Let me give you an example. When I was director of the youth detention centre, I found out that about 92% of the offences being committed by youths who were coming into custody were happening late at night. We had an NBA team in town in those days, so I went to them. I received federal funding and provincial funding to start a program that I called Night Hoops. The program went on late at night on Fridays and Saturdays. To get into it, you had to be referred by a police officer, a probation officer, a social worker, or a school counsellor. That was the only test. Most of these players had never been on a team.
The Grizzlies gave us 30 season's tickets, which we used as an incentive for these kids. My favourite story is the one where one of the kids came to me and said, “I need two tickets, Gord.” I knew he already had two, but he told me, “I want to take the police officer who arrested me and his wife to see the Grizzlies.” It was neat to see the dynamic shift with respect to that.
If I'd been way smarter in those days, I'd have done some random sampling. I'd have taken half of the kids who were referred to us and put them into Night Hoops, and the other half I would have just tracked. But I wasn't that smart in those days. Anecdotally, when a child comes into custody, it can cost us $130,000 a year for just the custody portion. Then there's court and all of those things. If, through the program, we had stopped just two of them from that, we would have more than paid for the program. But I can now only report to it anecdotally, because I didn't do what I should have done if I'd had better rigour and insight at that point in time.
That's an example of what happens, and of what I think can happen, in terms of prevention. The proposal from the BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres has the same model idea in place, only they are looking at children coming into the care of the state and the significant challenges there. We have about 9,200 kids in the care of the state. Over half of them are first nations. They are the fast-growing cohort of youth in our province and I think across Canada as well. There are significant issues with respect to them and their overrepresentation, as you're well aware, in our institutions provincially and federally. I think this is also an opportunity to start looking at some of the issues around that.