‘Risk’ and the Challenges in Moving Beyond Marginalizing Frameworks

Abstract

This chapter looks at the development and deployment of risk factor paradigms and uses examples from adult corrections and youth justice to explore the impacts on Indigenous and racialized peoples and communities. It draws attention to how risk analyses and resultant interventions use and embed, over time, a limited theoretical conception of criminality that entrenches historical inequalities through a deficit model of identity and culture that is conveyed along with these approaches. It considers how the concept of risk is used by states to define and reinscribe the identity of Indigenous peoples, racialized minorities, and marginalized youth as one that requires control and institutional intervention, an othering process that thereby continues the trajectory of colonialism and the further social marginalization of communities.