboriginal people in Canada. 136 Thecourt stressed that this section is a remedial provision, enacted specifically to obligethe judiciary to make special efforts to find reasonable alternatives to imprisonmentfor Aboriginal offenders and to take into account the background and systemic factorsthat bring Aboriginal people into contact with the justice system. 137In some jurisdictions, the Gladue decision has resulted in the production of moreextensive pre-sentence, or “Gladue,” reports that detail the background and contextualcircumstances of Aboriginal offenders. These reports help inform judges’ sentencingdecisions and are meant to encourage alternative options to incarceration. However,