Okay, so yes, yes, and yes.
Indigenous women, unfortunately, are the most over policed, but less likely to get justice. Our women are targeted, and they're being monitored because of racial issues.
We know that justice is intimately connected to the representation you can purchase. It's intimately connected to poverty as well. If you don't have the funds to buy a lawyer, and if you don't have the funds to get justice, then you're going to end up with the least favourable outcomes. They're going to end up in jail.
There was a clear example of this when we were in Vancouver during the Stanley Cup riots and there were young men coming in from the suburbs and lighting police cars on fire. Across the country there were arguments about why a young man should not go to jail because he had a beautiful career ahead of him and a scholarship to some Ivy League university. This was not a matter of boys being boys, but they were actually going to set police cars on fire. That's large-scale damage and potential danger, and yet an indigenous woman who defends herself.... If somebody has their hands around my throat, I'm going to fight back, too. That's real honest. Often many of our women end up in jail because they have stood up for themselves, or because they have fought back in violent situations. Double charging means they end up in jail, too, if he says, “He hit, she hit back”. We've seen again and again that our women are over-policed. Because of the high levels of violence when women fight back, they end up in jail because of racism. Because of the absence of indigenous women on juries, and because of court processes, our women don't get justice. We get harsher sentences.
Often, when indigenous women end up in jail, one of our primary concerns is that some of the women who are sent there on essentially trivial charges can then be subject to indeterminate sentences because of things that then happen while they're in jail. Somebody who is jailed originally for stealing food for her family ends up doing a life sentence because judges can given them indeterminate sentences because of some petty thing that happened while they were in jail, such as throwing their papers at the parole committee, which is considered assault. We've seen it again and again, where they've gone in for petty theft and end up with a life sentence.