Law and disorder: What Bill C-10 could mean for Canada’s native people

by Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail, Friday, Feb. 17, 2012

By his own reckoning, John Findlay has spent 25 of the past 33 years in jail. He has gone in and out of prison since his first arrest at the age of 17 – mostly for petty property crimes, sometimes violent, often committed after he had been drinking.
He tells me in a soft voice that he’s a pretty tough guy. I believe him. There was the time he tried to wrench away a man’s laptop in the street, and ended up stabbing him three times with a penknife. The victim survived; Mr. Findlay spent six years in Joyceville penitentiary. Then he was back on the street, much as before, a bundle of anger and fear.
“I didn’t learn anything, being in prison all my life, except to hide my fear and deal with it through violence,” he says.