Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Susan Reid, and I am a criminology professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I'm also the director of the Centre for Research on Youth at Risk, which houses the eastern hub of the Students Commission of Canada and the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement.
I have been studying the impact of juvenile justice legislation since the introduction of the Young Offenders Act, so I've been looking at this over a few years. I hope that my comments will help you as you move forward in the promotion of progressive youth justice legislation in the years to come.
“Why would you ask me what could be changed about the young offender system? I'm just another guy in blue clothes.” This was a comment from a group of young men I went to speak to in our only closed custody facility in the province, the New Brunswick Youth Centre. I responded to this young man by telling him that I was very interested in what he had to say because I wanted to share his comments with those who were making changes to the legislation. I told him I believed that the Youth Criminal Justice Act valued young people in its philosophy and principles, and it was important that young offenders' voices be considered when the government deliberated changes to the law that would directly impact them.
I am here today to let that young man's voice be heard, and to provide you with some pause related to the research and evidence on some of the proposed amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
I had the privilege of participating in one of the national round tables hosted by the Minister of Justice in the summer of 2008. At that time, I expressed my sincere appreciation for the thoughtful work that had gone into the creation of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. This legislation, unlike its predecessor, showed young people across Canada that they were important, that they were to be seen as valued and contributing members of society, and that we as a country believe in the potential of all our young people. I think we took the lessons learned with the problems with the Young Offenders Act and tried to create a piece of legislation that would be progressive.
I am afraid that in the proposed amendments, with the introduction of deterrence and denunciation to the principles of sentencing, we are headed back to that time when we had the dubious honour of being the country with the highest youth incarceration rate in the world.
I am saddened by the thought of more young people being held in custody, when our research evidence shows that incarceration does little to reduce offending patterns of young people and in most cases increases the likelihood that a young person will reoffend upon release. I believe the impact of such policies will be felt most by our most vulnerable members in our communities: the poor, the disenfranchised, and our first nations youth. I am worried that the message we will be sending to young people, with such principles as deterrence and denunciation, will tell them they are “throwaways”—discarded because we couldn't take the time to apply evidence-based research and practice.
I was very critical of the Young Offenders Act for its lack of priority placed on the principle section. When we created the Declaration of Principle in the Youth Criminal Justice Act, we were clear: we created a sequential approach to youth justice, where we were going further and further into the system, so that we started with the diversion of young people for minor offences, giving tools to the police to be able to move forward, with more severe and serious interventions as we dealt with more serious young offenders.
The final layer in section 38 sets out the purpose and principles of sentencing that underscore the long-term protection of society—just sanctions that hold young persons accountable and promote reintegration and rehabilitation.
The most successful parts of the legislation are in the area of extrajudicial measures and extrajudicial sanctions. Young people and professionals alike applaud that area. A recent meta-analysis of 29 studies in the United States that included over 7,000 juvenile offenders over a 35-year period conclusively showed that the more that justice processing happens to juveniles, the greater the likelihood of recidivism. Our best response is what we're doing right now—diverting minor offenders out of the system.
I also think it's great that the RCMP has developed a national strategy in terms of providing their officers with tools to be able to use evidence-based practice to screen offenders when they come before them to see about their suitability to be referred to an extrajudicial program.
When I was consulting with the police over my report on extrajudicial measures, they did express concern to me about the lack of record keeping in terms of the number of times young people have been placed with an extrajudicial measure, and they really would like to...and will applaud your recommendation before us about keeping track of those records. I'm concerned about that because the young people who are being diverted out of the system are not in the system and shouldn't have a record at this point. But it's the least of my concerns with the proposed amendment, to be perfectly honest.
The importance of protecting rights under the Youth Criminal Justice Act is also underscored in the preamble to the declaration in terms of underscoring the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It draws attention to us as well about the value of diversion from criminal proceedings, looking at extrajudicial solutions, and ensuring that we look for social and educational interventions. We must remind ourselves of the Beijing Rules, which also guide our choices under the UN convention; they talk to us about using juvenile detention in an institution as a measure of last resort.
One of the problematic areas with regard to this CRC is the reservation that we've had under section 37, which allows us to house young offenders in adult institutions. In the province that I come from...I want to applaud the number of young people who have been removed from that institution. But when we had empty beds, they had to fill them, of course, because it's cost effective, and they've chosen, on a ratio of 5:1, to put adults in those cottages within sight of young offenders. That not only is in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but it also reduces the programming that young offenders are allowed to participate in.
I want to applaud the government's insistence on the proposed changes that youth under the age of 18 who were given a custodial sentence will serve it in a youth facility, and I want to draw your attention to subsection 93(1), which also talks about the fact that we can keep young people in youth facilities until they're 20. Both of these sections are definitely in keeping with the philosophy and principles of the YCJA, and we should really underscore that.
However, I don't like section 92, which talks about the ability to make an application to the courts if it's in the best interest of the young person and the long-term protection of society to transfer that young person to an adult facility. I very much believe if we didn't have that provision we might have prevented the death of one of our New Brunswick youth, Ashley Smith, who took her life in one of our adult correctional facilities.
A University of Pennsylvania criminologist was quoted in the media in the 1990s referring to young offenders as “super predators”. John DiIulio predicted that the crime wave of the 1990s was going to be much more serious, and super predator became the common term for referring to young offenders, with a flurry of very punitive policies in the United States around dealing with young offenders. More recently, he's expressed his regrets for the characterization of young people in an article he published in The New York Times, which I was pleased to see, where he acknowledges that his predictions about the growing threat of youth crime did not come to pass.
I'm worried that the government, with its proposed amendments, is falling into the trap of what happened in the United States in an effort to do something because we believe Canadians want something to happen, and that we gain our knowledge from the few sensational cases that draw utter disgust from the public. Moral panics, as we have seen through history, are transitory and will subside over time. This is not to diminish the pain and the anguish that is caused to the victims and the families of those who have had a horrendous incident happen to them. On the contrary, I really strongly believe in the value of making sure that we match our interventions for those young people who come before us in such a way that we know that we're basing it on evidence and that we're doing the best possible thing for our young people and for the victims and the families of those young people who have come before our courts.
We know from our research evidence that providing too high a dose of correctional intervention to low- or moderate-risk offenders will actually increase the propensity for crime. We must ensure that we continue to promote this evidence-based practice and the idea that we think about the proliferation of news stories and take them into account. That's the dose the public is getting about what we do with our young people.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is very clear on the idea of privacy, and that we need to be thinking about not publishing names in newspapers. I'm nervous about the idea of lifting the ban on that, because I see that as in direct violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I'm also concerned about media attention and recent marathons on the A&E entertainment network on Beyond Scared Straight. They're publicizing a show that talks about a program that we know from academic literature doesn't work. The public is going to see that as something that is cost-effective and perhaps would help in terms of reducing crime by young people, but we know that--