[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, May 7, 1996
.1535 
[English]
The Chair: Order.
We have with us today, in our ongoing review of the Young Offenders Act, Gary Bernfeld, a psychologist with the Bath Institution.
Tell me where you got your degree, Gary.
Dr. Gary Bernfeld (Psychologist, Bath Institution): At Queen's in Kingston.
The Chair: Well, there you go. It could be better. It could have been the University of Windsor.
When we have a goodly amount of time, our procedure is to have you proceed and set out your brief and what you have to say. Then members like to ask questions.
Ms Torsney (Burlington): Why don't you switch your chair around? Seeing as you're a psychologist, I didn't think you wanted to be on a chair that's underneath the table. Is that better?
Dr. Bernfeld: Much better. It had to be left of centre. I don't know if that's a good position to be in.
The Chair: It's not a problem for most of us, although we're finding ourselves in agreement on a lot of things and it's making some of us quite nervous.
Dr. Bernfeld: First let me say how honoured I am to be here. I spent 15 years as a psychologist, as a front-line manager, clinician, and program evaluator, and I've eagerly been reading everything I could find in the field for about the last 25 years. So it's kind of exciting finally to get here.
The last time I was here was 35 years ago, when I got to represent my class and shake the then justice minister's hand in the House. He went on to be PM.
Ms Torsney: Wow!
Dr. Bernfeld: That was exciting, but I haven't been back. I'm a sentimentalist, so this is a really big honour for me. This is business as usual for you folks, but this is exciting, so I couldn't help bringing my family along for the occasion.
The Chair: Good for you.
Dr. Bernfeld: By way of clarification, I've officially left the program that I started eight years ago, the family preservation program that I'll talk about, for some of the reasons why I'm appealing to you today, in terms of your own work, to provide the support in the federal-provincial cost-sharing to ensure that high-quality family- and community-based services will flourish in a time of fiscal constraint - for the reasons that hopefully will become clear, that they work and save money for the taxpayers and protect society better than the quick-fix approaches that we're always tempted to follow.
I'm going to throw in a little quote that might add to that. I like quotes and comics, which you'll see as the comics get sent around.
Mencken said that there is always an easy solution to every human problem: neat, easy, and wrong.
My goal today really is to highlight the brief, kind of flesh it out a bit, and give you some of the main points. I'm timing myself, so I'll keep to the 15 minutes.
You know better than I do how much the young offender and the youth justice system costs. The half-billion-dollar figure in my brief excludes court, legal aid, treatment, and detention costs. In an era when we're shrinking our resources, we must ensure that our crime control strategies are built on a few premises, that they're built on the knowledge of how youth crime develops - and you've heard some excellent words on that before from other speakers, as I have followed on the Internet - and are based on the knowledge of how to best treat and prevent crime.
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Our strategies must also be: supportive of the family's responsibility to socialize and raise its children; implemented comprehensively across all children's services; delivered efficiently within the youth justice system; and effective and cost-conscious, or must demonstrate, in today's jargon, ``value for money''.
Overall, I'm recommending that your committee ensure that all the money spent on criminal justice services for youths and families be spent as intended. I'm going to try to briefly highlight the need for a young offenders system that is effective, cost-efficient and closely linked to the family unit.
I'm a little nervous, so I apologize in advance, but I'm going to need to rely on any translation services should there be any questions in French, because I don't want to mess up things and sound like Jimmy Carter in Poland.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Dr. Bernfeld: The next topic is development and treatment of delinquency.
I thought I'd leave all the heavy-duty research stuff to the appendix at the back of the document so I could keep what I have to say to under seven pages, which is a rare thing for a psychologist, and try to speak in fifteen minutes or less. In that appendix is a summary of research that suggests how delinquency develops and its best predictors. The top three predictors identified in a literature review by Dr. Alan Leschied, who you'll be hearing from later in the month, are family, peers and criminal attitudes. You can understand how they all interrelate.
The family can play a critical role in the development of delinquency by transmitting antisocial values and attitudes. We work with kids whose parents are pushing drugs themselves or sleeping in late because they're out over the border doing a little cross-border shopping, and I don't mean just for stuff at the local Wal-Mart.
Parents may also contribute to delinquency by unsuccessfully disciplining antisocial behaviour. When you have parents who don't use positive discipline approaches, they may be completely lax in their discipline or overly harsh and punitive and then model the kind of aggressive behaviour that we're concerned about the youth of today exhibiting.
Parents can also only weakly encourage positive or pro-social skills. We work with families where the parents don't know how to solve problems, so we have to teach the parents and the youth at the same time. We had to teach a mom in the Belleville area how to set her alarm clock, because she'd call the local taxi service in the morning to ensure that she and her family got to school on time. These are basic life skills that we perhaps in our upbringing might take for granted, but we can't when we go into those families that have multiple stressors in their lives.
We need families that can effectively discourage association with negative peers. When that's ineffective, we end up with situations where it's 11 o'clock and we don't know where our children are, as the commercial from the Mormon Church suggested when I was out in Calgary. It's a sad truth of today.
Finally, families that undermine the youth-parental bond increase delinquency by either neglect or abuse.
If you've had a chance to look at that diagram on page 7, it summarizes some of the major predictors of delinquency. This is some of Gerry Patterson's work in Oregon. He's the biggest name in the field. It talks about the setting stage for the kinds of adults I'm working with now in Bath, since Monday.
They often start off with antisocial parents, unskilled grandparents, multiple stressors in the family and parents' substance abuse problems, so even if they have the skills, they're not watching it happen, because they're not with it, if you like. That raises a youth who kindergarten teachers tell us can be spotted at that age, in terms of difficulty paying attention, starting with small antisocial behaviours such as cruelty to animals, fire-setting and that kind of stuff.
By the next stage, when they're in elementary school, we start to see them being rejected by their normal peers. They don't follow the rules of the playground. The parents start to reject them. They create hassles for parents because the police are always at their door.
We were working with one family that was in subsidized housing and was creating so many hassles for all the neighbours that the neighbours organized a petition to get them evicted from Ontario housing. The police were always there, kids' skateboards were missing, etc.
This was a family where the dad was dying of terminal cancer and had just recently been laid off, before Christmas. The mom was completely overwhelmed with raising five children and was quite depressed. The children had learning disabilities and mental handicaps, and the least of their problems was this 12-year-old kid who was stealing bicycles. But that's the youth we were referred to. You work with the whole family in the process.
.1545
I wouldn't know how to work with just one youth in isolation, and yet that's often the way the system focuses on things. The focus is on dealing with the youth labelled as the young offender, when in fact we see it as a family issue. They need to learn how to manage their own kids.
So by providing support to them, by arranging for things like food bank support so they had something to eat over Christmas, and by providing several hundred hours of intensive work, we got to the point where they had learned a lot of skills along the way. And, I should add, a month after we finished, that included the ability to take Ontario Housing to court and win, on their own. They remained in their community in spite of the fact that they were a challenge to the neighbours.
Family approaches tend to be the best way to get at not only immediate treatment needs in the here and now, but to get at long-term prevention. If you think about it, you're treating the next generation. Some of the teenaged moms we've worked with are an example of that. You're getting in at the early stage, before they continue that cycle where they transmit the problems from one generation to the next.
The key characteristics of programs that work with families are - and I had better speed this up because I'm halfway through my fifteen minutes - structured programs that teach pro-social skills to both the youth and the parents: teaching kids how to follow instructions of teachers and parents, how to accept no for an answer and how to resist peer pressure, teaching parents how to set limits, teaching stress-management skills for the parents' self-nurturing, and working with the entire family, not just the young offender, so that we're doing preventive things for the siblings.
Probably the factor that you may hear the least about in this committee, I would suspect, but which in some ways is one of the most important, is the quality or the integrity of service delivery.
If you walked into a McDonald's and didn't know what you were getting from one day to the next, if on some days you got food poisoning and on some days you didn't, if on some days you got one-half of a burger, on some days a square burger and on some days a round one, what kind of a return customer would you be? But in fact, that's the state of the art in terms of human services in this country, in my minor opinion. What we really need to do is focus on supports to those services that ensure consistency and the highest possible quality.
To give you an example, in a minute or less, the teaching-family model has been kind of a mentor to us over the years. That system was developed 25 years ago in Lawrence, Kansas, and then developed in Boys Town. Some of you are familiar with the Boys Town story. Over $30 million in U.S. government money has been spent on developing manuals for how to hire and train staff. It's been the most carefully evaluated residential program in the continent.
There have been over seventy published reports on it - I could get into other details - and the concept is that they know how to develop, package and systematically copy a human service from one site in the country to another.
For many years, for about five of the last six years, we were working towards certification in the Teaching-Family Association, but in fact that fell apart last summer when several private foundations that were looking favourably on extending the funding to help us reach the last year of that certification pulled their funding out because they weren't about to - in their words - put good money after bad and risk investing anything in the social service system in Ontario, where it's uncertain whether programs that were not legally mandated, like mine, would continue.
That was one of the determining factors. Maybe it was time to leave. It took thousands of hours of staff time and our spare time to do a really good service, and the structural supports weren't there to make sure we could make it across the finish line.
I'm sure you've already heard from other experts like Tony Doob, the John Howard Society and others that there is no research evidence to support the use of legal sanctions like custody, threat of breaches of probation or punishment-oriented approaches like boot camps or routine casework, but that's how most of the money is spent.
You know better than I do that more than 75% or maybe 80% of federal dollars are spent on incarcerating perhaps 20% of young offenders. That leaves the rest of the money - which isn't a lot - for all types of community services, let alone the specialized ones I talk about. The challenge that needs to be posed is why we don't spend our money, whatever we've got, on what works rather than on what's convenient or currently popular.
.1550
As an example, according to Dr. Leschied, the recidivism rate for custody in Ontario is about 66%. So 66% of all young offenders released from a custody setting will reoffend within six months, but that's where we're spending the bulk of the $40 million a year in the young offenders system in Ontario.
There isn't any panacea. Just to give you an example, our modest community-based program has a recidivism rate of about 55% over 15 months. So we're not talking about a cure or any guarantees of a quick fix. The other factor, of course, is that it's much cheaper. As you may have seen in the appendix, for every dollar spent in our community-based program, we save the local Kingston area system for young offenders $1.48. So about $250,000 a year has been saved over the last five years in which we've been collecting our data in our spare time.
So there isn't a panacea, there's not one place, but it seems as if even small changes or improvements in recidivism are important.
As an example, a Rand Corporation study done twenty-odd years ago in the U.S. found that just a 10% reduction in recidivism will save the system $250,000 per youth over their 13-year criminal career. If you make a difference with a few young offenders, you can save the system lots of money. Of course it's hard to demonstrate that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
In the brief I've talked about what family preservation is. It's a very selected kind of community service. Basically, the goal is to get people out of the system, to reduce dependency. I think that's a goal all of us share, whether we sit on the left or the right of the centre point of the table: to help the family manage and socialize their own kids and to hold youths more accountable in a system in which people may wait for six or nine months before an initial offence is dealt with in the courts, which are clogged with, basically, a lot of minor offences, establishing in-home consequences. So if you break a window, you're grounded, and these are the ways we're going to work things out in the family, rather than simply letting it go through the courts and breeding the kind of cynicism we read about in the papers.
The other goal, of course, is to protect society. I would argue that in terms of the effectiveness rates as much as the money-saving opportunity.
About six years ago we got a chance to visit a program in New York called Family Ties. We went down with some reps from the local probation department and colleagues in the whole system. They have been so effective of late that with their small program they're able to demonstrate$2.2 million in residential costs saved for the city of New York in one year. In the era of shrinking budgets, New York City has been way ahead of Canada in that way.
Even under the current mayor they were able to triple the budget of their program, because they project savings of $11 million.
So giving the community-based high-quality service, not just any type of service, more money means that you save more money.
Since 1989 at the St. Lawrence Youth Association we've run this community support services program. We try to incorporate the best practices, which I've described earlier, within an intensive family preservation model. Basically, the jargon for this is trying to put the money at the front end of the system. Prevention is way down at the front end, but family preservation would be stretching the young offender system to spend more money with first-time young offenders who are high risk in terms of violence in the community and community issues, but serving them in their own homes after their first offence rather than waiting until they've been incarcerated three to five times, coming out, in a sense, hardened by the system.
Unfortunately, too, at that point the bond between the family and the kid is broken. You're really dealing with a kind of emotional divorce at that point, where the family says, ``Enough! The system should deal with my kid''.
By repeat incarcerations, by breaking the bonds between families and kids, we let the parents off the hook. The system then owns the kid. A study was done in Maryland where they tracked kids who were placed out of the home for six months or more, and it was found that the system would own these kids for four years. This is in child welfare in the States. So basically, by using a kind of out-of-home institutional placement, we guarantee greater cost to the taxpayer, with not necessarily the same effectiveness.
.1555
By the way, I'm not saying custodial sentences don't have a place. What I'm trying to say is that we need a range of options and we need to beef up the front end of the range, because right now it's heavily tilted at the back end. We have less and less money these days, so where do we want to spend the money?
In terms of community support services, when Leschied did his survey of Ontario programs we came out in the top ten in terms of the quality of the service we deliver. I've already mentioned the recidivism rates and the cost savings.
We've built in program evaluation from day one. There have been no extra resources or money for it, so it's been kind of fun just to track things on our own and to set up databases. We have some whizzes of assistants who've learned database programming in their spare time and set up47 interlocking databases and a 500-page manual. Actually, just a little bit of seed grants over the summer helped us, in terms of federal employment grants, to get summer students in to help us through on the cheap.
We've looked at consumer data, so we've asked youth themselves, probation officers, and parents what they think of us. We've looked at child behaviour problems, family functioning, and social skills, and we've found statistically significant or basically reliable changes in the areas that we'd hoped to see. One of the challenges, though, in the coming year is that this proven cost-effective alternative to custody is under the gun in our local area and provincially.
By way of background, I've been an evaluator for the province on foster care and on family preservation for the Ministry of Community and Social Services over the last half dozen years. I've looked and collected the outcome data on a broader scale, but I know about some of the challenges that are out there.
One of the big ones is how to justify ``frills'', as they're now being referred to - they're now trying to reframe that to ``investment services'' - in a time when there's limited money to do more than what's legally mandated. I'm sure you've heard about that in the paper, and that's kind of distressing, especially when we know that some of the high-quality frill services, or community-based prevention services, are actually making a dent in the costs that we can deal with later. You've all seen the Speedy Muffler commercial; you can pay me now or pay me later.
I guess what's happened is that I've left St. Lawrence Youth as a result of the current year's worth of uncertainty. That actually began years ago under some other regimes, but the notion is that the program is continuing. With my leaving, in effect, the funding has stabilized. We've been able to maintain not six of the staff, as was slotted for, but at least four. The hope is that the funding will continue.
The question is what comes after this current Ontario budget. Will there be a future for the program? I'm hopeful, but at this point I'm not willing to stake my job security on it, for the sake of my family.
I'm now working with adult offenders. Of course, the irony was that the first day on the job was Monday and the first person I was dealing with was an individual who'd come out of the Alfred Training School. The situation was that he had been physically and sexually abused as a kid and also by his parents. He didn't get the support services he needed and went on to do some horrific things in terms of the system down the road.
In some sense it's kind of like a flash forward. I'm getting to see what the system may be looking like years from now in terms of cost to taxpayers. I'm sure you have the figures on the $50,000-plus cost per year of federal correction incarcerations.
The federal government's role is to support the National Crime Prevention Council's brief and others like it in terms of a much broader initiative. It's not just on the shoulders of youth justice; we need a broader-based approach across child welfare and mental health.
I would also honestly suggest that the federal government take a serious look at what the U.S. federal government has done, especially given their current climate and concerns about money. In 1993 they passed the Family Preservation and Support Services Act, which authorized $1 billion over five years. This was a bipartisan effort to basically support families to ensure that there be a better hunk of services at the front end and that there be less reliance on residential care.
Canada can do it. Canada's already started to do it. We were the first family preservation program, I think in the country but certainly in Ontario, when we started eight years ago. It's certainly coming on, but it's more in spite of the current fiscal constraints. People began this with private funding.
.1600
Third, there is the whole issue - and you folks are far greater experts on it than I am - of just trying to redefine the cost-sharing plan with the provinces. What are the issues there? Only you know. The concept is one of trying to reduce the reliance, right now at 80-20 in favour of residential, and to at least go in for a 50-50 residential community well before we might get to Minister Rock's optimistic goal of 20-80, which flips it around completely. I certainly support that, but I would encourage at least the setting of some interim goals in the meantime, while holding the provinces accountable in terms of how they spend the money - our money.
I think it will save money and basically be more effective, but on one condition - and this is the tricky one, in which I'm right over my head: if value for money audits or program evaluation are built in. If you don't have that, then we're back to the McDonald's scenario in terms of different qualities of food in different places.
As a program evaluator and manager, at least, I can't imagine any rationales for not beefing up the current accountability process if we have a vision, and I guess that's your job in terms of what vision you set for the country, in terms of the policy shifts and the desired outcomes for public safety. Are we really going to make sure public safety is given the attention it deserves in a way that can be effective?
I know how tough evaluation is. I don't suggest there's one model that fits all and that it's an easy process, but in just the same way as you wouldn't dare dream of giving money to an agency without financial audits, how can we do that without some kind of content audit in terms of what we are actually getting, what kind of outcomes are happening? There are a lot of people - me, or others - who might talk a good story, but what's the service on the ground like for families? What are the outcomes for community safety? If we don't ask those questions, we may just be kidding ourselves.
In summary, I'm still an optimist in spite of all that. I believe we can enhance community safety if we're willing to provide some guidelines. There needs to be that structural support, and that's what you folks can do. For people in the field like me, offer the supports needed to re-engineer the young offender system and to ensure that only proven interventions are used. We've seen a lot of fads come and go, but those can be costly in the long run. Ensure that the system supports families in a comprehensive and coordinated way with other sectors like child welfare and mental health. Offer intensive family preservation services as one example of an alternate to custody. Try to shift the funding source to at least 50-50 residential-community in the interim. And make sure that whatever money is given out is evaluated.
I heard the Auditor General the other day. He was talking about the need to evaluate the$150 million a year spent on treating federal inmates. Although I've just started this job - I'm on my second day - I think it's important to recognize that we need to be evaluating what we're doing because, as we all would agree, spending money without checking outcomes is not going to have the kind of desirable impact on public safety that we want. We need to go that extra mile. We need to hold people accountable in effective ways, and in that way contribute to secure communities.
So my basic optimism stems from the fact that we have the technology, we know what to do. We have the knowledge, we know what services work. You folks have the levers in terms of the legislative and cost-sharing mechanisms. Although I'm sure the real world is more complicated than it appears to naive persons like me, the real issue is one of commitment or will. Are we prepared to use all those available means to help change the young offender system, and then narrow the gap from what we desire to what's actually happening on the ground?
Thank you very much. We're over by ten minutes.
The Chair: You're the only one keeping time.
We'll start with ten-minute rounds, and Mr. Langlois.
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois (Bellechasse): Madam Chair, I would like you to tell me about the terms psychologists generally use in their work to call those that are known as young offenders in criminal law. The justice system calls them young offenders. Could you give me a short list of the terms you use to refer to those kids with behavioural problems that you treat?
I would also like to have an idea of what our neighbours to the South think, if I may call them so.
.1605
[English]
Dr. Bernfeld: Well, I guess every sub-specialty has its favourite term. People coming from a medical tradition might use the term ``conduct disorder'' or ``antisocial''.
Actually, along the lines of clinical diagnoses, believe it or not, there's no such thing as one type of young offender. In fact it's just a legal label, as we know, and people are grouped under that label for all kinds of reasons.
There are four major types of delinquents, or young offenders, consistently identified in the literature. About one-quarter would be the kind we hear about every day in the news. We assume all young offenders are psychopaths or sociopaths with antisocial personality disorder or whatever term you want, but that's only a minority of the population.
Another group - and they're all of about equal size - would be basically subcultural delinquents, kids who are followers. They are kids who get into the young offenders system late in the day, in their teens, by following their poor models at school and getting into drugs, which leads to crimes. Usually they commit a lot of property crimes, rarely aggressive crimes, whereas the first group tend to be the more aggressive.
The third group - and this is one that completely doesn't fit the stereotype - is kids who are getting into problems because they're depressed. One of the ways people deal with depression, as adults or kids, is to seek out substances to self-medicate, whether it's alcohol, drugs, etc. People need to medicate themselves.
Often it's also because they're being physically or sexually abused. Before the Young Offenders Act was passed, under the Juvenile Delinquents Act we'd have young girls labelled as basically promiscuous and locked up indeterminantly in training schools for their lifestyle, but often they're running away from abusive environments. We now know that, and that's what the London Family Court data from Dr. Leschied says.
The fourth group is kids who have attention deficit disorder. Basically they're hyperactive kids. They do things first and then they think about it. Some of us do that too, even as adults, but that's a different story.
So there's not one type of young offender, and therefore there's not one type of solution that fits.
Years ago, when I was in Kingston, I got a chance to sit in on a ``scared straight'' type of program called Save the Youth Now at Millhaven. The data in the end said those kinds of approaches didn't work and in fact for some kids became a badge of courage: they could go to Millhaven for24 hours, be locked in the cell for a hour, sit next to lifers and then come out unfazed. So we know those don't always work.
There are certain types of kids who will have a different kind of prognosis and a different approach, but social skills, cognitive work, helping kids learn alternatives...
You need to reach kids where they're at, on the street. Programs like mine don't sit in offices like this. Kids never see the office of a psychologist. They never meet me. They are served by street workers who work in their own communities. My program serves kids in the six counties around Kingston. We'll be in a trailer park in Elgin one day and in a north Kingston subsidized housing project the next. The service is individualized and carefully wrapped around the family, the goal being to create a residential bed at home.
The concept is that we need individualization, rather than a standard formula, to meet all those different sub-types.
I hope that gives you some answer to your question.
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois: You must have heard about last weekend's incidents in Quebec City. A group of kids who had established their territory within the city felt that the police was being hostile to them and they reacted with violence. What type do you think they would be and what means do you suggest the Canadian community use to prevent or manage such a crisis that were not anticipated obviously?
The police, in particular the anti-riot squad, seemed to have been "caught with their pants down". It took them four hours to get to the spot because they had to shower before responding, or so we were told. Such reactions are decidedly quite special.
I will rephrase my question. Are such events foreseeable? What means do you suggest the community, including the police, use to put a term to those incidents?
.1610
[English]
Dr. Bernfeld: To be honest, I'm not familiar with the sequence of events that led to that, so I couldn't comment on it specifically, but that sounds very similar to what was on the Ontario news the other night. Some youths were evicted as squatters from a condemned building in Toronto by the police, and they tried to demonstrate at city hall to get the mayor's attention.
It strikes me that both incidents are similar in that they betray a society afraid of its youth. We see kids wearing their caps backwards, wearing black pants or baggy pants, hanging out at the convenience stores, being where they're not supposed to be and listening to loud music.
It's nothing unique, in one sense. There's a quote from Aristotle that I've now forgotten but that I use in my child development class. It talks about the youth of today being kind of obnoxious; they're scary, they're loud, they're strange, they don't understand and listen to us. So the so-called generation gap has not really changed much over the years. It's always been there.
Part of it is what options are we offering other than a police response? It's always nice to know we have the emergency room model for medicine. It would be as if the young offenders system only had an emergency room and not a general practitioner to go to for day-to-day business. We're always willing to build a hospital at the foot of the mountain when the cars are falling off the cliff, but we don't look at how we design the roads.
One of the best preventive factors that Dr. Dan Offord suggested, when he reviewed, in a major landmark study for the Ontario government, the children's mental health problem in Ontario, was that we need more positive recreation options. We don't necessarily need more psychologists; we don't need more social workers; we don't need more jails. What we need are places for kids to hang out and toss a ball around.
I've heard about some initiatives at the federal level and other areas, where people are starting to pick up on that. It's not high-profile and it may not sound high-tech, but in fact it's building in grassroots community support for kids and their lifestyle, trying to understand them before we're in the situation you describe or into police response.
It puts the police in an awkward position. That's why I also applaud the community policing initiatives and the program in Kingston called the VIP program, where police come around and talk to kids about the system. They get to know them when it's not a crisis, because using them that way is, I think, an inappropriate use of their good skills and resources, and it puts them in sort of an untenable position.
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois: On page 6 of the English version of your brief, you say that we have to support families and to offer intensive family preservation services. I would like you to clarify what you mean. Do you you think that there is enough money right now but that it is beeing poorly allocated, or do you feel that the financial resources are far from beeing sufficient? If it is the former, tell us how the money should be reallocated and which area could use more money.
Do you think that events similar to those that have happened recently and others you mentioned could have taken place at a time when you still had mostly traditional families - that is a father and mother with their children - and when fragmented families were few and blended families almost unheard of? Were incidents such as those happening nowadays less likely to happen in the good old days, in the 1950s and 1960s?
I am asking more than one question so that you understand where I'm coming from.
[English]
Dr. Bernfeld: The easy answer is always to call for more money, but I wouldn't have any credibility these days if I said that. It's a question of using the money most effectively.
As an example, I've read the Jasmin report, which looks at the young offenders system in Quebec, and a speech by Deputy Minister Thomson some time ago, where he talked about there being differences amongst the provinces as to how we spend the money we have, how we divert kids from the young offenders system. In Quebec, where more than 40% of youths are diverted from the criminal justice system pretrial, we are saving court costs and ultimately some residential costs by not dealing with them in the traditional way.
The question is why is Ontario doing much less? In fact, very recently, it didn't even operate much in the way of alternative measures. The first program in alternative measures in Ontario was set up by our local judge, George Thompson, 25 years ago in conjunction with people likeMerice Boswell, who has joined me from Kingston and was our former executive director, to try to provide cheap and community-based ways to deal with problem kids.
.1615
So there are ways to better ways to use our limited resources than simply the courts and the police and the jails. Let's save those for the hard-core kids; let's save those for the small percentage of kids who are committing the violent acts that our people are concerned about. Let's not spend on kids going to court for riding their bicycles on a sidewalk without a helmet, or for pushing people in snowbanks - these are real cases - or for stealing a box of pop tarts. One of my youths got eight months in open custody, which cost the Canadian taxpayer $24,000. If he was an adult, it would have been a $50 fine. Why do we have this double standard?
We're trying to show people that we're getting tough, but the irony is that we're spending limited resources on the wrong people. We should be targeting the system at the individuals who need the intensive services like those I'm describing rather than waiting until further down the road when they're multiple offenders and have cost the taxpayer $50,000 or $60,000, at which point we try to throw in something at the back end.
On the broken families issue and the changes, that's a hard one to answer. I've seen the movie Back to the Future, and I've sort of wondered if there is a way in which we could turn back the clock. I'm sure that from the expert testimony you heard presented before you, you've heard how the family has changed, either from Sandra Scarth at the Child Welfare League, or the other folks who have come to you over time.
I don't really know what to say about that. There certainly wasn't a need for that kind of service down the road. On the other hand, the pressures on the system weren't that great. Social workers used to have what's called a home visit worker 25 years ago. They would go to a mom and spend some time with her, hang out and show her how to manage household routines, not be overwhelmed, manage a budget, etc. There were single parents back then. It just wasn't well publicized on Leave It to Beaver, but there were; I know because my mother was one of those. So we had that kind of system operating more informally, but what's happened is that the caseloads have exploded.
Six years ago when we started, we did a little survey. There were 280 young offenders in the six counties around Kingston. Figures in the last four years have been consistently around the500 mark - almost double the number of young offenders in this system. There is still the same number of hard-core kids out there, but we've just added all this kind of fluff. A local judge who was with me on a panel at the John Howard Society suggested that there are lots of kids who come into court for penny-ante stuff. The tolerance level has changed. We would not be sending kids to court before for things that we are now. It clogs the system up, wastes valuable money and resources. We're spreading ourselves so thin, yet at the same time we're having to cut back.
Even if we had the same money, we'd be offering less quality services because there's just not enough to go around. Probation officers are struggling with double the caseloads that they had even three years ago. How can you serve fifty or sixty youths effectively on your caseload when a few years ago you were serving twenty or thirty? Back then, they could get out in the community and could come to meetings with the family - they used to do that with us in the evenings in their spare time to support us - but now they can't do as much as they want and are resorting to pushing paper. So that's kind of a quality issue and not so much a quantity issue. It's not a question of spending more money, it's how we are using the money.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Ramsay, you have ten minutes.
Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): Thank you, Madam Chair.
I wish to thank you for your presentation. You have many very good principles, I think, expressed within your brief.
You use the phrase ``toughening up the system''. I've always felt the toughest thing for me to do was to face those things that caused my behaviour to change. That, however, is what we want to do with the young offender or the youth who reaches that level of behaviour that comes to the attention of the authorities, whether it's in the school or even in kindergarten. Of course, you mention an awful lot about the family and about preserving the family, which I certainly appreciate, but I do not see what the justice system can do to preserve the family.
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I see the justice system as being the final program of government to protect society from youths or adults who have not, through their upbringing, been impressed sufficiently with the need to obey the rules and regulations and see the benefit that accrues to them by doing so, and who become a threat to society. To me, that is when the justice system clicks in.
To develop a justice system that would deal with the preservation of the family I think is outside the mandate of the justice system. You speak about the programs of prevention, particularly early prevention. In fact, I think it was Professor Carrigan from Halifax who appeared before our committee and said that the signs of the problems children have emerge at 18 to 36 months of age. That's very young. The justice system ought not to have anything whatever to do with that, but other programs of government ought to.
So we get to that point and we see that we're spending $10 billion to $12 billion a year on the justice system, both juvenile and adult, and that there are preventative programs that are working, not only in Quebec but in other areas. They're working; we have looked at some of the programs that are working. That means to me that we must direct more resources from the back end, lead it off into the front end. Otherwise we're simply going to continue to see the expansion of what I call the criminal justice industry.
At the same time, we're hearing that it's a very small percentage of our youth who get into difficulty, and then there's a smaller percentage of that small percentage who are really a threat to society, the violent young offenders.
I see the task of our committee as being to make recommendations to the justice minister that will recognize the need to reduce the numbers that are entering the criminal justice system by putting more resources into those preventive programs. That is not really the role of justice but the government must do it, our society must do it at all three levels of government, while at the same time we must wrestle with how to deal with a violent young offender, that small percentage of young offenders who come in contact with the law.
Do you think your presentation here is at the right place? Do you think it should be at the provincial level or perhaps at the federal level, but not at the justice committee? I say this with respect, because eventually if these programs fail then the justice system has to deal with it. There's a connection there and there's a very vested interest in reducing.
I'd like to see the alternative measures dry up, wither up through lack of use. I'd like to see our courtrooms and our prisons do the same. The only way we're going to do it is by implementing some of the principles you have articulated and that we've heard before.
I would like your comments on that. We can make recommendations to the justice minister in our report that will be submitted by the committee, but really should we not be addressing some of these concerns to the other programs of government that are mandated? If we don't have programs, then should we not be looking at creating those programs that will keep our youth out of the system?
Dr. Bernfeld: As a psychology undergraduate student, I always learned that when you had a multiple choice question and you had option (d), all of the above, more often than not it was a good idea to select all of the above. So I'm going to agree with everything you've said.
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I think you need a multi-level, multi-pronged strategy that brings in different ministries, different sectors and different age groups, like you're talking about. Getting everybody operating on the same wavelength is an important goal.
You're right, justice can't do it alone. I think it's going to take some shaping and structuring of the system over time, because what seems to be happening now is that things are going the other way. There's a lot of time and energy being spent, if you like, on low-risk offenders, which is clogging up the system and drying up the resources that could be spent on dealing with the high-risk people more effectively.
As much as I agree with you in the long run, I think we need some temporary measures - like income tax was temporary. I hope I'm wrong, but we need some way to ensure that there's an incentive to turn the ship of state around, whether it's federal-provincial cost-sharing... We need some monetary incentive that encourages people to develop the front-end things outside of justice.
But within justice the reality is that we're dealing with kids and families right now. What's always amazed me as a... I worked out in Alberta for seven years. Mike Ozerkevich left here as an assistant deputy minister of social services and became the DM out there. We set up the first family preservation program in the country out there in Calgary under his initiative, because the money came from a special budget that wasn't subject to the same political pressures as the local budgets were.
Unfortunately, innovative approaches need a little protection in the early phases, because the system has a lot of counter-control. There are a lot of people, as you point out, with vested interests in the status quo. Some people refer to the ``correctional industrial complex'', which is ironic, even where I'm working.
We need to build in those supports and we need to encourage them, but we also need to deal with the realities. Families are families, and whether somebody's labelled a child welfare case or a mental health case or a youth justice case...
Some of the data that Gus Thompson had out at Alberta Mental Health Services, when I was there years ago surveying the caseload, said that basically about 80% of the kids would be in any one of those three systems given any day of the week. So it depends on when you catch them on the merry-go-round. As you point out, there's a certain percentage of kids who are exclusive.
Mr. Ramsay: I would you like to comment in one other area as well.
We were out in Sydney and we visited the program or facility that was in Sydney Mines.Our observations of that program, mine at least, were that it was an extremely successful program in picking up kids who had fallen through the cracks and failed in school and so on. It restored their self-esteem and got them up and running again.
As the staff and the manager explained to us what was happening, and as we talked to those young people, it was very clear that they had more working for them than just a very sound program. When we asked the manager about that he said the real success of the program is tender loving care. I'm always afraid of bureaucracies, because there's not much tender loving care in bureaucracies.I would like your comments on that.
Yes, we can divert resources into programs designed with the best of intentions to bring about the change in behaviour that Sydney Mines has experienced, and that other programs have experienced as well, but it can only work if there is that real compassion and concern for the welfare of those children.
If we pour in hundreds of millions of dollars - and I think probably it will take that - how do we keep the bureaucracy from developing? The people who call the shots... not removing them two or three levels from the grassroots effort of their own program, where they do not express that kind of feeling we saw that was so prevalent in the Sydney Mines facility.
Dr. Bernfeld: Just as a quick aside, the literature on effective services for kids, especially on family-based services, is really clear. There are certain characteristics you must have in order to have an effective program. It's not just a bunch of technicians running around with clipboards counting things. You must have people who care, you must have people who are willing to cross bureaucratic boundaries, and you must have people who are highly trained and supervised. You need the quality assurance systems there.
Mr. Ramsay: Are they there? Are those people there?
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Dr. Bernfeld: You need to have an innovative kind of champion in the local service context who's going to support them.
One of the things your committee can offer in some fashion, I would think, first of all, is leadership. Second, there should be some kind of structural support for people who are, as you put it, bureaucrats to give these programs a chance. There are programs out there that are kind of operating under the table, if you like, without a lot of recognition, doing the good works you're describing, and often at very low cost to the public.
Our own youth diversion program in Kingston, another program, has 200 volunteers.It operates on a $100,000 budget and serves hundreds and hundreds of youths and families every year for pennies. All they need is a little encouragement and support. Yet provincially at least, the current climate is such that people are looking strictly at what's legally mandated. Programs like that one or mine are not legally mandated.
So it needs some fiscal support and protection. Basically, rather than simply a top-down approach of pouring money in and encouraging people to do small-scale projects and building from the ground up, as the system has traditionally done, more of it should be done in a way that makes it worth while for the bean counters in Toronto, let's say provincially, to encourage that kind of stuff. We've had federal auditors come into our program periodically to look at how many bodies we're serving every year, but nobody has ever genuinely been counting our outcomes.
Unless that starts to happen and there are outcomes for kids and families, there often are people who will just get on a bandwagon, whether it's family preservation or boot camps or whatever, and they'll just take a run with it. Then you don't have the quality or the commitment. It's just seen as a fast way to get money for whatever is in vogue, whether it's pink cells for prisoners or whatever the case may be.
So you're right that the caring and the human side has to be there, but we do have the technology and the knowledge to support that. Are we willing to actually encourage that to happen? It happens on a sporadic basis. We need the structural supports.
Here is what they do in the States very well. They have technology dissemination centres that are kind of centres of excellence that spread ideas. They're often usually at universities. That's a good thing in some ways, but sometimes it's divorced from practice. It would be nice to encourage odd ducks or black sheep who are trying to go against the trends and do good services in spite of a system that, although it pays lip service to the things you're describing about outcomes, in fact is really concerned about maintaining people's funding and covering them from any eventuality. That's the challenge.
There's a great quote that you might enjoy. I'll get you a copy of it. Elizabeth Schorr wrote a book called Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage. She's the wife of Daniel Schorr, the CBS anchorman. She said that the function of bureaucracy is to institutionalize the suspension of individual judgment. That's what you're concerned about as well: ``The rule book says...'' That's the kind of straitjacket, frankly, that innovative programs struggle with all the time. The ones you describe don't flourish in those circumstances. They need some freedom.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. DeVillers, ten minutes, more or less.
Mr. DeVillers (Simcoe North): We've heard from a number of different witnesses and from the media, etc., that there's a suggestion that parents should be held responsible for the criminal acts of their children. In the context of your work in the family, where would that concept or proposal fit on the accountability side?
Dr. Bernfeld: It's a very narrow perspective on the broader issue of the family's role in preventing problems in the first place or holding their own youth accountable for them once they occur. Unfortunately, it's likely to drive a wedge between kids and families at a time when you're trying to build bridges - that's often where the relationship is - and decrease the family's motivation to be supportive of the kinds of things we want to see.
Say you're going to charge parents. That option has always existed. I've talked to individual correctional staff who feel that in some cases the parents should be charged. The difficulty is that there isn't anything to suggest that you change behaviour from either a punishing approach or a threat of punishment. There's nothing in the literature reviewed by Alan Leschied andDon Andrews, upon which $900,000 of Ontario taxpayers' money was spent, that suggests legal sanctions and a legalistic approach work.
That's ironic, because I come from a family of three lawyers. But I decided to be the poor cousin and go this route.
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I certainly respect the role that the legal system has to play, and good, creative lawyers with whom we work will often informally encourage parental cooperation. It's kind of a voluntary/coercive process. When you start to formalize things, create two camps, and polarize the situation, any kind of relationship you have is out of the window, along with any potential for real, serious change.
What you want to do is get families to allow you into their homes, in a sense, to work with them, support them and understand their situation. Maybe mom has a drug. We've worked with moms who have, say, been multiply addicted to tranquillizers and alcohol. They disappear for a weekend. They leave their kids in the care of the Children's Aid, and the youth goes out and commits an offence. You can charge that mom for negligent parenting, as they've done in the States and in various jurisdiction.
That's certainly a politically popular one under certain environments. But the problem is that you still have to work with that family next week or next month if you really want a change. There is no one-shot, quick way to do it. It's just hard, slogging work on the ground.
Think about any of the kinds of family issues we've all dealt with as people. Think about people in your own lives whose behaviour you tried to change. You've known them for decades or for many years. They're partners, parents, and kids. It's hard work. A one-shot kind of charge at a solution isn't really going to help. In fact, it will hasten the disintegration of the family. The taxpayer will end up footing the bill. Unfortunately, that's the sad outcome.
Mr. DeVillers: So you see the involvement of the family as more of supporting the family rather than involving the family on the accountability side of the ledger. Would that be a fair statement?
Dr. Bernfeld: I think that's a way to go. I think that when things have reached the point such that the behaviour of the kid is so much a threat to society, then there's not much point in getting the family involved. That's where we get involved with the youth as an individual and hold him or her accountable.
But in the early stages, you want to nurture that relationship. We work in conjunction with cooperative probation officers and crown and defence attorneys to kind of develop a little master plan that's going to help manoeuvre this youth and take the situation a little bit more seriously, which is what you want to see happen, but not blow all the work that's been done up until now.
Mr. DeVillers: My next question involves the controversy over crime statistics and the use of them. I sponsored a symposium in my riding just recently and one of the panellists was psychologist Dr. Marnie Rice from the Mental Health Centre in Penetanguishene. I also had panellists from the victims group CAVEAT. They had juxtaposed opinions on the state of reporting statistics, the method of reporting and exactly what state of safety or concern there should be out there. Have you been involved in that in your work, and do you have any comment for us?
Dr. Bernfeld: I'll just mention two quick things. One is that 35 years ago the total number of youths in Canada who committed homicide as an offence, which is very hard to fudge or exaggerate or change, was 55. Can anybody guess what the figure is 30 years later?
An hon. member: 55.
Dr. Bernfeld: It's 56. When you consider the population increase of youth over 30 years, we have not exactly experienced a crime wave. There are more than 70,000 young offenders in the criminal justice system in the country, and that whole system has exploded in size for reasons thatI was mentioning: community tolerance is lower, we take a more litigious route with kids, and we charge them for things.
A probation officer told me in Ottawa that years ago, if someone were to roll some garbage cans around on Halloween, he'd be taken home to his parent, who was usually the dad, and dealt with in a less-than-appropriate manner, let's say, by the current child welfare legislation, but it was not something that involved the courts, the judges, etc.
This becomes a charge of mischief. People become young offenders and get pulled into the system. Then things start to snowball for some kids. They get rejected by their peers.
We've had a high school track star in a small community near Ottawa - it was the judge's home town, unfortunately - charged with assault and sentenced to nine days of secure custody. This was because he was an A student and he didn't want him to miss basketball practice or anything else.
But he had an advantage. He had this social background on his side that led to some favour in his case. A lot of kids don't, so they get pulled into the system. It costs more money. It creates more problems. In terms of statistics, they're kind of misleading. They don't give us the true picture, because society's tolerance has changed and reporting practices have changed tremendously.
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There was one other fact I was going to mention, but I've forgotten it at the moment. I'll come back to it. Do you you have anything else?
Mr. DeVillers: In your summary, you make reference to the use of proven interventions to treat and prevent crime. Could you just give us some examples of such creatures?
Dr. Bernfeld: Okay. Things that tend to work are structured behavioural programs that teach skills to kids and parents, whether it's vocational skills, parenting skills for parents, social skills, or anger management skills.
These are the kinds of things that we picked up over time. Most of us did it by modelling or watching our parents in action. But what's happened to some kids is that, first, they haven't had the opportunity, or the kinds of models they had aren't positive and pro-social, so they've learned the wrong kind of skills, if you like.
The notion there is a teaching one. It's the way we take school learning seriously. We don't offer school just for exceptional kids. Perhaps what we need to be doing is teaching these kinds of things in a regular classroom curriculum. There are some examples of those positive things.
But when you're dealing with a youth who has already broken the law, one of the things that's worth while checking out is the reason for the offence. What's behind all that?
It's not as an excuse. It's not to say that they've had a bad childhood so they're off the hook, but if you're going to be effective in targeting and intervention, you need to know as a surgeon where your scalpel is directed rather than just tossing it in the air.
That's the notion behind it. There is a good literature out there. We have the technology. We know what works, in spite of people who are saying that nothing works. There actually is a lot of evidence. Consider family-based programs, like the one I described, which was the other example in which you target the family too.
Mr. DeVillers: Right. The third item under your summary to which you referred was family preservation services. What are examples of those?
Dr. Bernfeld: Those are services like mine, which means short-term ones that run for two or three months. Those are very intensive. So in those two or three months, each front-line worker serves no more than two families. For 40 hours a week, they're working with two families. The three months are intensive, then there's a one-year follow-up. We have booster sessions in there. So we follow up when dad comes back from the Gulf War. The families change, so we have to get back in there.
August is a time when we're back in with families, because school is coming and we have to prep kids for it. Those services are very short-term, but they're aimed at trying to prevent this crisis that's threatening to drive the family apart.
Most families don't want us involved at the beginning, as an example. They want to get the kid out and put him in custody. They want to be off the hook.
Mr. DeVillers: What budget are those services financed with?
Dr. Bernfeld: They're financed under provincial social services. A program like mine, for example, costs about $500,000. In the young offenders system in the six counties around Kingston, that runs over $5 million. We're the only major, intensive, community-based service in these six counties.
So most of the $4 million plus is going toward custody for a tiny fraction of the kids. That's where all the resources are tied up. There is no way and no incentive, of course, for people to change that.
It's like Field of Dreams; if you build the facility, they will come. So in Kingston we built the smallest secure-custody facility in the province, with only 10 beds, because we knew if we built a 20-bed one, it would be full all the time.
It kind of forces the system to look more creatively. But as long as the capped funding around custody is open-ended, as long as it's dollar for dollar and people just get a dollar federally for every dollar they spend provincially locking kids up, then there's a disincentive to offer community-based things. We've got the financial incentives working backward.
Mr. DeVillers: Back to Mr. Ramsay's point that maybe we should be working together on getting the money into the prevention end of it.
Dr. Bernfeld: I certainly agree. On the other hand, one of the easiest ways to express resistance to something is to sort of fob it off onto another department. Yes, I agree that it's important for everybody in the system to be held accountable for using taxpayers' dollars wisely. Prevention is one way to do that.
On the other hand, when you're working with a young offender and the family, about one-quarter of the young offenders referred to us come from families that have kids of pre-school age. So do we ignore the impact of this youth problem? We've had some kids who were born in the Prison for Women or dads who were out of phase two or provincial jails.
You might call those high-risks families. In fact, the local probation officer will refer Joe Blow because in the small town of Merrickville the family name is very well known. When a 14-year-old kid walks into a well-known restaurant there and shouts across the table ``I'm going to kill you'', we get a referral for a mischief charge, which might be a penny-ante offence in some sense, but in this case, because of the family name, this is a significant event. We want to get in there with that family and try to deal not only with the young offender but with everybody else who's involved.
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When you see, as we do, child welfare issues, mental health issues, and school issues all tied up around needy families, it's important to provide that kind of support. We should be putting our money into the high-risk families rather than into the ones that are into the minor stuff, and the system spends all its energy on that, I'm afraid.
The Chair: Thanks, Mr. DeVillers.
Mr. Ramsay, you have five minutes.
Mr. Ramsay: This is only a five-minute round, so perhaps we can share the five minutes.
I want to touch on the consequences of our behaviour, of our actions. It comes to mind as a result of your comments with regard to what might be termed as the negligence of the parent, which leads to the commission of a crime by a young offender, and whether or not that parent should somehow be held accountable by the system.
There are some who have appeared before the committee who do not believe in deterrents; they believe deterrents don't work. When I was a young kid my mother told me not to touch the hot stove. It was red-hot and it was beautiful and I didn't know much about it, but she told me not to touch it. If it hadn't been for the consequences of touching that hot stove, I'd have probably burnt my finger on it...because I touched it. But I only touched it once and Mother never had to tell me again.
When I look at the suggestion that there should be no criminal consequences for negligence that leads to criminal conduct on behalf of our children, I wrestle with that and I have some concerns with that.
I go back to the notes I made on April 23 when we were talking to Dave MacDonald, the manager of Sydney Mines. He talked about respect and responsibility and responsibility and respect, going hand in hand. The principle of consequences is there. With the display of responsibility in doing whatever it is before the child, whether it's in a math class or whatever, came the respect, not only from his peers but also from the teachers and the staff. There is a direct relationship to the consequences of your actions. It's either good or it's bad.
When it comes to criminal actions, do you not feel there has to be some kind of consequence that will deter kids from touching the hot stove?
Dr. Bernfeld: That's a very tough question to answer in a few minutes.
Mr. Ramsay: Take your time.
Dr. Bernfeld: In terms of consequences, it's interesting that public perception of the word ``consequence'' is always negative. In fact, the psychologist's definition could be negative or positive.
In terms of your mom, using that as an example, what helped you listen to what she had to say wasn't just fear; there was also a positive relationship there, a trust, a mutual respect. In a sense, there was a lot more positive stuff tying you to learn, and that's what socialization is. That's how kids get socialized by families.
In the families we're talking about, we're talking about apples versus oranges. What works for you may not work quite as well with other people. These are kids, for example, who have been in a sense consequenced for their negative behaviour, sometimes super harshly, more harshly than the criminal justice system could ever do, in terms of having been beaten or neglected or abused, etc. I don't have to tell you that. I'm sure you've heard the stories.
What's happened is that the bond between parent and kid is gone, so the kid's not willing to learn what the parent has to teach at that point. Often by the time we see them in the justice system they have reached a point where the bond is very tenuous at best.
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If you charge a parent with neglect or convict a parent of neglect, what we've seen in the child welfare system is that it doesn't necessarily solve the problem in terms of child abuse and neglect. It may provide a holding action and send out a clear message, but it may also end up driving the kid into foster care, into the care of the province or the state, and it often does.
We should be trying to support families in a positive way, trying to encourage them and give them some of the resources. We should understand by spending time listening to what's going on in their lives, not in a namby-pamby way because we're bleeding-heart liberals, but honestly. If people know that you really care about them, to use the TLC analogy, you can go so much farther than you can through fear.
We have programs operating currently in Ontario where the kids are being treated in a concentration camp atmosphere that's mandated through fear. They're being asked to stand for five hours at a time, to shovel manure... They're being told to stand outside in the evening if they've acted out because ``You're bug bait tonight, Jack. You've acted out today, so we're going to let you get bitten.''
Those things are happening in the province. The trick is that the punishment temporarily suppresses behaviour right away. I doubt if there was much delinquent behaviour going on in concentration camps; at least, I haven't asked my father-in-law that. He's been there.
On the other hand, when people get out, they haven't learned anything better. Punishing parents for inappropriate behaviour may temporarily suppress what's going on out of fear, but you're not going to hook them into learning the positive things they need to learn, because they're going to be fed up.
Mr. Ramsay: Why did I never touch the stove again?
Dr. Bernfeld: There was an immediate consequence. That's right. One of the other issues -
Ms Torsney: She didn't incarcerate you.
Dr. Bernfeld: - one of the challenges, when the system's clogged with people who shouldn't be there, is that kids wait for three, six or nine months to get a sentence. If parents start waiting for three, six or nine months, it will breed the same cynicism that we're concerned about in our youngsters.
I guess you breed respect for the system by supporting people through it as opposed to using it as a hammer. Those are my values speaking. Here's a quote from Abraham Maslow: ``When the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like it's a nail.''
I think the challenge... You said the youth justice system shouldn't be used for some of those other things that should be the responsibility of the other system. In one sense I agree with you. We should be treating the serious cases, but we should be building in the supports for the families and not relying on a legal sanction approach if we want to encourage parents to trust us.
Right now parents are pretty cynical about all kinds of things. The last thing they need is either an expert psychologist telling them what to do - which I'd never do - or a law-oriented person saying that they are going to be punished for being lousy parents. You'll get no cooperation. You'll get a lot of bitterness and the problems will just go underground. That's my fear.
The Chair: Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Ramsay.
Dr. Bernfeld: It's a tough question.
The Chair: Don't encourage him. Don't encourage that man.
Ms Torsney, you have five minutes.
Ms Torsney: First of all, I commend you for the work that you're doing. It seems to be very appropriately focused. It's always amazed me that one of the most important jobs people are ever given is the job of being a parent, and yet there are really no qualifications beyond being able to produce a child. Let me think about what I was going to say--
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Ms Torsney: Do you think we would be better off if we included more programs for conflict resolution and parenting skills early in children's school education?
Dr. Bernfeld: Certainly. There are examples, like working with pregnant teenaged moms who are real high-risk groups in terms of either abusing or neglecting their kids, or the Better Beginnings, Better Futures kind of thing, or the federal Brighter Futures initiative. Those stand out.
Some of you may have heard of a program called Quest, which hasn't been properly evaluated, and is sponsored by the Lions Club International. Right now, about half a million kids every year get that kind of instruction in regular classrooms on things like decision-making and problem-solving, and resisting pressure to get into drugs and commit crimes, etc.
It's part of the regular high school and elementary curriculum. It's not identified as being for high-risk kids only. It's just part of the three Rs. Maybe it's a function of some of the changes that were questioned earlier, about what's happened in society. It was pointed out earlier that we need some of these things to make sure we're getting in early enough with kindergarten and with grades one, two, and three - before we're into the justice system, where it's very expensive.
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I'm sure you've all heard the Fraser Mustard statistic about how for every dollar spent, you save six to seven later on. My program is only saving about $1.50, so we're not having the same impact as the earlier interventions.
So you need that for sure, but somewhere along the way there's going to be a small group of youths who, even if we have a perfect system that's redesigned, are going to need some kind of intensive supports if we're not going to have to deal with them in the adult system.
Ms Torsney: It's interesting, because there are examples in our area of good school programs in which the children learn peer mediation and other skills. I've heard from parents who have said that their children - brothers and sisters - have turned around while playing and said to their mom or dad that they need a peer mediator because they are having a discussion or a conflict, even though they may not exactly know what it means. In fact, just by having that presence of what they call the peer mediator - in this case, the parent - they were able to work out their own solution.
So they understand how to resolve conflict now without even getting into this area, this complicated procedure, even figuring it out with just the two of them looking at each other and with this other person in the room. It seems that we could avoid a lot of legalistic processes across all of our businesses and everything else if we could get that program going right across the country.
The other thing I wonder about is the SMARTRISK Foundation. Do you know about it? They're trying to teach children how to evaluate risks and to get the gear or training to use their heads, basically. It was started by a guy named Robert Cohn. He was a heart specialist who became tired of harvesting hearts from children who had died in accidents. They don't believe accidents are accidents. They believe they're preventable and predictable, so they're trying to teach children how to calculate risks, whether it has to do with their physical person in a car accident or whatever else.
But it's interesting that it has the same kind of psychological basis as some of the stuff you're doing, which is how to teach children - or adults, since you work with families - how to make healthy decisions and to understand consequences, because there are always consequences, both good and bad, as you say. We, however, don't focus on those decision-making skills, whether it's in our education system or in life in general.
Dr. Bernfeld: Just to relate it to Mr. Ramsay's point, I guess one of the points you're making is that to some extent all of these justice issues end up being projective tests for whatever value system we're coming from. If your values and my training are coming at it differently, it's hard for me to speak your language. There isn't a translator who could do that.
I don't think I gave a fair answer to your question, but I guess my training and my background are such that I believe in the strengths of people and believe that people do things because they lack skills. Basically, so-called troubled families and so-called dysfunctional families - I don't like that term - are people just like us who are living in situations where they're being pounded out regularly, where they don't have enough food.
The 45-year-old man I was assessing yesterday grew up in a family situation in which there were rats, physical and sexual abuse, and the whole bit at home. In our institutional settings, my goal as a clinician in such a case is to try to change things, to try to form a relationship with people, to try to engage them and then teach them the things that are missing. If they are not missing things, then you work at a different level. We'll work on having them reduce their stress levels so that they can learn the stuff or use the skills they already have.
When I work with these families, I often say there but for the grace of God go I. It's really hard, for me anyway, to look at it any other way. Basically, I to try to form an alliance or a coalition with people, and together we tackle things as colleagues. I do it that way rather than coming in as a psychologist who is an expert who's going to diagnose people and wave his magic wand, because nobody can do that. Even the best treatments out there won't make the difference that we want in terms of making safer communities. So if you look it as a skill deficit, I'm honestly more comfortable with that because that's what the literature has told me, that's part of my training.
There are some people for whom this doesn't work. There may be some people out there who need a different approach. I would make sure, however, that we are giving this former approach our best shot, because if it doesn't work, locking people up is just going to keep the bill running.
I think we're dealing oftentimes with really handicapped families, in the sense that they have social handicaps and need that same kind of attention and support. If they don't get it, then we pay the price. We create that underclass that we've heard about.
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Ms Torsney: Well, good luck at Bath.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Dr. Bernfeld, thank you for a very uplifting and positive approach to the subject. I think you are very articulate and that your offerings have been very helpful to us.
We're adjourned.