I'd like to start answering that question by telling an eloquent little story. At one point, I conducted a field study for my doctoral thesis in Puvirnituq, an Inuit community in Hudson Bay. My thesis concerned the administration of criminal justice and included a historical component to understand how the Euro-Canadian justice system had been imposed on the Inuit, in particular. There was also a component concerning the land, in which I asked them for their views on the administration of justice.
I explained my subject by saying that it concerned the criminal justice system. One woman interrupted me by saying the words “criminal justice”. She asked me what criminal justice was. I explained to her that it was punitive justice, our penal system. She answered that that was funny because the words “justice” and “punishment” didn't go together. I asked her what she meant by that. She told me that, for them, justice means doing good; punishment means doing bad.
I've always remembered that. As a result of going into criminology, I have developed a critical and suspicious look at our way of doing things, which doesn't work any better in the south or in the non-aboriginal communities. We really have to reinvent our approaches to social problems.
I often say that when a problem event occurs, whether you call it a crime or an assault—regardless of the name given to it—the major problem is that a justice system will always consider it a transgression. There has been a transgression of a code. In fact, before that transgression, there are two things. There's often something that precedes a problem situation that will be characterized as a crime, so problems that precede that transgression. The transgression also creates consequences.
So if you want my opinion, a true justice system should focus upstream from the transgression. In fact, it is important to know why someone hits someone else on the head. We won't focus on the transgression, but rather on why it happened. Can we take action to prevent people from hitting each other and help people avoid doing that? The other thing is that hitting someone creates consequences. Can we address those consequences?
So a real system, whether we call it justice or something else, is a system that takes into account the people in the situation, and the transgression is ultimately secondary. I know it may shock some people to hear me say that, but the further I go into my work, the more I assert, and am very sure, that we have to get away from the idea of a transgression against social standards and deal with the people who are caught in these social problems in order to support them. So we have to develop a network of assistance and support.
Going back to the issue of violence in the aboriginal communities, having met a lot of people who were brought up within these dynamics, I can tell you that men and women need support. There's nothing worse than a justice system that, in any case, operates in a completely different manner. Marie-Pierre can give you a lot of examples, but, in my field, for example, the notion of guilt does not exist in the aboriginal languages. So how do you translate it in court? You ask whether the person did it or not; that's how you translate the notion of guilt.
So we have to completely change our ways of seeing things in order to reinforce the idea of accountability instead. For example, a person admits that he was involved in such and such an incident, that he was responsible for that, he admits it, and so on. People need support. They don't need to be sent to prison.
People obviously have to be protected. The problem is different in an urban environment, but, in the communities, there are in fact natural protection areas that can be used. There are very promising initiatives for taking charge of male assailants who have problems. The male assailants aren't very happy people. However, it takes courage, initiative and creativity, and we have to go off the beaten path.
In the third report I'm preparing, on the community of Kuujjuaq, I came across an idea that I very much like and that I want to share with you. This idea has been used a lot by the people who work in political science. They say the problem with institutional reforms that we try to make is that we suffer from path dependency syndrome. Pardon me, my English is terrible. This path dependency idea is very interesting. It means that, when we're in an institution or an organization—whether it be the justice system, politics or whatever—we are always, like a hamster, stuck on our wheel, and we think of reform not just in terms of the logic of our system, but also in terms of the history and path of our institution.
So we always adopt reforms consistent with that logic and we become dependent on our own organization and the weight of its history. What does that mean? We are all caught up in this path dependency: you, me, Ms. Bouquet and everyone. We're always on a pathway and we always think in terms of that pathway.
I'll give you the example of the research I conducted on Kuujjuaq, where I interviewed a person—