Justice committee  In terms of decriminalizing the drugs that street gangs use, I don't see how that could occur. To think that cocaine or crystal meth or pills could be decriminalized doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In terms of what our best avenue is, certainly the suppression and the policin

Justice committee  From my experience in working with them, at ages 11, 12, and 13, they start to experiment collectively. They recognize that they're having fun and that they're not having as many problems. It becomes a coping mechanism for them by the time they're adults.

Justice committee  I would assume that many of our street drugs are made available through organized crime, biker crime, yes.

Justice committee  I think your question relates very much to Mr. Dechert's previous question in terms of how this population is different. The fact that they come from very dysfunctional backgrounds--poverty, emotional, financial, etc.--is actually in a strange way a reason for hope in working wit

Justice committee  Thank you for that question. I think it's a really important and difficult question. As you were asking it, I could feel my heart get heavy, because it's not always possible to keep them safe. The discussions and conversations that we have, the offenders and I, are very much arou

Justice committee  While they're on parole, yes, they have curfews as well.

Justice committee  Parole officers would certainly be interested in the vocational and job-training part of it. We also have staff in the parole services who assist in finding employment. It is actually a very, very significant part of them being able to change.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I work with the adults, so they're 18 and older.

Justice committee  Are you speaking about that relative to people who are not incarcerated?

Justice committee  There are many things we discuss with them. The major issue, really, is for them to become useless to their gangs. It's not necessarily to announce while they're in prison that they're leaving. It's just to fade into the woodwork, to fade into the background when they come out in

Justice committee  Just to add to that, I'll tell you a little short story about working in a group of 15 offenders in a medium-security prison here, all of whom were in a gang. My question to them was, “What's the number one thing that keeps you guys coming back to prison and keeps you being loser

Justice committee  In terms of a timeframe for when interventions occurred, within the prairie region specifically, we started the intervention process directly with gang members in the late 1990s, probably 1996 and later. It occurred sporadically. We did have some external evaluations done on inte

Justice committee  I wish I had more to say at this point in terms of what we want to do, but we're at the very beginning stages. I've had one meeting with the Assembly of First Nations. We're going to continue to work on the project. For the skeptics in the crowd, I'll just say this with respect

Justice committee  Not to repeat what I've said already, but we're looking at ways and means of gathering data for first nations across the country so that we can become a service for people who are already receiving gang people in their human resource agencies and provide them with specific interv