EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, November 23, 1995

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[English]

The Chairman: Perhaps we should start the meeting.

Today we continue with the review of the Young Offenders Act, phase II.

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Our witnesses are from the National Crime Prevention Council: Mr. Ross Hastings, president, and Joan Pennell, chair of the committee on youth.

You can make your presentation as you see fit. When you are done with whatever comments or presentation you have, there will be a period of questions and answers until 11 a.m., when we are due to shut this portion down and commence with the next portion. Please proceed.

Professor Ross Hastings (Chair, National Crime Prevention Council): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. What we'll do is divide our presentation in two. I'll speak for a couple of minutes about the council and its general orientation, and then Professor Pennell will speak about the council's brief on the Young Offenders Act and the youth justice system.

The council was created a little over a year ago. It's a body of 25 volunteers drawn from across the country, all of whom have two basic objectives. One is to provide advice to different levels of governments on the issue of prevention and on integrated strategies for the prevention of crime and victimization. The second is to serve as a resource to various communities at the regional or local level that wish to get involved in prevention-based activities.

We have two other members of the council with us today - Mrs. Priscilla de Villiers andMr. Neal Jessop - both of whom were on the youth justice committee that prepared this brief. And there are two members of the secretariat - the executive director, Mrs. Elaine Scott, and Ambrose Murphy, who coordinated the work of the committee from the secretariat's point of view.

I believe you all received a copy of this diagram from the clerk. I would like to point out that the basic orientation the council takes is to focus on crime prevention through social development. That, I realize, means a great many things to a great many people. The essence of the notion is that any meaningful and useful response to crime and victimization has to be comprehensive. The simple idea is that crime is an incredibly complicated phenomenon, and not surprisingly, the solution to crime is likely to be as complicated.

What you have in the diagram before you is an attempt to represent this in a schematic fashion. The basic idea of the diagram is that an individual getting involved in crime essentially has to cross a series of thresholds at which points decisions are made.

The first threshold is the one of motivation. The question here is whether or not an individual is willing to consider getting involved in crime. This links us up to issues of poverty, and especially with young people, a general sense of hope and hopelessness.

The second threshold is the threshold of being able to get involved in criminal activity. The essential issue here is opportunity. There's a whole range of strategies related to crime and prevention that focus on the strategies of either making a crime more difficult to commit or less rewarding, or of increasing the risk of being caught.

The third threshold focuses on internal controls. There are a lot of people who might be willing to consider criminal activity and who might have the opportunity or the ability to do so, but are constrained by what's basically the little voice of conscience, the sense of values or commitments they have. It's essential at this level that family and education play a key role.

The final threshold is the type of external controls that exist outside the individual, some of which are informal - basically community controls or peer groups - and some of which are more formal - basically the work of the criminal justice system.

In our view, the Young Offenders Act has to be considered a formal control. The basic idea of this diagram is to point out that an over-reliance on formal controls is almost too little and too late to be useful as a comprehensive solution to crime. We agree there's a role for those kinds of interventions, but they have to be imagined as part of a much broader package.

That's where I'll turn over the presentation to Mrs. Pennell, who will give you a sense of the council's orientation.

Professor Joan Pennell (Chair, Committee on Youth, National Crime Prevention Council): Thank you, Professor Hastings.

As chairperson of the youth justice committee, I want to thank all of you for getting in here on this snowy day. I want to express appreciation that you have asked us to appear before you to talk about our understanding of the youth justice system and also some of our thoughts on how to make it better.

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I would like to follow up on some of Ross's comments.

When you look at the youth justice system, it is crucial to place it within a social development perspective on how to reduce or prevent crime of young people.

I'd like to start with the words of a young person to whom, among others, the youth justice committee spoke in our consultations last spring and summer. It really speaks to what Professor Hastings was taking about in terms of the hopelessness and despair that can be the breeding-ground for the kinds of crimes that are of great concern to Canadians.

This was a young person in Montreal. He said:

You probably all have children, homes, cars, a good career. I can't imagine ever owning a home or being able to afford to raise children in the way that I want to. The idea of a career, or even a steady job, is beyond my wildest dreams.

It's precisely this kind of despair that sets young people at risk of becoming involved in crime. It is also exactly this kind of despair and frustration that a social development approach to crime prevention tackles head-on.

I'd also like to say from the outset that this review that you're carrying out is very timely and very important. As you are well aware - and we certainly are as well - Canadians have voiced and are voicing a lot of fears about youth crime and are really demanding strong corrective steps to address it.

We, as a council, agree that Canada must focus on what's happening with its children and its young people. For this very reason, in the first three years of our term of office we have taken on young people and children as our top priority.

To follow up further on Professor Hastings's comments, the stance of the council is that Canada can mount an effective and cost-efficient strategy to address crime if we take a big-picture look at the root causes of crime and the root solutions for stopping it.

If we take a very narrow focus that looks only at the wrongdoings of young people, or looks only at their rights, or looks only at their needs, then we're not going to have effective strategies. Instead, we need to zoom out and look at a whole range of partners or potential partners to make this a society in which young people, yes, have their rights but also are held accountable for their actions and are accorded opportunities not for crime - as Ross was speaking about - but to be productive and worthwhile citizens.

What a social development approach does is build constructive partnerships among young people, their families, their relatives, their communities, and various government departments - not just Justice - for finding ways to reduce youth crime before it ever gets started and before people get hurt by it.

It also means that in this approach you don't leave police, courts, correctional authorities on their own to try to figure out the solution. You don't take away the responsibility from young people, from their communities, but instead you focus on how all these different partners can work together and on each having an essential role to play as long as they have sufficient supports, resources, and input to carry it out.

It's really to this whole area that our brief has spoken in its 54 recommendations.

One of the things we also want to stress is that a social development approach is a way of getting outside of the endless cycle of enforcement, punishment, and incarceration that we get into. It's really a way of trying to make an integrated response to youth crime that can work.

It's a way of being proactive rather than reactive, and it also is a way of using wisely scarce public funds. Right now we're spending $10 billion in dealing with youth crime. Most of this is in the back end of the system, in the cycle of which I've talked.

Even though we're spending a great deal of money, we have overcrowded courts; we have police who are having a very difficult time in keeping up with all the calls they're getting; and we have overcrowded prisons and youth facilities. If we pay attention to prevention and intervention, we will have fewer problems with young people getting seriously involved in crime and with the justice system.

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I want to move on now to talk about the consultations the youth justice committee of the council carried out last spring and summer. We wanted to get a sense of what's happening across Canada with young people and identify effective strategies for crime prevention that use wisely our tax dollars.

We recognized that in order to do this we really needed to go out and talk to people. We carried out thirty consultations in six regions of the country. We made sure these were very diverse, different regions. We were in rural Prince Edward Island, downtown Toronto and Montreal, western Edmonton, Vancouver and also north into Whitehorse and the Yukon.

In these consultations we met with 100 young people, many of whom had been in trouble with the law or had family members who had been, and also with over 180 adults who worked with or on behalf of young people. These adults included a wide range of people. Almost sixty people were more or less within the justice system. These would be police, probation officers, youth correctional facility officers, court judges and others.

We also went to non-governmental organizations and had a very good representation there, including people from housing cooperatives, aboriginal programs, recreation and so on. We focused on what was happening with youths living on the street. We looked at schools, welfare and a whole range of programs.

In these discussions we had very honest and tough appraisals of what's happening in our communities. We heard about differences across Canada, but we also kept hearing recurring themes as well.

Out of these consultations we pulled together the recommendations we have provided to you. I'd like to point out that these recommendations were endorsed by the council as a whole, and they come from the wisdom of a group that included very diverse people from very different backgrounds. We have on the council victims' advocates, people who support inmates, law enforcement, alternative schools, aboriginal justice and so on. These are recommendations that the council as a whole endorsed.

At this point I'll condense some of the main points in the council's brief. I understand you have copies of it. We also sent one sheet that would have had recommendation 53 slightly modified.

As I said, I'll do a condensed version of this, but in the following question and answer period we'll be happy to expand on it.

First, the council recommends that in the phase II review there be a real focus on crime prevention through social development and that ways be found to translate this kind of emphasis into concrete action.

We would like to point out that in the Young Offenders Act and in Bill C-37, particularly in paragraph 3(1)(a), there is an encouragement of crime prevention. That paragraph particularly takes what we would call a social development approach in that it wants to get at the underlying causes of crime and it also wants to advance a multidisciplinary approach. These are sound principles and they should be implemented.

Second, the council believes it's the administration of the Young Offenders Act more than the act itself that requires reform. This came out repeatedly in the consultations we carried out across the country. People were pointing out to us over and over again that the Young Offenders Act is being interpreted and administered in different ways across the country.

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We recognize there are different provincial jurisdictions on this, but they were also saying - and they were particularly talking about the alternative measures program - that there's a real need to clarify principles in terms of this program, find ways to increase community involvement and also to extend alternative measures to encompass not just first-time offenders but also low-risk, who may have had more than one charge against them.

Third, the council supports efforts to expand the responsibility for community safety beyond the justice system. This means holding young people accountable, affirming the responsibility of parents and other caregivers for young people, and encouraging the involvement of extended family and community members. In Canada we have a number of very positive initiatives in this regard, such as circle sentencing, youth justice committees and mediation.

I would like to talk about one particular approach, that of family group conferencing, which I have been personally involved with in my own province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We tested this approach in an urban setting, a rural area and an Inuit community.

At the conference, we bring together the family - we've used it in the area of family violence - in which the violence has taken place with their extended family and with community supports to work out a plan for addressing the issues. I should note that the plans have to be approved by referring agencies, such as child welfare, parole, and so on.

At these conferences, we have found that families are tough on offenders. One offender at a conference said:

This was very emotional and stressful for me. Just facing all family members was very hard on me, but I found it very helpful.

To quote a parole officer from another conference:

The offender handled it pretty good. Initially, he was frightened to death. It was new for him to be taken to task and held accountable for what he had done over the years, and keep in mind that this is an individual who had been charged, convicted, incarcerated for the crimes that he had committed. But where it really impacted on him was when he had to face his family. He had to look at his father, his mother. He had to hear a statement from this child about the impact of what he had done, and when that happened it really registered, finally, what had happened.

I would like to also note that the plans family and friends come up with are not soft on offenders. They come up with plans that really hold them accountable and they can do this because they really know the offender and his or her history, and they know plans that can really work out.

Because I know a number of you are from different provinces, I will just note that this approach has been passed into legislation in British Columbia, and we are involved in terms of providing consultation for its testing in Alberta.

Fourth, the council supports the creation of partnerships among young people, those who have been victimized, families and relatives, community organizations and government departments, to stop youthful crime and protect the community.

To do this the different parties need to have clear roles and resources. This also means that justice workers need to have the necessary training for carrying it out so they can exercise discretionary powers in a responsive and constructive manner. It means giving victims information on what's happening and giving them the right to make impact statements. It means keeping parents informed so they know what's going on.

For our fifth and final main point we recommend that the resources of the youth justice system be focused primarily on young people who have committed serious or repeated crimes, and as much as possible families and community programs should be used to respond to young people who commit single or occasional minor offences.

We think this is the most effective way of using our legal system so it's not overloaded and so it can also handle more appropriately the cases that do come before it, to really attend to the individual situations and to set up measures to ensure that all young people are treated fairly, whatever their incomes, cultures, literacy or race.

In conclusion, we wish to stress that Canada needs to bring the full force of law enforcement and corrections to bear on serious offenders. This is to protect the public. It's also to make sure that these young people get the kind of treatment and re-education and reintegration they need for leaving custody.

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Secondly, we wish to stress that there is a real need to create a responsive system in which resources are placed at the front end before young people become seriously involved in crime.

In our future work as a council, we'll be fleshing out our vision of what is a social development approach, and we'll be looking at a range of alternatives and what they require in terms of material and human resources.

I'd just like to end by wishing you well in your future work. I think these are very important hearings you're carrying out.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

We'll start the first round of questioning with Madame Venne for ten minutes.

[Translation]

Ms. Venne (Saint-Hubert): Ms. Pennell, Mr. Hastings, in your recommendation number 18, you recommend that police and probation officers take a comprehensive course on the Young Offenders Act to become more familiar with the changes made as a result of Bill C-37 being adopted.

I would like to know whether the amendments we made through this bill were warranted, especially the provision to have 15 and 16 year-olds tried in adult court.

I would just like to have your general impression.

Mr. Hastings: I am a little hesitant because the question is two fold. Our recommendation reflects frequent comments made about the use of police officers' discretionary power when dealing with young offenders, and especially when dealing with young victims.

The problem is that many of the legal decisions are made by police officers at the very beginning of the process and not all officers exercise their authority in the same manner. As far as the young offender is concerned, the system is not fair and balanced. Many young offenders therefore find it difficult to understand the meaning of police intervention.

The council's position is that the Young Offenders Act and the amendements made to it through Bill C-37 are but a small part of the solution. We would have preferred to see the process reversed and we think more attention should have been paid to that at the beginning of the process rather than now.

As for the 16 and 17 year-olds, the council is somewhat divided on that issue. If the crime is serious, we have no objection to the benefit of the doubt being granted in favour of community protection.

Ms. Venne: Fine. The Justice Department ordered a study on public perception of youth crime. It found that Canadians had a very poor opinion of the Young Offenders Act, that they were not very knowledgeable about its provisions and impact, and that they did not understand the principles behind it. At any rate, they were against it.

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Is that what you have found? Have you found that the public does not understand the Young Offenders Act, that it is not familiar with it? Have you found that as well?

Mr. Hastings: That is a multiple choice question. People have a hard time understanding the punitive impact of the Young Offenders Act. Several surveys and studies have clearly shown that the public underestimates its impact. People think there are far fewer young people going to jail than there really are.

The irony of this departure from the 1980s, changing the Juvenile Delinquent Act to the Young Offenders Act, is that the original intent was to send fewer young people to prison by creating community based options. What happened, though, is that provinces held the legislation hostage to federal, provincial and territorial negotiations on funding allocations, and as a result, community options were often not implemented or were so poorly implemented that they were just a sham.

The tangible result of this has been that most judges who make the ruling are given options on paper in the legislation, but these options are not realistically feasable. That is why we are more punitive than necessary. I think the public is very concerned about crime in general and especially about youth crime. I do, however, think that lessons can be learned from the Quebec experience.

Several surveys have shown that Quebec is by far the most progressive province in terms of dealing with young offenders and providing community-based options. It is also the province with the least amount of fear of youth crime.

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Ramsay, ten minutes.

Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for your presentation this morning. I read a story a long time ago in which a stranger came into the community and was so impressed with the peaceful coexistence that existed there that he asked one of the leaders, ``How is it that you're able to govern your people so well?'' That leader replied, ``We teach our people proper principles and then allow them to govern themselves.''

Mr. Hastings, I agree with your statement that there is an over-reliance on the formal control, which of course is the justice system. I agree with that. So I would ask you whether you feel that in the area of prevention - crime prevention, particularly dealing with youth - you should be talking to a different branch of government. Why are we addressing programs or urging upon the justice system programs that the justice system ought not to have anything to do with? Why are we making it more complex? The justice system should not be responsible for directing programs or resources to deal with dysfunctional families. That is the responsibility of other programs. So why do we make something that is fairly straightforward as complex as you referred to? I agree that it is complex, but I don't think it need be complex. I think it's complex because we have attempted to create a dual kind of beast out of the justice system - part justice and part social welfare - and it's doing neither job very well. Do you have any comments on those observations?

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Prof. Hastings: Yes. I'd like Professor Pennell to speak about this after, but my immediate reaction is that the council would agree with you. If we were doing some important things right at the front through family supports and education, the justice system probably wouldn't have to be doing this work later.

I would like to point out that the other main committee on the council is actually working very hard right now to develop a position on the implications of prevention for children from the prenatal stage up to the age of six years. It's our conviction that a lot of what happens in families and in the preschool age at that point is fundamental to later involvement in criminality and prevention.

The practical problem, though, is that in our day and age with overriding concerns for budgets, deficits, and fiscal crises, and with the subsequent cutbacks in a lot of the other key institutions, the role of the justice system has changed fundamentally over a generation, and it's now being asked to take on work that quite simply was left to other groups before. But those groups have gone.

The healthy orientation we could take is not to think of justice as a punitive approach, but to think of it as an early warning system for social problems and as a way of alerting ourselves to the kinds of interventions we need to shore up earlier.

Mr. Ramsay: I feel the justice system should be an isolated system. It should be the last program of government to protect society, and it should not be involved as you've indicated it has become involved. I think maybe that causes some of our problems.

The budget of the justice department ought not to be directed into these programs. Those programs ought to have budgets of their own so that we keep the two functions separate.

When we begin to mix the functions of those programs with the justice program, I think that's when we get the complexity and that's why things seem complex and difficult to deal with. There's no question that inasmuch as we're able to strengthen the family, we will reduce crime - not only juvenile crime, but adult crime as well.

But it's not the job of the justice system to strengthen families. It's the job of the justice system to protect society against those who have come up through their parenting, the school system, the religious system, a community program they might have been involved in, or whatever it might be and failed to embrace the rule of law because they saw no benefit in it to them. It is those people who, when they create an offence and threaten society, must be dealt with by this final system to protect society.

Yes, that system must bear in mind the protection of society: number one, the deterrent effect and, of course, rehabilitation. But I'm suggesting that, over the generation you referred to, in which the role of the justice system has changed, the traditional role of the justice system has been altered, if not destroyed at least partially. I for one would like to get back to where, yes, the justice system has a role to play, but don't expect it to do something it's not designed to do, and don't try to change it to do what it was never meant to do and is not capable of doing.

Prof. Hastings: Well, we would in essence probably agree with you, but I think our perspectives are starting at different points.

My understanding of the justice system as a formal set of entities is that it spends an extraordinarily small proportion of its moneys on what we would call prevention programs or preventative kinds of interventions. Of the $10 billion, probably less than 1% is actually crime prevention money.

The concern of the council is not to reform the criminal justice system in particular; the concern of the council is to create a system that would provide justice in a more general sense for young people. We clearly see that as a network of institutions.

In simple terms, if the police and the courts have to get involved, we should think of that as a clear indication of failures earlier on and address it that way.

The problem you have is that when you try to do these kinds of things, it becomes very difficult for bureaucracies to adjust to new problems.

Mr. Ramsay: Why?

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Prof. Hastings: I think bureaucracies tend to insist, for good human reasons and for good organizational reasons, that the problems fit their logics. What you don't end up having, in the specific case of young people, is an organized framework that says what young people need. What you have is a series of institutions that say, ``We're the police and here's what we're willing or able to do''; and ``We're the courts and here's what we're able to do''; and ``We're the correction system and here's what we're able to do''. The child gets transformed and turned around at each level, and I think this is even more important for kids who are victims than it is for kids who are offenders.

Mr. Ramsay: Do you believe that within the rationale of these groups expressing themselves in this way there also is the reluctance to give up the protection of their own vested interest?

Prof. Hastings: As institutions, yes, but I think the more important message comes when you talk to police officers and judges and youth workers. The vast majority - almost all of the people I've ever spoken to - are people of goodwill who are trying very hard to do the best jobs they can do. But I think there's a real gap in the kinds of leadership provided by government and from senior officials when it comes to defining what the objectives and purposes of those jobs are, and what kinds of rewards and supports will be put in place to do them. What you have instead are police officers trained to deal with kids as offenders, not as children. Courts basically deal with kids as cases as opposed to part of a network of families and communities that have problems. And the correction system basically processes kids through to the end of their sanctions so that it can just turn them over and do the next child.

Mr. Ramsay: If we could remove the cause of crime, we would eliminate the need for the growth of many of the institutions within the justice system. Do you feel there is a sufficient will within those institutions to not only stop the growth of their institutions and reduce or maintain their levels of budgets but also to reduce the size of their institutions by eliminating the need for their existence through the reduction of crime?

Prof. Hastings: Yes.

Mr. Ramsay: Is it strong enough?

Prof. Hastings: Yes.

Mr. Ramsay: Where do you see it emerging?

Prof. Hastings: Most of my work is in the area of policing, and especially community policing. Most of my experience has been that the more police officers you talk to, the more of them will tell you that the best work they've ever done isn't law enforcement work in the pure sense of the word, but it is work that is essentially problem-oriented, human-based work. I think what's missing is not a concern among the people in these institutions, but a vision and a leadership around that vision in terms of how we could reorganize the network of institutions in a more effective way.

Mr. Ramsay: I've had the same experiences with front-line police officers. In fact, I was one for a number of years. Do you find that feeling is reflected up the line?

Prof. Hastings: Yes.

Mr. Ramsay: To the top?

Prof. Hastings: Yes, although you're asking me to comment on 450 chiefs of police across Canada and I obviously can't tell you they would speak with one voice. However, I am encouraged by the number of senior police executives, in my experience, who are struggling very hard to re-think the role of the police in a broader framework of institutions. Quite frankly, though, they are not getting much support because basically what governments have done is used the police for a dumping ground for all the problems they've been unwilling to solve elsewhere.

Mr. Ramsay: We'll come back to this. Thank you.

Mrs. Barnes (London West): I would like to extend a very heartfelt welcome to the National Crime Prevention Council. I think the work you've already done will help us; I see a very good basis of recommendations that I think we should heed. I also hope that as you continue to do your work, you will keep us updated on it. I know you will.

I wish we had the facilities cited in the Horner report from a prior government so that we could put even more money into your program, because I think it's necessary. I love the interdisciplinary, preventive approach. What I see you have done, and maybe we should be doing more of this, is on pages 19 and 20: you seem to have consulted the youth.

When we speak on these laws, very clearly the federal government has criminal justice jurisdiction. What we have now is the federal government giving most of its money in criminal justice dollars to the provinces, who go and spend it on custody, which we know is not working. I think we around this table have a major challenge to do the things we now believe will work. I think you've identified and listed those fora, and you've also identified the players in the community who have to implement, who have to be educated, and who have to know the facts as we know them, or can know them if we read the materials.

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When it comes to talking to youth, there's theory and there's reality. I have three children, aged seven, twelve and thirteen. With my twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, I remember when I was their age and I thought bell-bottom pants were the big thing. I went out and wore bell-bottom pants because my friends did. My son called me the other night, saying he wanted to dye his hair turquoise because his friend had dyed his hair turquoise.

What I'm reading in here says:

Many youths said that they have been victims of public or police disapproval just because they are young. They explained that a group of young people getting together in the park or browsing in a shopping mall will attract negative attention from police and/or from the general public. However, adults engaged in similar activities would not attract police or public attention.

As adults, I think we do tend not to hear the very real complaints of youth. We trivialize their concerns, and do not want to understand - and you address it on your next page - the sense of hopelessness and lack of involvement in society, the feeling that they'll never do as well as their parents, that they'll never have a house, that they won't get a job. It's all of these things.

Even though it's not, in Mr. Ramsay's opinion, part of our job as a criminal justice system...why do we even talk about these things? But this is our job in the sense that how we deal with the end product of an occurrence, the sentencing part of the justice system, is in our control. It's through negotiation with the various provinces and through using the finance lever when we get to the stage of a mutual understanding that we can see some pathway to a future in which it will improve.

Criminal charges, which are really what the statistics are based on - the charges and not the convictions - skewer the discussion to a certain extent. What we really have to consider is that we are dealing with younger, developing human beings we can turn around if we put the right resources at their disposal. The right resources don't always come in the form of a trial. The right resources don't always come with the policeman, either, but they can if we get into community policing, they can if we get into the schools, and they can if we get into the probation and the parole.

I want to hear first about how you talk to youth, but you have also made a suggestion on page 23 that I found interesting. You wanted to involve representatives of the corporate sector to coordinate a plan of funding. I'd like to hear what you have to say on that, because it's an innovative thought. Instead of going through endless rehashing of the complaints about the system, I think I'd like this discussion to focus on where you have seemed to be going on the problem solving.

I've said my piece; please say yours.

Prof. Pennell: Just to comment on how we spoke with the young people, we made sure we had a setting in which they were prepared to speak to us, one that wasn't a surprise to them. Usually we worked through youth organizations that explained to the young people what we wanted to do. We got their consent to come in. We didn't come in as a whole committee. Instead there would usually be about two council members there, plus a secretariat staff member. We would buy them pizza or their favourite food of the day, and we would just sit around in an informal setting - their kind of place, not an office building - in order that they could really share their experiences. We talked with young people who were in open custody; we talked with young people who had been involved in various kinds of recreational programs; we talked to the whole range of them.

What we tried to do in these fora was let them know we wanted to hear what they had to say. We wanted to assure them we were going to hold what they had to say in confidence, and we also asked them for input on the best way in which we could speak with them.

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What they said to us was that they really needed to know that we cared about what they had to say and that we were going to be presenting it to this committee. It was very important to them that they would be heard by the politicians. That was one of the reasons I made sure that in my presentation today I started with a quote from a young person.

To go on to the other part of your question, about the corporate sector, what we are very interested in is the hopelessness that so many young people feel in terms of the lack of jobs. We recognize that's an area that needs to be developed a whole lot further in terms of how local businesses can be involved, in terms of job creation, and also in terms of alternatives on measures for young people. That's an area we're going to be looking at further. Thank you for raising it.

Mrs. Barnes: I like the distinction you make between wilderness camps with treatment components and boot camps. Could you please give me a further elaboration?

Prof. Pennell: As some of you are probably aware, there are boot camps in Manitoba. This is also a program that Ontario is looking into developing.

The United States has had extensive experience with boot camps. What has been learned from that experience is that if they take the military-style boot camp, where you keep young people in a very intensive program where they're very disciplined and marching along, that tends not to have any positive consequences later in terms of recidivism. However, if you build into the boot camp intensive work around treatment and education that will help them, that is helpful. As well, what is really crucial is that there be follow-up after the boot camp, and that seems to be the particularly crucial variable in terms of there being any kind of positive outcome.

Mrs. Barnes: On page 8, number 5, you have listed a range of options: family group conferencing; youth justice committees; circle sentencing; work apprenticeship programs; alternate education; and community-based diversion and prevention programs. This is where you see our alternate measures going. Is that correct?

Prof. Pennell: Yes, we would see those as alternative measures. It would also be a way of really carrying out what we talked about, the partnership approach, where you're not having the justice department take on what it shouldn't take on, but you're also not having the justice department be in isolation from the wisdom that families and communities can offer. These are means of doing that.

Mrs. Barnes: So are you talking about diversion before it gets to the courtroom, as Quebec does currently, or going through some sort of screening process at the courtroom level and then diverting it out for sentencing? I'm asking this because the fact of the courtroom alone causes a major problem with delays and a lot of the feelings that youth, parents, and the public have about the wrist slapping and the so-called joke of the system.

Prof. Pennell: What we are emphasizing is that diversion or alternative measures be seen in a very broad, flexible way that would encompass all you're talking about. But we could use a lot more creativity in how we are developing alternative measures. We want to do it before any kind of charging or once young people are involved in the court system, and we need to really look at creative ways of using this.

There are a lot of programs that have been tried out in Canada but have not officially been called alternative measures programs. Therefore, they are not receiving the kind of funding they need to keep going.

Mrs. Barnes: In your work, are you dealing with creating a listing of best practice models or just a pure listing of what's going on across this country? If you have that, I'm sure our Justice people have it also, but if you're getting that, could you continuously send that to this committee?

Prof. Pennell: We would be very happy to do that. In fact, I have written a report on our consultations, and it's available to you. Those consultations really develop a constellation of kinds of programs that need to be brought together to respond to a whole range of community needs.

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One of the things we're stressing is you can't assume that certain best practices will work in Edmonton as well as St. John's. They need to come out of the community context.

The Chairman: Madame Venne.

[Translation]

Ms. Venne: Under the Young Offenders Act, two different dates can be used to calculate the duration of the detention depending on whether the youth was tried in adult court or in youth court.

Let me describe a most preposterous situation. If a 15-year old is found guilty of first-degree murder, he is eligible for parole after serving five years of his sentence, if he is tried in adult court under the Criminal Code. If that same 15-year old were tried in youth court, he would have to serve six years before being eligible for parole. Obviously it would be in the youth's best interest to be tried in adult court in such a case.

What do you think of that?

Mr. Hastings: That's absurd!

Ms. Venne: Fine. That's all.

[English]

The Chairman: Mr. Knutson.

Mr. Knutson (Elgin - Norfolk): You mention in here there's nothing particularly wrong with the act, it's the administration of the act. Let me ask a question from the perspective of an Ontario member of Parliament, since most of my knowledge comes from the situation in Ontario.

If the Harris government seems to be determined to try the punishment boot camp and is not ready to buy into funding community measures, intensive counselling or programs in the community, what would your recommendation be to us at that point?

Prof. Pennell: It already has been suggested here today that we should really look at the kind of programs the federal government is willing to fund and the principles around them. I think it's particularly these principles that need to be emphasized.

The other part is public education. We should be very clear that punishment approaches by themselves just don't work and are not going to be effective.

Mr. Knutson: So you would say if a province isn't ready to buy into the principles of the act we should just act unilaterally, set up our own alternative measure schemes, and fund and administer them ourselves. Is that fair?

Prof. Pennell: I think that's really a decision I would have to leave this group to make, in terms of what is possible under the legislation.

Prof. Hastings: I'll make just one supplementary comment to that. It was raised, I believe, by Mrs. Barnes in her comments about best practices.

We're starting to learn a great deal about certain kinds of programs that do work under certain kinds of circumstances. I think one of the most effective things the federal government could do is publicize those programs more effectively. It would be a way of holding provinces accountable for their refusal to go in that direction. It would also be a way of holding provinces accountable for spending an inordinately large amount of public dollars on programs that have been proven to fail.

Mr. Knutson: That's fair enough.

Your research indicated which programs work and which ones don't. Generally, all the witnesses who have come have said that for the amount of resources we put into custody, it doesn't work. It tends to be more community-based programming that works.

I was wondering, more specifically, if you had any comments on what works in dealing with sex offenders.

Prof. Pennell: Yes, I do have comments on that.

In terms of sex offenders, we have to keep in mind they're usually incarcerated for only a period of time, and we really need to think about what happens when they come out. Again, I'll speak to my experience with family group conferencing, which included very serious cases of sex offences.

.1030

What was found to be really important was to build up a community system of policing sex offenders. In this case it was publishing the person's name, not to the whole community but to those who really knew about this person. They were brought in through the family friendship network to figure out a plan.

The parole officers have said this is the most effective means they've ever found for dealing with the situation, because for once they actually have a whole community that knows about this person, cares about what is happening to the victims and the offender, and by the consent of the offender is giving reports back to the parole officer on what to do.

Mr. Knutson: Where is this?

Prof. Pennell: This is in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Mr. Knutson: Maybe we could get some more details.

Prof. Pennell: Certainly. In fact, I do have the report with me if you'd like me to give that to the chairman.

Mr. Knutson: I would.

The Chairman: Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. Ramsay: I'm interested in what works. We've heard some very interesting things that appear to work, such as the sentencing circles and healing circles in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I also know that if you reduce the degree of alcohol abuse in a community, you reduce crime. I know that from my own experiences.

Why does this committee hear so little about that from organizations such as yours when they appear? Why do we not hear from groups such as yours that spend a lot of time putting briefs together for us to consider? Why aren't you addressing one of the main causative or contributing factors to not only child abuse but also crime in general? It contributes to sexual immorality, which causes the family to disintegrate. Why do you not address that single most prominent factor in the contribution to crime?

Prof. Pennell: We discuss this in our brief and in our report as well. We focus on it first by identifying that the family context and the community context in which young people grow up really affect what's going to happen to them. The other recognition we give to it very clearly is that young people - and there are many young people who have addiction problems - need treatment for this. Unless they're receiving that treatment it will just continue. Incarceration is not necessarily the solution to that unless treatment goes with it.

The other part - and I say this from having worked with some aboriginal communities and rural areas - is that if you're looking at alcoholism that is very pervasive throughout a whole community, supports really need to be given to that community to address those issues itself. It doesn't work if outsiders come in and say, this is what you need to clean up your act. If it can go through those kinds of healing processes, we've seen some very excellent examples of the results of that within Canada that offer us all models.

Mr. Ramsay: Let me be more specific. I served in the Mounted Police for a number of years. During that period of time I saw the extension of liquor outlets' hours of opening. We knew about and saw through statistics the increase of incidences as those liquor outlets stayed open until 8 p.m., then 10 p.m., then 12 a.m. and then 2 a.m. But we were never allowed to express our opinion that if the government was going to pass legislation allowing those liquor outlets to stay open longer, then it had better be prepared to deal with the consequences - perhaps more manpower for us and greater facilities to deal with those kinds of incidences, extending into the family home.

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Why do we not hear organizations, such as police forces and your organization, saying that if we could reduce the degree of alcohol consumption and abuse, we would see a direct correlation in the reduction of these kinds of criminal incidents, including the disintegration of the family, which brings about so many youth offences? Why aren't we seeing that from your organization, the police forces, and so on?

What we've seen instead is that the drive to reduce impaired driving isn't to reduce the number of hours that these outlets are open - and every policeman worth his salt knows that. We're hearing instead, ``Well, we'll set up check stops'' - which means more manpower, more equipment, and a greater drain on the budget that's available.

Although it might be in your brief, why didn't we hear that from you in your presentation today? I would have given you a much higher mark if you had touched upon that very serious factor contributing to crime.

Prof. Pennell: As a professor, I'm going to have to share this story with my students when I go back. I appreciate your comments and feedback.

Prof. Hastings: One other comment in response to this is that, while I agree with you that alcohol is a cause of a lot of abuse and of a lot of problems, it might be more useful to see alcohol as one of the other effects of a general sense of hopelessness and of despair and of a lack of meaning in lives and that the very solutions that are likely to help us prevent crime are also likely to help us prevent alcohol abuse.

Mr. Wells (South Shore): I'm going to address some of the issues you're talking about.

There are two schools of thought on the responsibility of parents. One is to hold the parents responsible, either criminally or civilly, for the acts of their children. You seem to take a different approach, having the parents work within the justice system. Could you go over some of your reasons?

First, do you feel that parents should be held criminally responsible for the acts of their children in the context of young offenders? If not, why not? From your brief I get the sense that you don't support that view.

Prof. Pennell: As a council we have not taken the position that parents should be held criminally responsible for the acts of the young people. We do take the position, though, that the responsibility of parents needs to be emphasized and rather than isolating parents.... Often they do not have information on what is going on in terms of police investigations, courts, incarceration, or release time around young people, and they need to be brought in on this.

We raise the caution on this that there are parents who can be very abusive of their children. There are good reasons why many young people run away from their parents or seek refuge elsewhere. So, in proceeding with parental responsibility and involvement, we have to take a close look at the family situation.

The other part - and I say this out of experience as a social worker - is that with families that are going through a great deal of difficulty, I find that often they know what needs to happen in order to make sure that their young people will stay out of trouble, but they don't know how to carry it out and they don't have the resources to carry it out. They have a lot of knowledge and wisdom, even though they themselves might be dealing with alcoholism or violence in their own lives.

So part of what needs to be set up is really a support education system to make it possible for them to take on their responsibility in a solid way.

Also out of my experience - and this comes out of the consultations too - if we just go around blaming parents for the wrongdoings of their young people, one, it gets the young people off the hook for what they've done and they cannot be held accountable in the same way, and the second piece is that particularly fathers will just take off. They won't stay involved if there's a blaming approach. Then mothers become very depressed and it's all the more difficult for them to take charge. So it's really a matter of building in resources and input and knowledge so that they can do this.

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Mr. Wells: Would there be any circumstances where you would hold the parent criminally responsible?

Prof. Hastings: I think the position would be that parental responsibility for somebody else's actions isn't a particularly useful strategy. It would be hard in a court of law to come up with rules of evidence that would be convincing.

There are many cases where parents are acting criminally in terms of abuse or a failure to fulfil responsibility, and perhaps that could be pursued more aggressively. There are also circumstances where administratively we haven't held, for instance, men accountable for support payments adequately in a way that is very consequential to families.

Mr. Wells: Thank you.

I would make the comment that in reading your brief, the areas of the responsibility of parents has been very helpful to me in focusing in on some of the questions that are pertinent in today's discussion, and I thank you for it.

Prof. Hastings: Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Wells.

Madame Venne.

[Translation]

Ms. Venne: No, I'll pass this time. Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Gallaway (Sarnia - Lambton): I wanted to ask if you would recommend a return to prohibition, but I won't.

I want to discuss two of your recommendations. First, there is number 20 on page 16, where you recommend that this committee deal with the National Judicial Institute:

...to initiate discussion groups with judges to explore different possible models for responding to concerns raised by other justice system professionals and/or members of the public regarding the judgments of individual judges.

I wonder if you could explain that just briefly.

Prof. Pennell: In our consultations, there were numerous times when there would be statements made by young people or by the adults working with them that the kinds of sentences judges were coming up with weren't making sense.

I remember one young person who talked about how when he committed a minor offence - I think it was shoplifting - he had to wait about a year to get into court. He received three months for that. Then when he later tried to stab someone, he again received three months. It just didn't make any sense to him why he should get the same kind of punishment for doing what he sees as very different acts in terms of their seriousness.

What we also were hearing about was lawyers judge-shopping, going from judge to judge to try to get the best kind of decision they could.

Mr. Gallaway: In regard to the degree in support in terms of the assessment of young people before sentencing and in regard to generally the level of professionals who are support workers within the court, do you find it surprising that judges appear to make decisions on a regular basis where the punishment doesn't fit the crime?

Prof. Pennell: No, it doesn't surprise me. I think there are a lot of reasons for it. Some of it is the overload. Some of it also is the very narrow way in which provinces have implemented the Young Offenders Act, not thinking about how they can more broadly respond to it. Therefore, within provinces - and I know this is very true for my own province, which does have a lack in terms of resources - there are very limited options for judges as well.

As well, what I have found in my experience with the court system is there tends to be fads - I don't know if the word is right - or times when some kinds of measures are more popular than others. It doesn't seem to always fit with what's going on in young people's lives.

Mr. Gallaway: One of the other recommendations on page 7 talks about alternative measures. First, you recommend that we clarify the types of offences.

We've had very broad and in some ways philosophical discussions and recommendations made here this morning. At the same time, we appear to be applying the same types of philosophical approach to these young offenders notwithstanding the type of crime that might have occurred. You've mentioned the theft of the chocolate bar versus the stabbing.

Where do we sift out the differences? In other words, the child who has stolen the chocolate bar is, according to the witnesses we had yesterday, unlikely to reoffend, whereas the person who has stabbed someone has progressed along the line.

Where do we start drawing the line in terms of vetting these one-time...and I don't want to call them ``insignificant'' offenders, but low on the level of perhaps an indiscretion as opposed to a criminal act. Where do we start straining them out of the system?

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Prof. Pennell: One of the areas where we do it is right at the police level, in terms of them having increased discretion around charging. What we also need to do, far more than we are, is have programs that may not necessarily be addressing young people's criminality but giving them really other kinds of options.

The other kind of thing that I found really positive is an initiative by young people where they are giving education to each other on vandalism, shoplifting and so on. That's the kind of thing that really gets through.

So a lot should be happening before there is any kind of charging. Once people are charged, though, we need to be looking far more at alternative measures.

One of the things we were hearing, particularly in Edmonton, because there was a fair representation of aboriginal people, is that many young people on the reserves will be somehow or other involved with charges. It means, though, that when they leave the reserve and come into the city, they already have a charge against them, and therefore they are not eligible for the alternative measures program. What we find is a systemic racism that has a very high under-representation of aboriginal and other minority youths in alternative measures.

The Chairman: Mr. Ramsay, five minutes.

Mr. Ramsay: I don't know what Mr. Gallaway really meant by the comment about prohibition, but to ignore the consequences of the abuse of alcohol, and the contribution it has to crime, I think is to overlook the cause. If we don't look at the cause of crime, and bring about a change in the cause of crime - and I understand that alcohol abuse is a result of a deeper problem as well - if we don't look at those problems, then we're like firemen directing our water at the flames and not at the cause, and the flames will be there until the cause is consumed.

I would like to ask you - and I invite comments from either one of you - a question on youth crime; it has to do with their sense of justice. I have often thought from my experiences with children, my own children, and children who come in contact with the justice system, that their sense of justice has been altered, and has been altered because they had not received from their parents the adequate love, attention and care, whether it was for their physical needs, emotional needs, their spiritual needs or whatever. Because they had not received the fulfilment of those needs as children, they saw no reason to obey the rules of the house, because it was drawing to them no benefit. Of course, this simply moved as they grew older into the larger society. They could see no reason or no benefit to obey the rules and the laws.

In other words, they could teach them proper principles but they would not be governed by those principles because they saw no benefit that would derive to themselves from obeying those principles. I have found that in many of the young people I came in contact with, as well as my own experiences with our four children, this was a factor in the deviant behaviour.

Would you care to comment on that?

.1050

Prof. Pennell: As a council we have really taken the stance that what happens between the ages of prenatal to 5 years old really makes a difference in terms of what's going to happen in the future. That group really needs to be looked at. If they do have the proper care, not just from family but also from community, it makes a big difference as to what's going to happen in terms of crime rates later.

Speaking as the mother of three - two are teenagers and one is on the way to it - I really think there's a great deal that parents can do for children. But I'm also very aware of the power of the peer culture around young people. We cannot simply say these are things that parents are doing wrong. We have to pay attention to the whole community.

To go back, there was earlier questioning about where the corporate sector gets involved; I think that makes a big difference. I come from a province where there are incredibly high rates of unemployment, incredibly large rates of exodus from the province of young people, because there are not jobs, and those who stay there face a great deal of boredom. They really want to work, but work's not available. All these things play into what's happening in terms of criminality.

Prof. Hastings: Could I just make one brief comment in addition to that? One of the messages that came out of our consultations again and again and again is that young people, especially the adolescents and teenagers, don't have a sense of hope that they'll have a meaningful role to play. This came out in part about their expectations of the future in terms of jobs and careers and homes, but also in a very immediate way about their right and their ability to be part of their community in a meaningful way, to give something back, and to be valued.

I think this is perhaps where we want to be careful about how much responsibility we place on parents. In certain communities there are no jobs and there is no hope for jobs, and the best parents in the world can't create jobs. They can only create a sense of maybe how to better cope. I think it gets back to the point you made at the very beginning: unless we address this as a society, we're going to fail as a justice system.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. DeVillers.

Mr. DeVillers (Simcoe North): Thank you, Mr. Chair. As a lowly associate member of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity for a question.

I realize your focus is on prevention, but on page 8 and 9 of your brief you do deal with what's described there as the groundswell of opinion that young people are not held responsible for their actions, and get into the punitive measures that people are looking for in terms of the Young Offenders Act.

I was just wondering if you would care to comment on what you see as the role of the punitive. I had an exchange with a constituent on sentencing generally, and I was suggesting that what this individual was looking for was revenge. He corrected me and said no, he was looking for retribution. I find them all along the same lines, that element of the traditional component of the sentencing process. I'm just wondering what your view is of the role of the punitive or retribution in sentencing in the case of young offenders, as opposed to sentencing in general.

Prof. Pennell: To speak first about the issue of public perception, I've been on a fair number of talk shows by now in different parts of the country, hearing what people's views are. Often people will start off by saying that the solution is Singapore-style whipping. What I find, though, is that when we actually start engaging in dialogue, people don't have these clear-cut solutions, and they're not really totally focused on simple retribution. What they're really feeling is the loss in terms of having been a community that is able to deal with their young people, and now feeling it's out of hand.

So when I start discussing with them what are the things that worked in the past and what are the things that you found have worked, what you find is really a concern about the young people, not a focus on punishment, but instead on what can be done to solve problems on this. What is very important for communities to hear is that, as a National Crime Prevention Council representative, I'm really listening to some of the solutions they have. Once they feel heard, the whole stance they're taking really starts to shift. It's much richer and much more informed than just saying, okay, let's punish and that's the only solution. People really know a lot more than that.

.1055

At the council what's important for us to do...and this is what we have been doing. We have a fair number of publications, but we also have individual members meeting with different groups. This is a way of being able to share the information we are hearing.

Having just spoken at the citizen's group on crime prevention in my own province, what I'm hearing is that people are really looking for national direction so that they don't become stagnant in their own approaches.

Prof. Hastings: There's another quick point we can make. One of the things we know about criminal justice responses is that the sooner they're delivered, the more effective they tend to be, and I think that's especially true with young people. Young people go through a very important series of developmental stages at which certain kinds of behaviours will emerge, and if we can come up with a mechanism for responding in a clear way to those behaviours when they're inappropriate, that's very helpful.

One of the reasons that we think community alternatives are important is that the justice system is a very slow and blunt instrument for being developmentally appropriate, and we have a lot more faith in the ability of diversion measures to respond appropriately and in a timely way.

Mr. DeVillers: In recommendation 6, which follows that section, there's a reference there to ``referring agency'' in both 6(i) and 6(ii). That would be what, probation office, etc.? I was a little confused about what's meant there by referring agency.

Prof. Pennell: Yes, that would include that.

Mr. DeVillers: It would be what, probation officers and social workers?

Prof. Pennell: Child welfare, and youth correction.

Mr. DeVillers: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. DeVillers.

Thank you very much for coming here today. It's a pleasure to get this information in your brief. I'm sure it will be looked over closely by members of the committee.

We'll take a five-minute break now before we start with the other group. Thank you very much.

Prof. Pennel: Thank you.

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.1106

The Chairman: We'll start again and continue our review of the Young Offenders Act.

At this time we have representatives from the Child Welfare League of Canada. We have Sandra Scarth, the executive director; Vaughan Dowie, the president; and Sarah Lugtig from Montreal.

Whoever is making your presentation, please proceed, and then we'll go to questions and comments after.

Ms Sandra Scarth (Executive Director, Child Welfare League of Canada): Thank you very much for the opportunity to present before the committee. I am Sandra Scarth, the executive director of the Child Welfare League of Canada.

Vaughan Dowie is with the Batshaw Youth and Family Centres in Montreal, and he's also chair of the board of the Child Welfare League of Canada.

Sarah Lugtig, our researcher, will also be available to answer questions on the research noted in our brief and also on the cost savings we've noted towards the back of the brief.

The Child Welfare League of Canada is a federally incorporated charitable organization dedicated to protecting and promoting the well-being of children, particularly those at risk because of poverty, abuse and neglect. Member agencies across Canada serve probably, conservatively, over a quarter of a million children and families each year.

We want to make a few brief points, because we think our submission speaks for itself and we'd like a good time for discussion after. Our whole brief is really based on the fact that the Young Offenders Act is only one part of the Canadian government's policy and strategy aimed at the prevention and reduction of youth crime. The act in itself cannot solve the problems.

We believe most of what needs to be done can be done within the framework of the present act and should be done with reference to Canada's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and within the original spirit of the intent of the Young Offenders Act, which was to balance the protection of the public with the rehabilitation of young people and also to give them some sense of due process, which they didn't have in the previous juvenile delinquency legislation.

We want to make about five points.

First, changes to the law should not be based on public misperception of the problem.

Second, we believe the problems lie more with the implementation of the act than with inadequacies in the actual legislation.

Third, the corrections-oriented response ignores the root causes of youth crime and costs more socially and financially.

Fourth, we believe the focus of the Canadian government and also of provincial governments should be on facilitating a social development model, which has proven effective in other countries in targeting root causes of youth crime and in the reduction of youth crime. We really push for a preventive, rehabilitative and cost-effective model.

Fifth, we'll briefly highlight the Canadian prevention programs we have listed in our brief, because we think they have great potential. Those are on pages 29 and 30. Then we'd like to review our recommendations at the end.

Having sat through the last presentation, I'd also like to say we really do believe the work of the National Crime Prevention Council has tremendous potential for making very positive changes to our youth justice system. We hope their recommendations will be listened to by this group.

.1110

On our first point, we believe it's senseless to make critical changes to policy and law based on public misperception of the problem. We know this committee has access to good statistics from the justice department and others, but the public unfortunately depends upon the press.

The statistics we've seen - and we can quarrel about statistics - show that youth crime is either stable or decreasing to some extent. It's true that youth homicides are up in proportion to adult homicides, but generally speaking, youth homicides are substantially lower than they were in the 1970s. The public doesn't know that. They don't understand that. We do agree that there is a very small amount of very violent and persistent young offenders who we do have to deal with and we have no trouble dealing with them in a sensible way.

The public misperceptions spread by the press unfortunately focus on these most severe cases. There's a plethora of contradictory statistics about increases in ``youth crime'' that we read in the press all the time. It's very confusing for the public. Stances taken by the police and in school boards in Ontario for zero tolerance policies inflate these statistics. They frighten the public into believing that there's a dramatic increase in violent youth crime.

This kind of chasm between reported youth crime and public perception was noted at least three years ago by the justice committee chaired by Bob Horner. Professor Nick Bala and Patricia Begin and others have all noted this chasm in public perception. This has resulted in public cries for much harsher measures, based on further misperceptions about the actual Young Offenders Act.

One of these examples in our brief is the study in Manitoba and Alberta, which showed that the public believes dispositions are much more lenient than they actually are. The public needs education.

We have no trouble locking up the really bad guys, the violent, persistent offenders whom we have little chance to rehabilitate. We believe that society can and should be protected from these very few, truly horrific offenders. And now they can be transferred to adult court and dealt with in a proper manner.

Our belief is that policy based solely on these worst-case scenarios will be really ineffective in addressing the overall problem for the bulk of youth offenders. So we're concerned that the federal government response might be based on similar misperceptions and we urge the government to first educate the public. The national forum, the national group that just preceded us, can certainly help to do that.

Second, we urge the government to take a really strong leadership role in establishing a comprehensive long-term plan instead of simple, popular, quick-fix solutions - like boot camps - for a very complicated issue.

I'm going to hand it over to Vaughan for our second point.

Mr. Vaughan Dowie (President, Child Welfare League of Canada): The problem with having 20 minutes to present a 35-page brief is that one has to jump over points really quickly, so I'm going to jump over a series of points on pages 6 to 12 and just highlight them for you.

One of the first points we talk about is that the problems with the Young Offenders Act lie primarily in the implementation of the act as opposed to the need to legislate again and modify again in this endless pattern of modifications of this law. The problems have to do a lot with the implementation question and to some extent with some broader questions.

One of the first points we make is that it would be illusionary to think that a comprehensive approach to dealing with youth crime is not impacted, for instance, by the reduction in CAP funding between the Government of Canada and the provinces. That has the inevitable impact of the reduction of the general social services that are on the line in communities. I say this as the executive director of an agency that has to provide services both within child welfare as specified in the Youth Protection Act in Quebec and the Young Offenders Act.

There's an inevitable consequence of this kind of reduction of funding. Services that are aimed at trying to prevent crimes and at working with families have to be reduced, with the inevitable consequences of the increase of certain kinds of social phenomena.

[Translation]

In your brief, we mentioned other problems with implementing the Act and said that new legislation was required. One of the problems was the inconsistent use of alternatives, which varied from one region to another. In fact, that point was raised by the group that appeared before us and also the last time I was here with the Association des centres jeunesse du Québec.

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In our brief, we also mentioned that many youths used to get arrested by police and sent home. The officer would speak to the parents and let them handle the minor offenses. An increasing number of those youths are now being charged under the Young Offenders Act.

As for the burden of proof required to refer an adolescent to adult court, it was not necessary to make those changes in Bill C-37. The changes were made to solve a non-existent problem.

We ask that the committee reexamine the bill. When Mr. Rock tabled it before the committee he said amendments could be made if the conclusion was that some changes weren't required.

In our brief, we also refer to an Ontario study on the over use of temporary detention. Approximately 72% of temporarily detained youths were serving time for property offenses, despite the intent of those provisions.

Youth rehabilitation also varies from one region to another, as each has a different system. In Quebec, for instance, there is more emphasis on rehabilitation than in other provinces where the focus is primarily on prison sentences. There are inconsistencies in this approach and in the underlying principles of the Young Offenders Act.

The implementation problems are far more numerous than those listed on pages 6 to 12. I presume you are already familiar with them. Quebec is always used as the best example of proper enforcement of the Young Offenders Act. This is indeed true if you compare Quebec with other places.

Quebec has just completed a study on implementation problems, entitled "Au nom... et au-delà de la loi" (in the name... and beyound the laws), written by a task force headed by The Honourable Judge Jasmin. It provides a fairly long list of implementation problems, including delays, emphasis on victims and consultations between the various parties involved. You may find that report useful since you will find that some problems are not due to the legislation per se, but rather to its implementation.

[English]

Ms Scarth: I'm going to speak very briefly to the third point, which is that the corrections-oriented response ignores the root causes of youth crime.

We've pointed out on pages 13 to 16 that there are predictors of youth crime. These are the factors Mr. Ramsay noted were missing from some presentations. We have them in colour in our brief. The list includes things like poverty, family violence, addictions, abuse, neglect, racism, and early anti-social behaviour, to name just a few. They are listed in order of community, family and individual factors.

We also have come up with some very recent Canadian research that I think is quite startling. I've sent a document around to you that contains a brief description of it.

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It's really that child welfare itself is an extremely high-risk factor for later criminality - not a cause, but a high-risk factor.

What Dr. Gus Thompson has found in Alberta - and this has been confirmed by a very recent study that I don't yet have from Dr. Nico Trocmé at the University of Toronto - is that between 60% and 80% of these children had severe mental health problems compared with 18% in the general population, according to the Ontario child health study norms. That's absolutely enormous.

Of even greater concern is that there is such a high rate of conduct disorder, which becomes asocial personality, which is a contributor and trajectory right into adult crime. Of greater concern is that there was such a high rate of conduct disorder: 25% of the girls, which shocked me, and over 40% of the boys - more than five times higher than what is in the general population, about 4%.

What we know about conduct disorder is that once it's established, which is usually at about the age of eight, it's very intractable. It's very difficult to eradicate it. This says that we really have to start a lot earlier.

By the time someone starts to offend at around the age of 14, it's almost too late. So we really have to look back. We know it doesn't work as well then to wipe out anti-social personalities. It's very difficult.

So he's suggesting that we have some opportunities, which really reinforces all of the business about working with families and communities and early intervention.

You can start right at birth. You can identify at birth about 50% of the kids who likely will be abused. We know this. Then you can deal with home visiting and the community programs mentioned earlier by Joan Pennell.

You then can actually catch them again when they start to be difficult in kindergarten. A third time you can catch them is when they fail grade one and start being rejected by their peers and so on.

I have a paper available. It isn't copied because I don't have the copyright, but it's listed here in this document.

Other studies show that by supporting parents over the long term, not the short term, the effects of poverty, family and community breakdown actually can be mitigated. We mentioned this in our paper by Professor Utting.

Page 18 of the brief lists reasons why harsh methods don't work, and on pages 20 and 21 we note some of the social and financial costs to the corrections-focused approach. For example, as mentioned earlier, boot camps that have no corrective or rehabilitative methods included and that have no follow-up afterwards actually increase recidivism. They don't reduce it.

We believe that we have a choice and that we can make some choices about the way in which we will reduce youth crime in this country. Mr. Dowie is going to speak to that.

Mr. Dowie: I'm going to speak to it to the extent of pointing you to the right part of the brief, where you can read it for yourself.

We thought it would be useful to the committee to speak a little bit about some different programs that are operating in different parts of the world that might be of interest to the committee. Starting in the second section of our brief, which starts on page 23, we speak a little bit about some of the international developments of crime prevention and really how the social development approach has been operationalized in a number of jurisdictions around the world. Within that section there are a series of prevention programs.

We've looked at some of the primary prevention programs that are available. For the ones we have here, probably ten times as many could be identified in different kinds of jurisdictions that are aimed really at trying to prevent problems before they occur, very often in young children, and almost always trying to support families to be able to deal with their own problems.

Then there are some listings of some secondary and then tertiary prevention programs, some of which are available in Canada, one of which is a project that our own agency is trying to get up and running. We're having problems with our own government in trying to get permission to use electronic surveillance, but that could be the subject of a whole other presentation.

We tried to offer to the committee some listings of different kinds of approaches of how the social development approach has been operationalized in other countries.

I just want to underline what Sandra has already said, that with this approach there will always be a custodial part of the system and a phased custodial part of the system.

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We're basically trying to say that there has to be a continuum of services that is first aimed at trying to prevent families from getting into the situation in the first place, and then different phases of prevention or program delivery that deal with different kinds of problems that you see and different kinds of offenders and the families from which they come.

Ms Scarth: We are really at the close of our time for presentation. I would just like to have you take a quick look at our recommendations on page 37.

We are recommending the immediate implementation of recommendations that were first proposed in the Horner report. We're suggesting the allocation of prevention funding to family-based programming. We have some recommendations related to the YOA and its implementation, particularly some of the corrections-focused amendments. Basically we are suggesting that we need to focus on prevention and early intervention and have that range of services.

I think we'll stop there.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. I'll have one question, because I have a difficult time squeezing in a question, before we start with Madame Venne.

This may be for your own information. You made reference in your presentation to an article by Patricia Begin. She happens to be one of our research assistants and is seated to my immediate right.

Ms Scarth: I'm very impressed.

The Chairman: Has there been any costing or attempt to cost to determine that if you put in certain resources for prevention with young people, through pre-school and school and dealing with high-risk families, this is in fact going to save money on the end result by reducing crime, etc., to such a point that maybe governments will look at it in these difficult economic times? Has anything like that ever been done?

Ms Scarth: Yes. On page 36 we have put in some potential savings on the investment in family-based crime prevention. If you have further questions after looking at that, our researcher would be happy to answer some of them.

The Chairman: I realize that particular diagram, but it is not very extensive or broken down so that we can get a cost analysis of the whole matter. Is that available?

Ms Scarth: I don't know that it's available in the Canadian context, unfortunately. You might be able to give us some information on that, Sarah, but I know that the most elaborate evaluation of this was the Yale...Oregon Social Learning Centre project in the States, which is listed here.

The Chairman: But nothing in a Canadian context.

Ms Scarth: Very little has been done in Canada because we have very poor information systems in Canada, extremely poor collection. We haven't done the kind of research to prove these models that we should have been doing over the years.

Ms Sarah Lugtig (Student-Researcher, Batshaw Youth and Family Centres): Just to add to that, the reason we even have this data is not that these programs were originally planned to target juvenile delinquency. They were collecting the data more in terms of preventing child protection services. Many of the programs actually found, to their surprise, that juvenile delinquency and the reduction of juvenile delinquency was one of the most significant effects of the programs. To begin with, they weren't planned to determine that.

One of the Horner report recommendations is actually to develop a national strategy of ongoing evaluation. So it's been recognized.

[Translation]

Mrs. Venne: I have but one brief question because, unfortunately, I have to leave to go to the House of Commons.

Towards the end of the first part of your brief, in the second last paragraph on page 22 of the English version, you say:

The Child Welfare League of Canada believes that we do have a choice. We advocate an approach to youth criminality which seeks to address its root causes and to involve families and communities.

I have a question about the following sentence:

By so doing, we can prevent what starts as an individual's response to family-based problems and socio-economic difficulties...

Do you not feel that by drawing these conclusions and by saying that this is an individual's response to family-based problems, etc, that you are freeing the youth from all of this responsibilities?

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Mr. Dowie: No, however, I do feel that er should make it clearer. Making young people responsible for their actions is an important aspect of any measure taken under the Young Offenders Act. I am taking that for granted. Perhaps we should emphasize this more.

There are different ways to work with these young people. I will give you two examples based on programs which we currently offer, at least in the organization where I work. Some youth need to be committed to custody. A large part of the work we do with a youth who has been placed in a facility of open or secure custody consists in getting this young person to acknowledge what he has done and to work on changing his behaviour on the basis of his admission. This is one way that we work with a certain type of youth.

On December 15th, we will be introducing an intensive probation program like those already implemented in some youth centres in Quebec. By intensive probation we mean finding a family for the youth who is willing to work with us intensively. Under this program, social workers will work daily with the family for a period ranging from 3 to 6 months.

This program advocates family intervention rather than custody. The objective of the program is to make the young person accountable and to better equip the family so that it can cope with the behaviour of these young people.

It all hinges on the youth's needs requirement of the young person. Some youth need this type of program, whereas others, who have committed the same crimes, need a program involving custody. Both programs seek to make the young person accountable for his actions.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mrs. Venne.

[English]

Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. Ramsay: I see that on page 3 of the booklet you've given us there's an item entitled ``Give the Boot to Boot Camps and Keep Talking Prevention'', written by Sandra. Maybe I could ask Sandra, have you evaluated the boot camp programs within the country?

Ms Scarth: I have read extensively. We have a huge pile of information about boot camps all across the United States. Manitoba hasn't yet fully evaluated their programs. I've actually visited places like Camp DARE and wilderness programs here in Canada. My very first job was at a girls' correctional school in Manitoba, so I have a fair experience in working with these kinds of kids.

Everything I have read says that boot camps by themselves, particularly the militaristic ones, particularly the ones that really debase young people, do not work. In fact, they do the opposite. They totally control the young people while they're in that camp in a very militaristic fashion, but they don't set any internal controls. Once those young people leave, you've developed a stronger, faster criminal. Quite frankly, I think it's extremely dangerous and very simplistic.

The only evaluations I have seen that show any decrease in recidivism have had a very strong educational program, have had a very strong rehabilitation program, have included working with the parents so the parents have not been excluded from the process and are not way out here somewhere, and also have had a very long follow-up process afterwards, when the child is back in the community. There is follow-up in the community. In my view, those are the pieces that work, not the boot camps.

I feel really, really strongly. I say ``give the boot to boot camps'' and I believe that very strongly. I think they are very, very bad and very simplistic. I understand why these people like them, because they want these kids in order.

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I also want to tell you that I've had personal experience, just so you know. Somebody else was talking about their personal life.

We adopted a child from the Children's Aid Society who was five and a half years old. We found out afterward that he was physically abused.

We managed to keep this young man out of the young offenders system by sending him to a military school. That military school was a dreadful place. We took him out after a year.

There was total control on the external side, but he came out as the same boy as when he went in. We had to develop the controls from within him, which we've done.

He's now a young adult, and he's doing fine. He's had a job for five years, and he's stable. But this was a young man who could have gone the other way. He came very close to going the other way. He was in the adult correctional system for a very short period of time.

My sense is that I lived through a boot camp, personally, as a parent. I believe it was the worst possible thing you could do for this young man, because the total control is from the outside. So I really do feel quite strongly about it, as you can tell.

Mr. Ramsay: I spent nine months in training with the RCMP back in 1956, and that was a boot camp.

Mrs. Barnes: As an adult?

Mr. Ramsay: I was 18 then, going on 19. There were some very negative aspects about that training. I thought the screaming and yelling was unnecessary to direct intelligent people. Once the figure of authority left the scene, bedlam ensued.

It's funny; years after, on occasion, we would get together on the drill square, and the same thing would happen. This is after we were more mature, certainly, in terms of years and experience, but the same thing would happen. As soon as the figure of authority left, all signs of that kind of discipline that was required simply disappeared.

Yet there were good aspects about that kind of training that served us well as we went on to enforce the laws of the land and do our duties and our responsibilities, which were sometimes in very difficult situations and in isolated conditions.

I emphasize, and I'll say this to every group that appears before the committee, that I am interested in what works. When I hear about what's happening in the province of Quebec, I want to know what is working there. What are they doing there that's not being done in other provinces? They seem to be having greater success. I am very interested in this whole concept of the principles and the dynamics involved, and the healing and sentencing circles.

We've had witnesses appear before the committee before different bills. I remember one person said that we must not cause juvenile delinquents or offenders any pain. Yet the witness, a judge, who appeared and spoke about sentencing circles in Saskatchewan told about the quite excruciating pain they went through over a period of two and a half to three hours. There was a breakdown of the individual. There was a kind of emotional thing to the point at which, I think his testimony indicated, some who had gone through that sentencing circle experience indicated later that they would sooner take the other alternative over that.

I am convinced that if we really want to rehabilitate the offender, it ought to be done at the front end. I think the success of the sentencing circle lies, at least in part, in that area in which you get the offender together with the victim and with members of that community. I don't know what goes on. I would very much like to participate in one.

It's interesting, but it's not surprising, that these kind of innovations are coming from our aboriginal people, and from the aboriginal people in New Zealand and Australia.

It seems to me that we ought to be looking more closely at those principles. I don't think those principles are different. I think they're applicable. In fact, the judge indicated it is applicable to the non-aboriginal community. I understand that Nepean is looking at a community sentencing circle as well.

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But it involves an admission of guilt, and that harm and damage was sustained to someone else, as well as to the individual who caused it. I don't believe you can ever hurt someone else without hurting yourself as well.

It is a cry out for something. It is a cry out for recognition. All the dynamics are there to create the necessary ingredients to begin the healing process, which is essential to rehabilitation.

I think we have to get back to that. I think we have drifted too far away. Consider the impact statements that victims can make today before parole boards. We wrestled with and debated that. We argued about how that should be done. We are not allowing the victim to appear before the individual. So it is a cold, clinical statement of fact. And if the person can't articulate their thoughts, feelings and experiences on paper, then that whole idea, concept and principle is missed.

This is what we have done. It's tough for a boss to fire you by looking you in your eyes and saying you have to be let go. They send you a slip of paper, which is sent down the line.

In other words, we are not facing the issues. The judges don't want a victim crying and being emotional, and so on. They avoid that, so we avoid it. I think it is wrong.

The sentencing circles are telling me that there are some groups of people in this country that are on the right track. They're getting back to the very basic, old principle. When I was a child and I did something wrong, I stood before my Mom and my Dad and everyone and was accountable. Yes, the tears came. Yes, the emotion was there. Yes, the pain was experienced. But when it was all over, the love was there as well. The love couldn't come until this was out of the system and dealt with.

That is the problem with our justice system. It's cold and clinical. It's way off track. I don't know whether we are going to get back on track. I don't know whether the report submitted by this committee is going to get us closer to being on track, but I'm hoping it will.

Ms Scarth: I hope so, too.

Mr. Ramsay: I think all of our efforts should be directed in that area. If you heard my comments to the other witnesses, I think the justice system has to be separate. It should be working in harmony, but separate from preventative programs.

We cannot ask the justice system to deal with dysfunctional families, but they must be dealt with and helped. The resources must be available to them. Anything that a program of government does to weaken the family adds to the juvenile delinquent program.

I would like to ask you this. It's a little bit off the topic, but I haven't asked this question before.

Under the old Juvenile Delinquents Act, there was an offence for contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. That was removed from the Young Offenders Act.

Do you feel that ought to go back into the Young Offenders Act, or do you feel there is sufficient law dealing with contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile in other portions of the criminal code? Or is it being dealt with in other statutes within the provinces across Canada? Do you think it should go back into the Young Offenders Act, or do you think it should be disregarded altogether?

Mr. Dowie: I have to say that it is not a discussion I have ever taken part in. So I don't think, as an organization, we have a position on it. I don't think that question has been posed to us before.

The problem is that we are not lawyers, in terms of being able to balance that off against other provisions in the Criminal Code in terms of whether or not that's sufficiently dealt with in other provisions.

Mr. Ramsay: That's a very frustrating answer to me.

Mr. Scarth: It is a frustrating question.

Mr. Dowie: If you'd asked your question a week ago, I would have had an answer for you.

I know of situations in which adults are charged with conspiracy in terms of conspiracy legislation. For instance, when adults use juveniles as ways to commit offences, or as intermediaries for an offence to be committed, there are situations in which adults are charged within the adult system with conspiracy to commit that offence, whatever that offence is.

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I don't know whether or not that is sufficient; I'm not a lawyer to say whether that's better or worse than the offence of contributing to the delinquency of a minor that used to be in the old act.

Mr. Ramsay: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I understand my time is up.

The Chairman: Mr. Regan, you have ten minutes.

Mr. Regan (Halifax West): First of all, I want to say that I found myself ready to applaud what Mr. Ramsay was saying until he came near the end. So far, so good; I was ready to applaud - but then he said he didn't feel we should connect the justice system or the Young Offenders Act with preventative measures.

What I'd like to have is your views on whether you can separate them, and if you were going to do so, how you would do it or why you would want to.

Ms Scarth: With all due respect to Mr. Ramsay, I don't think they can be separated. I think that's the problem. I think we've too long separated children's programs into sections like child welfare problems, children's mental health problems, young offender problems, financial problems, etc. The families and the children have to negotiate this and they get caught between these stovepipes. One of the problems of bureaucracy is that we don't make those stovepipes any simpler.

Some provinces are trying very hard to do that. A number of them are trying to get policy across. Manitoba has a secretariat that is trying to get policy across where funding in all of those envelopes will not be spent until they've agreed on their priorities for children. I think there's some hope there where the funding is attached to a cross-sector. I don't think there's a way you can separate family and family problems and child abuse from the ultimate trajectory into crime. So I disagree with Mr. Ramsay.

Mr. Dowie: Look at it from the perspective that now you're in the justice system, so that means a crime has already been committed and the justice system is involved in one way or another. It seems to me almost axiomatic that part of what the justice system tries to do in that kind of prevention - because we're not talking about primary prevention any more, but about secondary or tertiary prevention - is just to make sure this doesn't happen again. That is what you're trying to prevent when you're in the justice system.

I don't think we expect a justice system to have no role in trying to make sure there is no recurrence of that crime or that kind of behaviour. I don't think anybody, even Mr. Ramsay here, would expect the justice system not to take into account how to prevent the reoccurrence of that crime.

How do you take account of the reoccurrence of that behaviour with a juvenile? You have to look at who that person is and what are the things that contributed to him or her committing the act, which I assume at this point we have concluded they are guilty of, in order to try to design a sentence for them that will prevent the reoccurrence.

I have trouble trying to understand how one can even conceptualize how you separate the justice system from prevention within that framework, because prevention within that framework is not primary prevention. When the justice system is involved it means that it's prevention to try to make sure that this or more serious offences do not occur in the future.

Mr. Regan: One of the things I noted about your submission to us was the section about boot camps and the whole issue of deterrence. It seems that young people often have a theory of infallibility and that they also don't consider the long-term consequences of their actions. Do you have information about the ages at which those kinds of things develop? When do people start to lose their feeling of infallibility or when do they start to consider long-term consequences of their actions, or do we ever?

Ms Lugtig: The research wouldn't have reflected that, but the research did deal with young people up to the later teen years. I don't actually think the research could answer that question except to say that certainly that feeling of infallibility persists into the later teen years.

Mr. Regan: So we're not sure when it ends.

One of the perks about not having opposition members here now is that we know there's some chance of getting to ask another question. So I'll pass to one of my colleagues for now.

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The Chairman: Ms Torsney.

Ms Torsney (Burlington): I guess we need people in our society who are never afraid of things. The people who are astronauts perhaps have a less developed sense of fear or something.

It's too bad Mr. Ramsay here is...what's justice but treating people fairly, and is it fair to keep a certain group of people poor? You know, that's social justice; it's just another aspect of the justice system.

Earlier you were talking about the stats and the reality and who can best get the message out. There's this whole problem in which we're not seen as credible sources, especially if you're on the government side, because it's in your interest not to try to work on the problem - that traditional distrust of politicians and all that stuff. So we really need to look for other partners to get that message out, and if there's some way we can help you, whether we go across the country or have networks with groups in our own ridings, we'd be happy to do that.

I don't know whether you saw the article in the July issue of Atlantic Monthly. It talked about that sort of topping-up effect. Yes, there are only so many incidents per year, but given that we in Canada are a population, for instance, of 30 million, each increase means that it's that much closer to us or that we have more experiences with people committing acts against us. We are that much more exposed and therefore that much more at risk.

It is a fascinating article. It talked about the societal influences, in particular its American focus, but particularly the issues related to single-parent families, not just because they are single-parent families but also because they didn't have any other supports and all those kinds of things.

So we have to deal with the reality and with the perception. I think while some people may have been disappointed by some of the changes on Bill C-37 and the fact that they thought it was getting tougher, the reality was that there were so many more people asking us to abolish the Young Offenders Act and treat those children as adults. They wouldn't, of course, have given them voting rights or anything, because they were just kids, but when it comes to crime, we would of course treat them very severely.

The other thing I see coming out of this - and it's in the article on page 21 - relates to dealing with the prelatency and the factors coming in at a very early age, from 8 to 10.

Mr. Dowie, asking you, I suppose, in your experience, I believe with the Youth Protection Act in Quebec, should we do what some people are suggesting whereby under 12 years of age is considered part of the young offenders system? Is there another model we can have? We hear about the Quebec model being so terrific. What are the terrific parts of it, what are the limitations of that system, and how can we either improve that or improve the administration right across the country?

I know of specific incidents in which people have called the police about 10-year-olds, and their reaction is that they can't do anything. Well, there are things they can do, and they should be accessing and integrating the services. How do we do that and how do we deal with those kids? Because they're clearly coming out very early on.

Mr. Dowie: One of the advantages of the Quebec system is the linkage between the child protection system and the young offender system. Also, the person we call in Quebec the director of youth protection is the person the federal legislation calls provincial director. So we have the child protection system, and the young offender system is within the same organization and the same establishment and benefits from the same resources. It's not like a Solicitor General system and a social service system.

That plays out a little bit when you talk about, for instance, what happens to kids under 12. In Quebec, in the Youth Protection Act, there is a provision that says the child has a serious behavioural problem and the parents are not able to take the steps necessary to correct it. What happens to a child who is severely acting out or has even possibly committed a criminal offence but is under the age of 12 is that they fall within that provision of the Youth Protection Act and access almost the same range of services through the Youth Protection Act.

For those who believe that one needs.... We were talking about this yesterday. One of the bizarre parts of this is that, as a young offender, if that 10- or 11-year-old had been found guilty of an offence in the Young Offenders Act and even had been sentenced to custody, it would have been a determinate sentence. It would have been four months, five months, six months, eight months or whatever.

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When you fall within child protection legislation, you really fall within the indeterminate sentencing provision. You're in the system until the problem has been resolved, which is a little different from the Young Offenders Act, where, whether or not the problem is resolved at the end of the sentence, the sentence is over and you walk away.

So that is one of the quirks of this. If you come under the behaviour problem provisions, where you can even be placed within a residential facility, the order is valid until you can satisfy the court that there's no longer a protection issue at stake.

As to some of the advantages of the Quebec system, if you haven't heard them endlessly yet, you will hear them endlessly in terms of the development of the alternate measures provisions within the law. I guess there's just a basic belief of almost all the major players, including the public, about the need for such a law with the kind of philosophy that underlines the law. The support figure I'm told is 70%.

We also have the benefit of being able to look at crime statistics and say the rate of criminality in Quebec, all things considered, is relatively low vis-à-vis other jurisdictions that use a different kind of approach in their young offenders systems.

What has to be worked on in the Quebec system? Well, there's this. I sat on a work group just for the Ministry of Health and Social Services with the Ministry of Health and Social Services trying to prioritize some of those things.

A lot of them are timing questions we're working on. For instance, in Quebec a child used to get a probation order and sometimes it would take two, three or four weeks for them to see their probation officer. There's the whole question of time with kids, and the consequential act has to be relatively quick. Now our agency and a number of agencies in Quebec are able to see the child the day of sentence. So you leave the courtroom, you get your sentence of probation and you see your probation worker or a probation worker the moment you leave the place.

In the end, the problem with the Quebec system is going to be the money coming out of the province in terms of trying to support the whole social service initiative in general. We're talking about losing $500 million in revenue in Quebec next year. I don't want to get into the politics of that, but the realty of it is that money is going to come from somewhere, and in the end it filters down to the services that are providing the ability to respond in a comprehensive way.

The Quebec system is going to take a real hit, as will everybody else's system, as a result of what we see coming.

Ms Torsney: On a point of order, this I think is the Jasmin report.

Mr. Dowie: Yes, the one I referred to.

Mr. Gallaway: Mr. Dowie, you made a statement I thought was interesting. You said some of these programs involve having a young offender realize what his or her act meant. To me that suggests we have young offenders who have been convicted or perhaps are before the court and who, because they didn't know what their act meant, really didn't have the necessary intent one would require perhaps in an adult court to be convicted of an offence. Do you think that's the case?

Mr. Dowie: No, my reference was more to taking responsibility for their acts. It's one thing to plead guilty or be found guilty and then have the litany of excuses of why you got into the situation.

With young kids, most treatment programs say you have to take responsibility for what you did. It's not somebody else's fault. It's not your mother's fault, it's not your father's fault, it's not the guy who led you astray's fault, it's not the rest of the group's fault, it's not your school's fault. It's your problem; how are you going to deal with it?

Central to almost all treatment programs for these kinds of kids is to take responsibility for your act as opposed to knowing what you did.

Mr. Gallaway: Ms Scarth, I certainly agree with your editorial with respect to boot camps.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Gallaway: At the same time, as you are aware and as you pointed out, in this country there's a tremendous shift in the perception of youth and youth crime. In Ontario we seem to be moving towards this type of dealing with young people. Is there any empirical evidence to suggest that these types of wilderness experiences - I'm talking about boot camps - have any effect other than to remove the person from society for a determinate period of time?

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Ms Scarth: I don't think so. I've seen only one or two evaluations that show any slight improvement in short-term effects on young people, and those are the ones that I mentioned that had the rehabilitation attached, that had the educational component, the families were involved, and there was follow-up. So I don't believe the boot camp itself was necessarily what caused the improvements. I think these other components caused them.

This does not mean that we would advocate having no discipline and no order. A lot of these young people need structure. That's what a lot of the treatment programs Vaughan is talking about provide. They provide the structure. What they try to provide is developing the child's internal self-control: first of all, acceptance that they've done something wrong and secondly, some way in which they can learn not to do that again, so they can learn to say no to themselves.

A lot of these kids are totally impulsive. They do things before they think. What they try to teach them is to slow down and think about it and develop some strategy so they can control themselves, so they won't have to depend on you or me or somebody else yelling at them to run back and forth down the hall and scrub floors and that kind of stuff. I just don't think that kind of behaviour works.

When you think of a militaristic environment, ultimately we end up with something such as what happened with the Airborne Division. That's the ultimate answer to a militaristic approach: you end up with people who don't think and who go crazy and who become totally controlling of other people in a very negative manner. That's the last thing we'd want for our justice system.

Mr. Gallaway: My final question deals with the whole issue of what I call front-end costs - these are my words - versus downstream costs, downstream being when they hit the courts.

You also appreciate that in this country we have the ongoing problem of jurisdictional interpretations, so the province may embark in one direction and the federal programmers may be pointed in another one.

I'm very interested in the idea of intervention in the schools, recognition, detection at a young level. I'm interested because my wife teaches kindergarten and she believes she can identify from time to time some who are going to be a problem.

Ms Scarth: I'm sure she can.

Mr. Gallaway: This is a very vague and open-ended question, but, recognizing that they're finite, where would you prefer to see our resources being directed? Can we...? I don't want to suggest eliminate, but what kind of effect can we get if we direct our resources at the front end as opposed to directing more resources at the treatment-after-conviction end?

Ms Scarth: There have been some very interesting programs. Some of them are mentioned in here, and a few aren't.

There is one program in Hawaii that developed some home visiting programs for kids at risk of child abuse. I mentioned that earlier. I'm not sure that their evaluation is totally accurate, but they claim to have had a 50% reduction in child abuse. If you reduce 50% of the child abuse, then you are reducing the numbers of kids coming into the child welfare system, which seems to have a bad effect on them. They end up moving up into the correction system and then into adult crime, so you have this trajectory.

The paper I've mentioned in here is really interesting, and you should get a copy of it.

I would put my money on dealing with at-risk young parents very early, when children are born, pre-birth and at birth. That's the most dangerous time, because there's no public oversight. So, to start, I would target the money on public health nurses, home lay visitors, and those kinds of things.

You have to retain the service over the continuum, so you still have to deal with kids when they hit the early school years and you have to deal with them once they have committed crimes. But my sense is that if we put more of our efforts into that early piece, we would probably have to spend less later.

Mr. Dowie: To reinforce what Sandra has said, you can't get away from a period of double investment. It's just not possible.

I'll give you an example of the challenges we face just within an agency. We have a regional board, if you know the Quebec system. In our region everybody has bought into prevention. Everybody wants to move the money around now to try to get to the five- and four-year-olds and so on.

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It's absolutely true that this is where your money is best spent. Nonetheless, from the perspective of someone who has to provide service, kids who are born tomorrow won't enter into the system I have to administer until they're 13 years old. You can't take the money out of my system now just because I won't need that bed, for instance, for that child in 12 years.

So there has to be a period of double investment. It will create the dividend in the end, but the dividend is really not a one- or two-year dividend. People don't usually have the patience in terms of funding to be able to do that.

The consequence of not doing that - I'll just tell you about it in terms of our own experience - because of tougher court sentencing on provisional detention, for instance, one of the phenomena I have to deal with....not if we do the provisional detention. This year we have to open a new closed-detention unit - we serve the English-speaking community in Montreal - to deal with the provisional detention cases that are being stacked up by the court.

That's $750,000 a year for 12 beds to hold kids until they go to trial and are found guilty. That's another $750,000 being spent that could be spent some other way. Eventually, if we don't spend it some other way, we're going to have to keep putting more and more into these very expensive resources that have a really very limited prognosis.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. DeVillers.

Mr. DeVillers: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Translation]

Mr. Dowie, on page 12 of your brief, you quote an article written by Carrington and Moyer stating that the police are less and less likely to respond to a young offender by taking him home. You used this quote to indicate the trend towards more corrective solutions. However, you do not make any mention of the reasons why this is happening in your brief. Isn't the article written by Carrington and Moyer telling us something? Could I have your comments on that?

Mr. Dowie: You said that the quotation could be found on page 12?

Mr. DeVillers: Page 12, third paragraph.

Mr. Dowie: In French?

Mr. DeVillers: In French.

Mr. Dowie: I have the English text. It seems to me that it's on page 9.

Mr. DeVillers: It's on page 9 in English. The subject is police intervention. The article states that this is an indication of the growing trend towards more corrective interventions. I'm wondering why the police are less likely to send the young offenders home.

Mr. Dowie: This is an extension of the zero tolerance policy. Nothing is tolerated. Everything must comply with the system. We see this in the schools. We see this almost everywhere. We no longer want to resolve problems ourselves. Now we turn to the system to find solutions and to make everything more official.

This also explains the trend that we see amongst the police. Because of this policy of zero tolerance, in certain jurisdictions everything winds up being referred to the court.

When the police officers bring the young person home to his parents and tell them to resolve the problem, as was the case when I was young, many years ago, punishment was immediate. One could say that, for some minor crimes, punishment is immediate. Parents assume their responsibilities. If the police decide not to lay charges, even in cases where they could take alternate measures, the file is forwarded to the Crown by the police. The Crown then studies the file and forwards it to the Youth Protection Branch which in turn determines if alternate measures are a possibility. The Youth Protection Branch has six weeks to study the file. Once this is done, it can rule that the young person should be referred for alternate measures, measures which are taken three or four months after the perpetration of the crime. However, in some jurisdictions, police are against this.

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[English]

We're going to say no to everything, and everything goes to the court.

[Translation]

Mr. DeVillers: Do you think that the police are fulfilling the demands made by society?

Mr. Dowie: Everything depends on the jurisdictions. There are still some jurisdictions where police officers use their discretion as much as they can, however, these jurisdictions are becoming fewer and fewer in number.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. DeVillers.

Mrs. Barnes.

Mrs. Barnes: Thank you, and welcome. I apologize that while you were giving your presentation I had to do a speech in the House on another matter.

I think Quebec is very lucky. I think the youth of Quebec are very fortunate. In London, Ontario, I think I'm fortunate in being educated by probably the best researchers - Alan Leschied, Louise Sas, Peter Jaffe, Lorraine Greaves - in family violence, children's victimizations, and sexual offences. I get that information and with the information some vision of this, as opposed to some skewered vision of justice being retribution and punishment.

We know all the research points out - and we've heard it in the first phase here - that intervention techniques can reduce crime by 40% to 60% through good preventative measures. We have that information here and yet we continually hear from community groups that don't understand we know about this, and still push for the rough and tough. I firmly believe this committee can end up on that side of it. We have to be more visionary than that.

Along the pathway from childhood to adult, at least 50% of the people charged under the Young Offenders Act over the last decade have had child welfare involvement. I don't know where we're going to go in my province of Ontario, where nearly half the people being cut off and cut down in our welfare are children. The concept of victimization that is a precursor to involvement is here for us to acknowledge and do something about.

That being said, I know the people in this room right now understand those things. For the record, I'll say the Reform Party is not present at this time.

What I want to talk about that nobody has really touched on yet is the gender issue that goes with offending. We know that in most of our offences, whether juvenile or adult, criminal activity in this country is 98% male, yet we don't talk about this. To me this is one area where we don't want equity.

There are two issues here. What are we doing that is preventative, and what can we do to change the real fact that this is a male issue? Where we have that 2% of female offending, what do we do? There is one sentence in your report that says when we have female offenders, especially young ones who have to be incarcerated, they are subjected to some terrible situations in closed-custody settings where they're housed with large numbers of pre-teen or teen males. They take all types of extra victimization because we don't have the facilities to cope. We know one of the statistics that has increased as far as criminal activity is the female factor. It's still tiny but it is rising. So I think there are two issues dealing with gender that we have to focus on here and get some information on.

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I'd like you to tell me if you know where we can go to get resources on this factoring and how you would handle it.

Ms Scarth: There hasn't been enough work done on the gender issue. I think one of the areas that has some hope is the whole issue of conduct disorder and asocial behaviour. It is much larger in terms of boys and males, and it does start very early.

It seems there would be some use in looking at some of the issues of how we socialize young male children. I think that's one area where the beginning of some work has been done.

Looking at that early conduct disorder, some work has been done in Quebec with some young boys. It's longitudinal research. We mentioned it in our brief at one point, and how you work with them once they are disordered.

In terms of the prevention aspects, we really haven't done enough work in Canada on prevention of conduct disorder. It's the one area where Dr. Gus Thompson says we really ought to at least attempt to make that effort because we don't know it won't work, whereas we do know that dealing with them when they're 14 definitely won't work.

In a backwards way, he's saying we might as well try to prevent the conduct disorder in young boys because nothing else has worked. It doesn't work later. I think that is an area where we need to do a lot of work. I'm glad you raised the issue. I think there's one sentence in here about gender issues but it's very much buried. It's something we will pay attention to in the future.

Vaughan, do you want to add to that?

Mr. Dowie: I just want to add that this is a phenomenon I can't comment on because I don't know, really, if it's generalized. I know that within Quebec anyway, we don't get the girls in young offenders, but we get a very similar kind of behaviour under child protection. For some reason, which people are still trying to understand, they get caught up in the child protection system rather than the juvenile justice system.

For instance, in our closed-custody facilities for girls, where we're allowed to mix offenders and child protection for girls because the numbers aren't there and have what we call encadrement intensif for girls and closed custody for girls in separate units, the behaviours are almost exactly the same. But for some reason they're coming in through the Youth Protection Act rather than through the Young Offenders Act for behaviour we very often get from boys under the YOA.

Ms Lugtig: We mention gender on page 13 of the brief. Part of the reason it's mentioned so briefly is because there hasn't been very much research in the area, but if you are looking for research some has been done in England and is cited there.

Those who are working in family policy and crime prevention are starting to address the gender issue. One of the things they're looking at is the role of fathers and the impact of the lack of fathers in these families, or abuse by fathers. That's where it's going right now.

Mrs. Barnes: I don't know how we break down these provincial barriers of child welfare and mental health, but I certainly know we're doing it at the corporate end of the federal government.

In my own riding, just in the last six months, I've had co-locations of things like Canada Post and provincial licensing agencies. I've had unemployment services mixed with provincial welfare agencies.

I don't understand why we can't do co-locations with different levels of government in service delivery where cost savings come because bricks and mortar are integrated. The people who need to be talking to each other aren't across town from one another.

Co-location with different levels of jurisdiction, and service delivery located under one roof, with the professionals talking and the savings in the administrative functioning becomes one-stop shopping for services. We do it now and we're doing it more and more.

To me, this has to be the direction of service delivery where the professionals and the different levels are involved. Do you see that happening anywhere in Canada?

I happen to have come from London. London is historically the test market centre because it's an urban community isolated by a ring. So I don't know if what's happening in my community is being replicated or if you're hearing about it, or if we really are just being tested.

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Ms Scarth: In Ontario, probably one area where they're making some real efforts to do some integration of services is in the north, where they've really had to do it. There are some co-locations and some teams of educationalists, social service workers, and health professionals working in the area. It's called Integrated Services for Northern Children, and it appears to be working well in some towns and communities and not so well in others. It works well where people are disposed to make it work, but there is a model there that is probably as good an integration model as I've seen anywhere in the country.

So that's happening on the ground in the north in Ontario. Certainly before the Conservatives came in, the community of social services was intending to do a children's policy framework that would move that kind of model across the province. Now children aren't a priority, so I don't know what's going to happen.

In other provinces there have been attempts to do something from the ministry level down, where they're often government run, and they've mostly come to failure because they haven't attached funding to them. For example, B.C. tried it and they didn't attach funding, and it's been an exercise in words and rhetoric. Ontario tried it and it was the same thing, words and rhetoric.

But there are two or three places now where I think it might happen. It already happens in Quebec. It's a different model, and that's really why we brought this model here. We did our brief from Quebec because we felt it was the best model in Canada for the young offender system.

Across these other systems, there's some hope in Manitoba. A man by the name of Reg Toews, who comes from a mental health background, has the premier's okay to keep five ministries talking. Some money out of each of those ministries will be held in the ministries, in the line ministries, but they can't spend a certain amount of it until they decide on the priorities for children's spending.

A political will is needed to start, and because there's a will above and there's funding attached, I think there's some hope coming out of that process. People will follow the funding; it's a real carrot. They'll do what the funding says they must do. If there's no funding there, they'll just talk rhetoric and they'll go back into their bureaucratic stovepipes.

In Saskatchewan they've developed a policy across government for children. They have seven or eight ministries that say they're working together. I haven't actually seen the results of that work as yet, but it seems there's a will to do something there as well. They've just shuffled their cabinet, so I don't know what's going to happen.

For all the wrong reasons, things may happen positively in Alberta too, because they've been told they have to privatize and send all the children's stuff out to the marketplace. We don't know what's going to happen, because it might happen very well in some communities if they allow the communities to do the planning. They say they're allowing the communities to do the planning, and the unfortunate part is that they don't have justice, education, or health involved. It's all community and social services in that area.

So from my perspective right now, I would say look to Manitoba, if this man can pull it off, and look to northern Ontario to see what's happening up there. There seems to be some good work in some of those communities up there, and I can tell you who to talk to.

Mrs. Barnes: I might do some travelling on my own during the Christmas break, looking for these places. So if you have it, please send it in. You can send it to me, but also to the clerk so other people can have it.

Ms Scarth: Yes.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mrs. Barnes.

One comment on boot camps - and this is just a personal impression - is that in my understanding the military type of camp is set up to break down an individual, and that's why the armies are as they are. They break the individuals down and rebuild them to what they want, which is as a warrior to go into war or police to go into policing, etc. Unfortunately, boot camps break down individuals, but they don't rebuild them.

Some of the other members who have left have told me to apologize on their behalf. They're in the House and, as Mrs. Barnes did, the people are coming and going. When members of the population notice that people are not in the House, they're quite often in committee, but when they're not in committee, they're in the House.

Again, thank you very much for coming. Your presentation today was very interesting.

Ms Scarth: Thank you.

The Chairman: We are adjourned until next Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.