On a cold Saturday night in January, Jean, 40, sits at the kitchen table of the east Toronto apartment she shares with her two sons, Brandon, 19, and Thomas, 22. Both sons have cycled in and out of the youth criminal justice system, and now find themselves in serious trouble as young adults.
A mix of court paperwork is scattered across the table.
After spending years bailing out her boys, the elder perhaps more than 50 times, Jean finds herself at the dismal point where even she has been sucked into the criminal justice system.
Among the court papers is a set that pertains to Jean herself. Tasked with supervising her eldest, Thomas, who is under house arrest, Jean was charged with failing to be a good surety after police dropped by just before Christmas and found Thomas to be out, without his mother.
It did not matter to police that Thomas, a diabetic with a host of food allergies, had taken a cab on his own to hospital, where he was being treated in the emergency room.
Jean has just returned from a police station, where she was required to be fingerprinted and photographed on the surety charges. It’s now up to the courts to sort that one out, and Jean is confident the charges will be tossed.
Jean — her name and that of her boys have been changed for the purposes of this story, since it delves into their youth records — is far less certain of what will become of her boys.
Related
Behind the Ontario jail data and Toronto Star analysis
Data on admissions of youth to provincial jails
Few youth get the mental health they need
Analysis: Why we should worry about who we're jailing
Ontario must stop imprisonment by race: Editorial
VIDEO: Who we jail
Jean, who is white, raised her boys, who present as black, on her own. She was a teenage mom, with a supportive family. She worked as hard as she could to support the boys and further her own education, and today has a well-paying job working with special needs children.
But along the way, just about every factor experts cite when talking about the roots of what lands people in legal trouble and jail came into play.
The real slide began when Thomas was 10. He was a handful. Teachers talked of attention deficit disorder, in addition to his diabetes. The Children’s Aid Society, following up on an educator’s belief he needed Ritalin, got involved and Jean, who did not want her son on the drug, says she was forced to hand over Thomas for a psychiatric assessment or would risk losing both boys for being an unfit mother who refused medical treatment.
“I was fought by the doctor. I was fought by the CAS. Eventually I caved.”
Thomas was taken, screaming, by police, to a youth psychiatric crisis centre. From there, he went to foster homes and a group home, before eventually coming back home.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ We have a damaged relationship because of (this). I hope one day he forgives me. But to this day he hates my guts because I put him there.”
Jean moved the boys to an apartment she could afford in Thorncliffe Park, and that’s where, when Thomas was 12, “the pushers” got to him, paying him $10 to make deliveries.
“I stayed in Thorncliffe for 12 years,” says Jean. “Big mistake. It’s in part why they got in trouble, just living there, I believe.”
Brandon’s troubles were fairly minor. Today, he’s facing break-and-enter charges. The farthest he got in school was Grade 9.
Thomas racked up a deep youth record — for marijuana, assault, theft — and did brief stints in jail, including time at the Roy McMurtry Youth Centre, a secure jail in Brampton. He also served an adult sentence of two years at the superjail in Penetanguishene for an armed robbery involving a gun, and emerged “damaged. He’s a damaged kid,” says Jean.
Thomas had just turned 18 at the time of the armed robbery charges. It was a long sentence. His youth record had “screwed him,” says Jean.
Upon his return home from Penetanguishene he would not leave his room. It was lights out at 10 p.m. and up by 7. He’d been institutionalized. Only now is he gradually emerging from that space, says Jean.
While in Penetanguishene, he earned 18 credits. That’s 18 more than he got anywhere else, including the Roy, where he found going to school too dangerous.
Both boys have a history of school suspensions, more so for Thomas.
“The record is thick. Five-day suspensions, 10-day suspensions. When a Caucasian kid would do the same thing, he would get a one-day suspension.
“They placed him in different schools. He was kicked out of here, placed over there. Suspended for this, suspended for that. It just was like his needs — his learning disability — wasn’t being addressed. They never gave him a break.”
Last fall came an out-of-town drug charge and house arrest.
On this Saturday night, he desperately wants to get out for a haircut. Jean will have to take him.
Alvin Curling’s sparsely decorated Wellesley St. W. office sits east of Queen’s Park, which came knocking last summer, following the Danzig Ave. shooting that claimed two young lives and injured 23 people.
The knock came a full five years after former Liberal MPP Curling and former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry released their much-lauded Roots of Youth Violence report, which itself was commissioned after Toronto’s 2005 “Year of the Gun.”
But it took Danzig — on top of a deadly shooting at the Eaton Centre — to fully shake the dust off the Roots report, which made many recommendations aimed at improving the lives of young people in impoverished, violence-plagued neighbourhoods. Prime among them: create a comprehensive youth strategy.
Just over a month following Danzig, Ontario unfurled its Youth Action Plan, relying on the Roots report as a blueprint, and announced Curling, who is also a former Speaker of the legislature, as a strategic adviser to help make that plan happen, working within the Ministry of Children and Youth Services.
With the recent deaths of young black boys in Toronto, the 2008 report is receiving many mentions lately.
As the report warned back then, Ontario was at a crossroads.
From the executive summary: “Racism is becoming a more serious and entrenched problem than it was in the past because Ontario is not dealing with it. The significant new investments in education are not reaching many of the children who need the most help because long-identified barriers to learning are not being addressed.
“Ontario’s youth justice system is harming some youth because it has no overall coordination, remains punitive in ways that are not strategic and permits increasingly problematic police-community relations.”
Curling, in an interview with the Star in 2009, called for the creation of a czar-like bridge builder who could sit above the more than a dozen ministries that have a stake in youth and make sure resources were wisely dispensed and programs were proven to be effective and there for the long term.
To be sure, the Ontario government has made moves to address poverty, mental health issues and youth violence (until of late, mostly more or core funding for police), and, although it falls short of creating the czar-like position, its youth action adheres to many of Roots of Youth Violence recommendations.
But, given the history of good reports in Ontario that largely gather dust, it’s fair to ask: is it for real this time? Will the urgency of today play out to be an opportunity of a lifetime taken, as people spoke of back in 2008 when the Roots report first came out?
Curling believes so.
“We have enough resources in this province to move towards solutions,” he said in an interview in his office.
Curling said he was pleased last year when Roots of Youth Violence was folded in with the province’s poverty reduction strategy, and he sits on a cabinet committee that addresses the issues in a more holistic approach, and where he pushes the “buttons” of various ministries.
“Poverty does not cause violence,” he says. “But couple it with some other things, its potent. It’s like mixing any kind of chemical. If you put poverty with racism, if you put poverty with police harassment, poverty with mental health, it blows up — very strongly.”
The Roots of Youth Violence report scratched the surface on issues with aboriginal youth. There wasn’t enough time or money to delve deep there, says Curling. “We didn’t do an extensive job on the aboriginal people . . . that should be looked at very closely.”
When the Star spoke with Curling, Kathleen Wynne had just taken over the premier’s chair vacated by Dalton McGuinty.
What would happen, Curling is asked, if the government was to change? Is the youth plan safe?
“I want to believe it is. It exceeds any ideology just how we’re going to treat our young people. Is the NDP or the Liberals or the Conservatives saying that our kids are not hungry? Yes, they are. Are we saying we don’t have a mental health problem in our young people? Anyone who says no is not with the reality of things.
“Statistics have shown that. Are we saying that racism in an NDP thing or a Liberal thing or a Conservative thing? Well, racism is here, so ignoring it is to their detriment and the province’s detriment.
“The shooting and the killing destroys the community but I think what is more deadly and deeper is racism, and what is more deadly and deep is mental health, which we have to address.”
He points to a declining youth crime rate and the steady decline of numbers of incarcerated youth since the introduction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act as indicators that things are already headed in the right direction.
Enforcement and punishment alone are no solutions, he says, reiterating something almost everyone agrees upon.
“You can’t arrest your way into a peaceful society. What you (then) have is a huge institution called jails and then the cost is enormous, and then what do you do with the people? You wear out people until they die?”
Curling has been out in communities in Toronto to gauge what is happening. Are policies trickling down to fill gaps? Where are the extra youth workers? Are programs delayed or not being sustained?
“The worst thing you could ever have is something to be started, and it’s wonderful, and then the government will cut it off or be slow in getting to it … It can be more damaging than anything else.”
Curling then reports back to the bureaucracy and the multi-ministry cabinet committee.
Due to the proroguing of the legislature in October, the committee has met just once since he was brought on board.
Curling’s one-year contract expires in October.
Since the introduction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in 2003, the proportion of youth diverted from the laying of formal charges has increased and the proportion sentenced to secure jails and open group homes has steadily decreased.
In 2010-2011, only one in five youths found guilty of crimes served a jail sentence. Most were sentenced to probation
Youth crime in Ontario is also down since 2003.
Coming up on its 10th birthday, the YCJA has done what it was intended to do: take age into consideration in sentencing, divert as many as possible from incarceration and use jail as a last resort and for the most serious of youth offenders.
There is one stark failure: as with adults, the proportion of youth being held pending or without bail is bigger than the proportion serving sentences. In other words, more youth and adults are being detained following arrest and before being proven guilty of anything.
Last year, there were 7,145 youth admissions to secure and open facilities in Ontario. Of those, only 407 were admissions to serve a sentence. The average stay last year in a secure facility for boys awaiting bail or resolution of charges was 34 days. The average stay for those serving a sentence was 78 days.
The Ministry of Children and Youth Services spends $160 million a year on youth incarceration and directly operates six secure youth jails. A further 14 secure jails and all of the province’s 48 open facilities are privately operated through transfer payments.
A former social worker and now assistant deputy minister, JoAnn Miller-Reid remembers the days before the YCJA came into effect, when the 100-bed youth facility she worked in was completely full every night.
And, when 1,000 youth filled provincial jails on average every day. Now, on any given day, about 375 youth are housed in jails. They range in age from 12 to early 20s, since some serve out longer youth sentences in youth facilities.
“The introduction of that act had a huge impact on the approach to youth who are coming into contact with the law,” says Miller-Reid. “It was a really important change in Canada because it shifted the approach to youth from the previous legislation, which had a very high rate of incarceration of youth.”
Over time the ministry was able to close more than 600 open and secure custody beds and in 2005 used the money — $28.5 million — to implement a broad range of community programs.
What happens in youth jails, particularly secure ministry-run facilities, isn’t always pretty — or safe. A 2010 report by the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth into the then year-old Roy McMurtry Youth Centre secure jail found a staff struggling between a traditional corrections approach and more of a relationship philosophy.
The youth saw a place in chaos and complained that there was nothing to do. Some felt it unsafe to attend school, since that is where peer-on-peer violence was taking place.
When it comes to education, not a lot of it is happening behind bars.
Data the ministry shared with the Star show that in 2011-2012 fiscal year, 1,043 youth inmates enrolled to go to the school at Roy McMurtry but only a total of 844 credits were earned. The figures are similar at other ministry-operated youth facilities.
During a Star visit to the centre late this week, it was clear staff are making efforts to improve programming and are looking at ways to better connect youth with community supports upon release. A follow-up report on the Roy is due in April.
Miller-Reid says her ministry is doing whatever it can to deliver programming to its youth, even if some are in the system for short stretches of time.
“Our position is there’s not time that’s too short. Whatever amount of time you have, you can do something that period of time that can make a difference.”
Jails are one of the few institutions that have absolutely no control over who enters through the “back door,” says Justice David Cole of the Ontario Court of Justice and co-author of the 1995 report into systemic racism in the province’s justice system.
Cole, who splits his time hearing youth and adult cases, works out of a courthouse in northwest Toronto.
“What I get is a lot, a lot of poor people,” he says. “And my stuff of life is poor kids ripping off the iPhones of other kids on their way to or from or at school.
“Who are those kids? Who are the victims? They tend to be — gross generalization — poor young black males. And I have no difficulty saying that disproportionate numbers of young black males appear, particularly in youth court, every single day.”
The federal Conservatives continue to tinker with the criminal code in ways unproven to reduce crime and, in a move scorned by experts, opened up the Youth Criminal Justice Act in its omnibus C-10 bill and just got tougher on youthful offenders.
Now, youth who receive extrajudicial sanctions — non-court outcomes, such as police warnings and community programs that involve no trying of facts — will see those count against them as a much as a finding of guilt would should they get in trouble again.
When deciding whether a youth should remain in jail pending a trial, the court must now consider factors including seriousness of the charges and past history, which could mean more pre-trial detentions.
The act also now specifically allows judges to factor in deterrence and denunciation in sentencing, which could result in harsher sentences aimed at sending a message.
Before the changes became law, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said it was “deeply concerned at the fact that the 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act, which was generally in conformity with the Convention (on the Rights of the Child), was in effect amended by the adoption of Bill C-10 and that the latter is excessively punitive for children and not sufficiently restorative in nature.”
Justice Cole, for one, doesn’t believe the changes will significantly affect much that the judges do in youth cases.
But others predict the youth changes, as with the ones for adults, will increase the overrepresentation of aboriginal people and blacks in youth facilities.
“When you do these things you’re going to pick the groups that are overrepresented already,” says criminologist Tony Doob.
Terry Roswell, a doctoral candidate who has worked with inmates and has studied the impact of intra-racial homicides in Toronto on the black community, calls it a “disturbing pattern.
“It’s going to get darker, in complexion, and probably it will be darker in terms of the aspirations and hopes of the people that are in there, on both sides of the fence, the offenders and the guards and the wardens.”
Says Jonathan Rudin, program director at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto: “The federal response, which is to create safer communities by putting more people in jail, seems to run at odds with the provincial response, which is we need to provide more treatment and non-custodial responses and an increasing awareness by judges that jail is not as productive as a response.
“And they are colliding.”
Last week, the front door of Jean’s apartment came crashing open. Officers rushed in to execute a search warrant, says Jean. Police were looking for a gun, she says, but found instead illegal drugs. Both her boys were arrested. Thomas didn’t make bail this time. He’s locked up at the Toronto (Don) Jail.
Jean’s worried someone may be after Thomas.
“Jail may be the safest place for him to be right now.”
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Jim Rankin, Patty Winsa
A mix of court paperwork is scattered across the table.
After spending years bailing out her boys, the elder perhaps more than 50 times, Jean finds herself at the dismal point where even she has been sucked into the criminal justice system.
Among the court papers is a set that pertains to Jean herself. Tasked with supervising her eldest, Thomas, who is under house arrest, Jean was charged with failing to be a good surety after police dropped by just before Christmas and found Thomas to be out, without his mother.
It did not matter to police that Thomas, a diabetic with a host of food allergies, had taken a cab on his own to hospital, where he was being treated in the emergency room.
Jean has just returned from a police station, where she was required to be fingerprinted and photographed on the surety charges. It’s now up to the courts to sort that one out, and Jean is confident the charges will be tossed.
Jean — her name and that of her boys have been changed for the purposes of this story, since it delves into their youth records — is far less certain of what will become of her boys.
Related
Behind the Ontario jail data and Toronto Star analysis
Data on admissions of youth to provincial jails
Few youth get the mental health they need
Analysis: Why we should worry about who we're jailing
Ontario must stop imprisonment by race: Editorial
VIDEO: Who we jail
Jean, who is white, raised her boys, who present as black, on her own. She was a teenage mom, with a supportive family. She worked as hard as she could to support the boys and further her own education, and today has a well-paying job working with special needs children.
But along the way, just about every factor experts cite when talking about the roots of what lands people in legal trouble and jail came into play.
The real slide began when Thomas was 10. He was a handful. Teachers talked of attention deficit disorder, in addition to his diabetes. The Children’s Aid Society, following up on an educator’s belief he needed Ritalin, got involved and Jean, who did not want her son on the drug, says she was forced to hand over Thomas for a psychiatric assessment or would risk losing both boys for being an unfit mother who refused medical treatment.
“I was fought by the doctor. I was fought by the CAS. Eventually I caved.”
Thomas was taken, screaming, by police, to a youth psychiatric crisis centre. From there, he went to foster homes and a group home, before eventually coming back home.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ We have a damaged relationship because of (this). I hope one day he forgives me. But to this day he hates my guts because I put him there.”
Jean moved the boys to an apartment she could afford in Thorncliffe Park, and that’s where, when Thomas was 12, “the pushers” got to him, paying him $10 to make deliveries.
“I stayed in Thorncliffe for 12 years,” says Jean. “Big mistake. It’s in part why they got in trouble, just living there, I believe.”
Brandon’s troubles were fairly minor. Today, he’s facing break-and-enter charges. The farthest he got in school was Grade 9.
Thomas racked up a deep youth record — for marijuana, assault, theft — and did brief stints in jail, including time at the Roy McMurtry Youth Centre, a secure jail in Brampton. He also served an adult sentence of two years at the superjail in Penetanguishene for an armed robbery involving a gun, and emerged “damaged. He’s a damaged kid,” says Jean.
Thomas had just turned 18 at the time of the armed robbery charges. It was a long sentence. His youth record had “screwed him,” says Jean.
Upon his return home from Penetanguishene he would not leave his room. It was lights out at 10 p.m. and up by 7. He’d been institutionalized. Only now is he gradually emerging from that space, says Jean.
While in Penetanguishene, he earned 18 credits. That’s 18 more than he got anywhere else, including the Roy, where he found going to school too dangerous.
Both boys have a history of school suspensions, more so for Thomas.
“The record is thick. Five-day suspensions, 10-day suspensions. When a Caucasian kid would do the same thing, he would get a one-day suspension.
“They placed him in different schools. He was kicked out of here, placed over there. Suspended for this, suspended for that. It just was like his needs — his learning disability — wasn’t being addressed. They never gave him a break.”
Last fall came an out-of-town drug charge and house arrest.
On this Saturday night, he desperately wants to get out for a haircut. Jean will have to take him.
Alvin Curling’s sparsely decorated Wellesley St. W. office sits east of Queen’s Park, which came knocking last summer, following the Danzig Ave. shooting that claimed two young lives and injured 23 people.
The knock came a full five years after former Liberal MPP Curling and former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry released their much-lauded Roots of Youth Violence report, which itself was commissioned after Toronto’s 2005 “Year of the Gun.”
But it took Danzig — on top of a deadly shooting at the Eaton Centre — to fully shake the dust off the Roots report, which made many recommendations aimed at improving the lives of young people in impoverished, violence-plagued neighbourhoods. Prime among them: create a comprehensive youth strategy.
Just over a month following Danzig, Ontario unfurled its Youth Action Plan, relying on the Roots report as a blueprint, and announced Curling, who is also a former Speaker of the legislature, as a strategic adviser to help make that plan happen, working within the Ministry of Children and Youth Services.
With the recent deaths of young black boys in Toronto, the 2008 report is receiving many mentions lately.
As the report warned back then, Ontario was at a crossroads.
From the executive summary: “Racism is becoming a more serious and entrenched problem than it was in the past because Ontario is not dealing with it. The significant new investments in education are not reaching many of the children who need the most help because long-identified barriers to learning are not being addressed.
“Ontario’s youth justice system is harming some youth because it has no overall coordination, remains punitive in ways that are not strategic and permits increasingly problematic police-community relations.”
Curling, in an interview with the Star in 2009, called for the creation of a czar-like bridge builder who could sit above the more than a dozen ministries that have a stake in youth and make sure resources were wisely dispensed and programs were proven to be effective and there for the long term.
To be sure, the Ontario government has made moves to address poverty, mental health issues and youth violence (until of late, mostly more or core funding for police), and, although it falls short of creating the czar-like position, its youth action adheres to many of Roots of Youth Violence recommendations.
But, given the history of good reports in Ontario that largely gather dust, it’s fair to ask: is it for real this time? Will the urgency of today play out to be an opportunity of a lifetime taken, as people spoke of back in 2008 when the Roots report first came out?
Curling believes so.
“We have enough resources in this province to move towards solutions,” he said in an interview in his office.
Curling said he was pleased last year when Roots of Youth Violence was folded in with the province’s poverty reduction strategy, and he sits on a cabinet committee that addresses the issues in a more holistic approach, and where he pushes the “buttons” of various ministries.
“Poverty does not cause violence,” he says. “But couple it with some other things, its potent. It’s like mixing any kind of chemical. If you put poverty with racism, if you put poverty with police harassment, poverty with mental health, it blows up — very strongly.”
The Roots of Youth Violence report scratched the surface on issues with aboriginal youth. There wasn’t enough time or money to delve deep there, says Curling. “We didn’t do an extensive job on the aboriginal people . . . that should be looked at very closely.”
When the Star spoke with Curling, Kathleen Wynne had just taken over the premier’s chair vacated by Dalton McGuinty.
What would happen, Curling is asked, if the government was to change? Is the youth plan safe?
“I want to believe it is. It exceeds any ideology just how we’re going to treat our young people. Is the NDP or the Liberals or the Conservatives saying that our kids are not hungry? Yes, they are. Are we saying we don’t have a mental health problem in our young people? Anyone who says no is not with the reality of things.
“Statistics have shown that. Are we saying that racism in an NDP thing or a Liberal thing or a Conservative thing? Well, racism is here, so ignoring it is to their detriment and the province’s detriment.
“The shooting and the killing destroys the community but I think what is more deadly and deeper is racism, and what is more deadly and deep is mental health, which we have to address.”
He points to a declining youth crime rate and the steady decline of numbers of incarcerated youth since the introduction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act as indicators that things are already headed in the right direction.
Enforcement and punishment alone are no solutions, he says, reiterating something almost everyone agrees upon.
“You can’t arrest your way into a peaceful society. What you (then) have is a huge institution called jails and then the cost is enormous, and then what do you do with the people? You wear out people until they die?”
Curling has been out in communities in Toronto to gauge what is happening. Are policies trickling down to fill gaps? Where are the extra youth workers? Are programs delayed or not being sustained?
“The worst thing you could ever have is something to be started, and it’s wonderful, and then the government will cut it off or be slow in getting to it … It can be more damaging than anything else.”
Curling then reports back to the bureaucracy and the multi-ministry cabinet committee.
Due to the proroguing of the legislature in October, the committee has met just once since he was brought on board.
Curling’s one-year contract expires in October.
Since the introduction of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in 2003, the proportion of youth diverted from the laying of formal charges has increased and the proportion sentenced to secure jails and open group homes has steadily decreased.
In 2010-2011, only one in five youths found guilty of crimes served a jail sentence. Most were sentenced to probation
Youth crime in Ontario is also down since 2003.
Coming up on its 10th birthday, the YCJA has done what it was intended to do: take age into consideration in sentencing, divert as many as possible from incarceration and use jail as a last resort and for the most serious of youth offenders.
There is one stark failure: as with adults, the proportion of youth being held pending or without bail is bigger than the proportion serving sentences. In other words, more youth and adults are being detained following arrest and before being proven guilty of anything.
Last year, there were 7,145 youth admissions to secure and open facilities in Ontario. Of those, only 407 were admissions to serve a sentence. The average stay last year in a secure facility for boys awaiting bail or resolution of charges was 34 days. The average stay for those serving a sentence was 78 days.
The Ministry of Children and Youth Services spends $160 million a year on youth incarceration and directly operates six secure youth jails. A further 14 secure jails and all of the province’s 48 open facilities are privately operated through transfer payments.
A former social worker and now assistant deputy minister, JoAnn Miller-Reid remembers the days before the YCJA came into effect, when the 100-bed youth facility she worked in was completely full every night.
And, when 1,000 youth filled provincial jails on average every day. Now, on any given day, about 375 youth are housed in jails. They range in age from 12 to early 20s, since some serve out longer youth sentences in youth facilities.
“The introduction of that act had a huge impact on the approach to youth who are coming into contact with the law,” says Miller-Reid. “It was a really important change in Canada because it shifted the approach to youth from the previous legislation, which had a very high rate of incarceration of youth.”
Over time the ministry was able to close more than 600 open and secure custody beds and in 2005 used the money — $28.5 million — to implement a broad range of community programs.
What happens in youth jails, particularly secure ministry-run facilities, isn’t always pretty — or safe. A 2010 report by the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth into the then year-old Roy McMurtry Youth Centre secure jail found a staff struggling between a traditional corrections approach and more of a relationship philosophy.
The youth saw a place in chaos and complained that there was nothing to do. Some felt it unsafe to attend school, since that is where peer-on-peer violence was taking place.
When it comes to education, not a lot of it is happening behind bars.
Data the ministry shared with the Star show that in 2011-2012 fiscal year, 1,043 youth inmates enrolled to go to the school at Roy McMurtry but only a total of 844 credits were earned. The figures are similar at other ministry-operated youth facilities.
During a Star visit to the centre late this week, it was clear staff are making efforts to improve programming and are looking at ways to better connect youth with community supports upon release. A follow-up report on the Roy is due in April.
Miller-Reid says her ministry is doing whatever it can to deliver programming to its youth, even if some are in the system for short stretches of time.
“Our position is there’s not time that’s too short. Whatever amount of time you have, you can do something that period of time that can make a difference.”
Jails are one of the few institutions that have absolutely no control over who enters through the “back door,” says Justice David Cole of the Ontario Court of Justice and co-author of the 1995 report into systemic racism in the province’s justice system.
Cole, who splits his time hearing youth and adult cases, works out of a courthouse in northwest Toronto.
“What I get is a lot, a lot of poor people,” he says. “And my stuff of life is poor kids ripping off the iPhones of other kids on their way to or from or at school.
“Who are those kids? Who are the victims? They tend to be — gross generalization — poor young black males. And I have no difficulty saying that disproportionate numbers of young black males appear, particularly in youth court, every single day.”
The federal Conservatives continue to tinker with the criminal code in ways unproven to reduce crime and, in a move scorned by experts, opened up the Youth Criminal Justice Act in its omnibus C-10 bill and just got tougher on youthful offenders.
Now, youth who receive extrajudicial sanctions — non-court outcomes, such as police warnings and community programs that involve no trying of facts — will see those count against them as a much as a finding of guilt would should they get in trouble again.
When deciding whether a youth should remain in jail pending a trial, the court must now consider factors including seriousness of the charges and past history, which could mean more pre-trial detentions.
The act also now specifically allows judges to factor in deterrence and denunciation in sentencing, which could result in harsher sentences aimed at sending a message.
Before the changes became law, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said it was “deeply concerned at the fact that the 2003 Youth Criminal Justice Act, which was generally in conformity with the Convention (on the Rights of the Child), was in effect amended by the adoption of Bill C-10 and that the latter is excessively punitive for children and not sufficiently restorative in nature.”
Justice Cole, for one, doesn’t believe the changes will significantly affect much that the judges do in youth cases.
But others predict the youth changes, as with the ones for adults, will increase the overrepresentation of aboriginal people and blacks in youth facilities.
“When you do these things you’re going to pick the groups that are overrepresented already,” says criminologist Tony Doob.
Terry Roswell, a doctoral candidate who has worked with inmates and has studied the impact of intra-racial homicides in Toronto on the black community, calls it a “disturbing pattern.
“It’s going to get darker, in complexion, and probably it will be darker in terms of the aspirations and hopes of the people that are in there, on both sides of the fence, the offenders and the guards and the wardens.”
Says Jonathan Rudin, program director at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto: “The federal response, which is to create safer communities by putting more people in jail, seems to run at odds with the provincial response, which is we need to provide more treatment and non-custodial responses and an increasing awareness by judges that jail is not as productive as a response.
“And they are colliding.”
Last week, the front door of Jean’s apartment came crashing open. Officers rushed in to execute a search warrant, says Jean. Police were looking for a gun, she says, but found instead illegal drugs. Both her boys were arrested. Thomas didn’t make bail this time. He’s locked up at the Toronto (Don) Jail.
Jean’s worried someone may be after Thomas.
“Jail may be the safest place for him to be right now.”
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Jim Rankin, Patty Winsa
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