Most of the police services...and certainly when I worked in Calgary with the police service, we had what they called a “serious habitual offender comprehensive action plan”; it then got shortened. The comprehensive action piece was the most effective intervention we saw. It brought child welfare folks and education folks together.
We saw with those young people that they were persistent, but they were predominantly without any other supports in their community. When you were able to build those supports around them, you could actually see a change. That was the way the Calgary police became supportive of a program--I was actually with John Howard at the time--where we worked with those kids and did intensive intervention and support for them.
I don't think the current changes to the legislation will achieve that at all. I do think some of the suggestions around moral blameworthiness, and increased focus on rehabilitation, and increased focus on getting those kids out of that system and into a more appropriate service base is important. The difficulty is that most of those service bases have been underfunded. The stripping of resources in order to fund criminal justice responses has happened at the youth system and has happened at the adult system. I'm not sure you can achieve that through legislative change, except through the continued presumption of not having them come through the system, all the more so when you're talking about aboriginal young people.