[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, April 30, 1996
.0939 
[English]
The Chair: Order.
We have before us this morning, from the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Kim Pate.
Kim, we'll be with you from 9:30 to 11 a.m. I'd ask you to start whenever you're comfortable and then we'll ask questions afterwards.
.0940
I want to acknowledge that we have a new committee member, Paul DeVillers, who is parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Ms Kim Pate (Executive Assistant, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies): Thank you very much.
I hope to keep my preliminary comments brief and then open up to as many questions as the committee would like to put to us. I want to thank you very much for inviting us and also put forth the apologies of my board members, who were unable to attend. We attempted to have this meeting some two weeks ago and for a number of reasons had to postpone it, so I do apologize on behalf of my board members, who are not able to be here with me.
In order to situate the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, I thought I'd give you a bit of general information about our organization and then discuss our concerns, issues and perspectives with respect to the review you're involved in.
The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies is, as the name would connote, an association of 21 member organizations spread across the country that provide direct services and report to community-based boards of directors. They're all autonomous societies but are joined, by virtue of their beliefs and fundamental positions on issues such as this, to the national association.
The leadership comes very much from the community and from our grassroots base. We're comprised predominantly of volunteer members throughout the country, both people who work with our organization as well as those who direct our organization by virtue of being on our boards of directors. I am directed by a board that's comprised of representatives from those individual associations, so that's who I'm accountable to. We're an office of two at the national level, and all of the work we do at the national level is generated out of that office.
Given that context, our mandate at the national level is very much to focus on women who come into conflict with the law, both young women and adult women, but particularly adults who are involved in the federal system. We also are very concerned about women who are at risk of coming into conflict with the law. You tend to see more of that work done both in sessions such as this, where we'll be talking about some of the proactive work we think needs to be done for young women in particular, and also via some of the perspectives we provide when we answer to legislative proposals put forth by the various government departments.
We operate in that way, and as you're probably well aware, we're involved in a very direct way in some of the attempts to have proactive approaches taken when you look at women who are in conflict with the law. Our battered women's defence review and the self-defence review that Judge Ratushny is doing are examples of an issue we worked on for some five years. This year we're targeting mental health issues for women in the justice system. That will be our next thing to push.
It's much to our chagrin that young women and the Young Offenders Act have been very low on the priority list of our national organization in terms of work, and it's only because of resources. There's absolutely no other reason. It's seen as a very important issue.
Our local societies do work on providing services to young people. However, the reality is that we've seen cutbacks happen across this country, particularly to social programs and educational programs and also to some of the most innovative community-based programs, particularly for young women but also for other young people, and most particularly, I would suggest, for those who are often seen as being at greatest risk, whether it's first nations young people or other visible and cultural minorities and economically marginalized groups. We've seen a tremendous evisceration of those services.
At the national level our ability to meet the needs of this committee in its review is very much circumscribed by some of those resource deficiencies. Despite that fact, we do see it as very important, and we were very pleased to receive a number of calls from individual members as well as from people within the government asking us to spend some time looking at the phase two review.
I want to reiterate and underscore that it's not because of lack of interest, but it was some effort, given our other resource commitments, to bring this together. So I want to thank you for providing this opportunity, and for accommodating our schedule as we've tried to deal with everything from the Arbour inquiry to various other crises across the country with respect to women in the prison system.
.0945
I'd like to point out in a historical context that the Elizabeth Fry Society has been working with young people since before the Young Offenders Act, in fact under the Juvenile Delinquents Act and preceding. Also, it has historically worked with young people who have been involved in the child welfare system, as well as young people involved in other social services. So the involvement has been long-standing.
The concern we've seen over the years, and certainly since the inception of the Young Offenders Act, is the increasing criminalization of behaviour that, while it's certainly not to be condoned, in the past has been described in various other forms, whether mismanagement, educational problems or a whole variety of issues. The manner in which issues that are now being criminalized have been dealt with.... As a result when you look at young women, for instance, we have seen an increase in numbers of young women coming into custody for ever more minor offences, I would suggest, and increasingly administrative types of offences.
When they come into custody, the majority of young women are held in overly secure settings. They're often not seen as a risk. However, because of their limited numbers we've seen a parallel to what we've found in the adult system or the ordinary courts. We've seen that many young women are housed in secure settings, sometimes also in with young men. We've also seen young people who are perhaps classified as open custody being housed in secure custody, and then starting to adapt their behaviour in such a way that they become very much entrenched in that system. It becomes very difficult for them to move out of that system and gain access to the community. We've seen a whole range of those sorts of trends.
With respect to the Young Offenders Act and how we think it has contributed, the progressive changes to the Young Offenders Act, in our opinion, have eviscerated the initial purpose of the act. Very clearly the focus of the act at the outset, from our perspective and certainly from the perspective of those putting forth the act at the time - both legislators and policy-makers - was that it was supposed to clearly identify only those events and those behaviours that were criminal as ones that should come under the jurisdiction of the young offenders system or the juvenile justice system. It also identified that at the very first opportunity, young people should be in the community; custody should be an absolute last resort.
I think we've seen just the opposite. I would suggest to this committee that one area in which you could make some very appropriate and valid recommendations that would go a long way to rectifying and remedying the situation we find ourselves in now would be to propose to the justice minister that we look at cost-sharing agreements, and the impact that the moneys going to custodial settings have had on increasing those numbers - in fact decreasing and pulling from the very meagre community the resources that have existed.
If I take some of the places where I've worked directly with young people, in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia, as the act evolved and we saw more custodial settings developing and institutions being built, we saw very clearly a pulling back of resources from the community. They were often the easiest resources to cut. It's far harder to close an entire institution; at least that's often the perception at the bureaucratic level. So we saw the evisceration of those programs as well.
It's not surprising to us that as we saw fewer and fewer programs, and fewer and fewer options for the judges to avail themselves of, that we also saw more young people coming into custody. We also saw an assumption on the part of the public that this was the option, that part of the problem was that there weren't sufficient beds, there weren't sufficient interventions of the type that were being increased. Essentially, in our opinion, we have been on a very slippery slope towards incarcerating ever-increasing numbers of young people.
I know you've heard from other witnesses before this committee of the vast increase in the numbers of young people coming into custody. You know that we're leading - and I don't think it's in an enviable way at all - internationally in the number of young people we're putting in prison. I think we're already seeing the impact in the adult corrections system.
.0950
In preparation for our presentation to you on phase two of the review of the Young Offenders Act, we tried to do a survey of the various jurisdictions in this country to determine how many young people have been transferred up just since the most recent provisions, the amendments to the Young Offenders Act in 1995.
Most provinces couldn't tell us precisely how many there were. However, we did find that in Manitoba we've already had six young women referred into the adult system.
Some of you will know that in our previous presentation on Bill C-37 we talked very clearly about the concerns that were being raised by many of the women, the adults in the prison system, who were talking very clearly, particularly some of the lifers, about the concerns they had about more young women coming into the system. Many of the women themselves are now in their thirties and forties, and they talked about coming in themselves as young people prior to the inception of the Young Offenders Act. They felt very clearly that to keep young people out of the adult system at all costs was one of the priorities they would place. I think they also wrote to this committee to that effect.
In sum, if this committee can really focus very much on some of the principles of the Young Offenders Act, despite the fact that, as I've already mentioned, our view is that we've seen a limiting of the most progressive pieces of the legislation.... We still have enunciated in the principles a very clear focus on crime prevention. We have a very clear focus on the need for community-based options. We need to try at the very least to stop the clock and, if possible, to turn back the resourcing issues and see more resourcing going into the communities as opposed to into prison settings for young people.
Also, we need to be investing in our young people at an earlier stage.
Historically young women have been overrepresented in the child welfare system, for example. We've seen an absolute pulling back of child welfare services in every jurisdiction in this country, and I don't think it's any surprise that we're now seeing increased numbers of young women coming into the system.
Young people need to be held accountable for their behaviour. We support that wholeheartedly. I would suggest very strongly to this committee, though, that putting those young people in custodial settings with ever-depleting resources....
In Alberta, as part of the National Crime Prevention Council, we met with young people and with workers and talked about young people now going hungry in the prisons. We're seeing ever-depleting resources, to the point that we may very well end up with a situation in which young people can be held in custody at the same price as was put forth to me by some of the government people when I was in Alberta. They're saying now that young people may be able to be held in custody at the same rate as they're kept in the community.
It's an incredible indictment of Canada if we're having young people going hungry in our prisons for the sake of keeping the costs down and for the sake of presuming to meet the very real needs of victims and communities and those young people.
I will leave it at that and will answer any questions you may have.
The Chair: We'll have 10-minute rounds, starting with the Bloc.
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois (Bellechasse): I have noticed a number of things in your brief and I would like to thank you for it. You have said that the needs of women should get greater attention. Is this linked to specific characteristics such as, for example, low levels of education and economic dependence that can give rise to an emotional dependence and a lack of appreciation for many women in certain environments?
We shouldn't kid ourselves. It's not easy to be a woman in Canada. Women have to perform ten times better than a man in order to receive half the credit. Attitudes change, but very slowly. This is noticeable at all levels.
It is not unheard - of to see women doing two, three, or even four jobs and to not get any credit for it. As well, they sometimes deal with marital difficulties due to the fact that at least one of the spouses has a number of jobs. In the medium term, do you see any solutions other than continuous public education that would allow women to gain status that is at least comparable to that of the opposite sex in Canada?
Ms Pate: I am sorry, but my French is very bad. May I answer you in English? Thank you.
.0955
[English]
I think you've hit on what is certainly one of the issues when you look at the experiences of women in our system. As well as in Canadian life generally, we see some impacts that are disproportionately experienced also by young women. It might be how violence they experience is dealt with. Or it could be, for instance, how their drug dependency may be dealt with. There are all kinds of variations. But particularly when you talk about criminal behaviour involving criminal malfeasance or offences defined as criminal by virtue of the Criminal Code, you see very clearly that often the response to young women is still one of wanting to define them as either mad or very, very bad.
There is still an attempt to put many of those young women into psychiatric and psychological care, some of which is successful but much of which is not. Part of the reason our organization has focused next on our proactive campaign around mental health issues is because at the same time as we're seeing cutbacks to the mental health system and the closure of psychiatric hospitals, we are seeing those young people and adult women being virtually dumped into the criminal justice system.
For instance, I was in Newfoundland last year. We know what the economic situation is there. As they were closing psychiatric hospital wings, the superintendent of the jail said when I visited that they might as well just put the women in a truck and bring them over to the jail, because this is where many of them are ending up. In fact, in the adult system in the Prison for Women, we've seen that some 10% of the population is now from the Atlantic provinces with significant mental health concerns. So there is a whole new population in prison. This is, I think, part of it.
Another piece is that we still suffer from stereotyping, particularly when it comes to young women. I can think of many examples of young women, who have suffered incredible abuse as children, continuing to suffer abuse. And I should point out that there is more gender parity in terms of experiences of abuse when you look at children. However, often the reaction of young people is quite different.
When they do not get paid, many young women who end up working on the streets as sex trade workers are pulling knives to get the money they feel is their due. They are then being charged and are increasingly seen as more violent offenders.
Again, this is not to support or condone what they are actually doing or to suggest this is how young women should have to be working or surviving. But they are then being convicted of what is framed very clearly in the law as violent robbery. However, they are living on the street in a situation where, from their perspective and from anybody else's perspective, they're basically settling what they view as a contractual arrangement, albeit not in a way we would find acceptable if it was in any other setting. So we are seeing those sorts of stereotypes as well.
I think we are very clearly seeing that we need public education around many of these issues. We need systemic change. But we also need to see some of the resourcing that is not just being pulled but never was in place being used to support young people in our communities. We need much more of the preventive type of programming and support work right from when young people are going into schools, health care, those sorts of areas. From talking to doctors and teachers, we know this is often where these young people who potentially will face problems as they grow into adolescence are first identified.
Does that answer your question?
[Translation]
Mr. Langlois: In part, Ms Pate. I am going to continue in the same vein and broaden the topic somewhat. One of the problems that concerns me is not that of education even though I think that education has its place when it comes to improving the societal behaviour of the public, but that of sentencing. I find that our courts are particularly generous when dealing with spouses who beat wives and with fathers who abuse their daughters and end up with ridiculous sentences for behaviours that sometimes spread out over 10 or 12 years and affect a number of family members.
There is a sort of conspiracy of silence, the traditional omerta. People do not dare speak out. Quite often the wife is involved in this. She is afraid that the situation will explode if she leaves. She always tries to ensure that things do not blow up. These are the types of situations that we must correct in order to ensure the mental and physical balance of people. I'd like to hear what you have to say on that matter.
.1000
You focus on open custody rather that close custody for young people, but you say that, in certain provinces, the makeshift resources are almost non existent or are about to be closed. Is the solution, then, to make available new sums of money or to reorganize budgets that exist already, but that are badly used at present?
[English]
Ms Pate: I'll answer your questions in the order you provided them in.
In terms of the longer sentences, or what I presume you're asking, which is how do we feel about the length of sentences for family violence cases, in particular violence against women and children, it may be of interest to the committee to know that our organization is among all of the national women's organizations, save perhaps one, that support very strongly interventions for women and children, particularly in violent situations, but don't necessarily support longer sentences.
It is a very significant concern of the women's community, as well as the youth advocacy committee - and National Youth in Care Network is a group I have been involved with for the better part of a decade. They have long advocated not longer sentences but appropriate intervention, early intervention, and safety for young people and women.
Unfortunately, the reality is that this is where the greatest risk to our community is. It's mostly our women and children who are at risk, who are the victims in our communities, if you look at criminal behaviour. However, it tends not to be the greatest percentage of those offences that are either pursued, have charges laid, convictions registered, or sentences served in our criminal justice system.
So the attempts to discuss going after issues of violence and violent perpetrators in the vein that we're going to get longer sentences is lost on most youth groups and most women's group because it is clearly, from our perspective, an attempt to pander to some very vocal interest groups but not necessarily to meet the needs of some very important victims in our community.
That's not to say that not all victims need to have their needs met. We feel very clearly that victims do need to have their needs met. Part of the problem is that continually trying to tinker with the system as a means of trying to meet those needs is only getting us into ever more regressive and oppressive sentences or correctional terms. We've seen the Arbour report. We now know publicly what many of us have known for many years about the brutalizing experience that prison is for most people.
So our concern is very clearly that we have more of those resources in the community. For instance, when we made recommendation to the Arbour commission and in our recommendations to the Minister of Justice and the Solicitor General, we have suggested that we look at things like capping the number of custody bed-days that are available to people, to judges, to utilize; that we look at capping the amount of resources that can be used for custodial sanctions; that we look at decarcerating young people, and adults for that matter, who are in custodial settings who don't need to be there. Everybody who deals with them will agree, including often the police and some who are seen as vocal opponents in another vein from that which I am putting forth at this point, that those resources should follow that individual into the community. For instance, the resources required to keep a young person in custody in this country are said now to be anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000.
I have to tell you that the resource issue is one, and the actual cost of how much it costs to keep someone in custody is one that we are also trying to receive accurate information about. We're not able at this point to give you a full range of figures. I would encourage this committee to ask those questions of the jurisdictions as well, exactly how much they are spending on keeping young people in custody each year and what the range of costs are, depending on the range of services provided.
.1005
Look at how many young people are in because they have no other place to go, so they're living on the streets and they're picked up for really fairly minor offences, or young people such as the group of young women I was referring to earlier, who are in for violent offences but in circumstances in which there are often clearly economic, social and cultural situations - there are a number of first nations young women in that situation - that preclude them from having many other options. I would suggest there are no other options, but there certainly may be some few options of which I'm not aware.
When you look at those situations, we would be far better off having the resources flow with those young people into the community rather than the expense of human and financial costs that we're exacting from those young people, their families, their victims and the communities they come from.
To summarize, our suggestion is to look at really capping the number of custody days that can be given out by judges and by jurisdictions. Look at limiting the resources that are available for custody settings, in accordance with those caps. Also, look at transferring those moneys into the community and the development of resources.
Given that you've got intergovernmental issues at least represented here at the table, I would also suggest there are other areas in which cost-sharing arrangements could be impacted. So everything from child welfare and social services funding to health funding to mental health funding to educational funding are areas that directly impact on those young people who are increasingly likely to be criminalized.
It's well known internationally - and we see it - that the number of people in custody in any country is generally more of a reflection of the social and economic policies than it is of crime rates. That's consistent, as well, with the research through the National Crime Prevention Council, to which we've been able to have access.
I think that answers your questions.
Mr. Langlois: Merci.
The Chair: Thank you. Mrs. Ablonczy.
Mrs. Ablonczy (Calgary North): On page 3 of your brief - it's a very wide-ranging brief, and I think one that's very helpful to the committee - you say:
- we would better meet the needs of Canadians, particularly young people, if the implementation
of the preventative elements were made a government priority. Such a strategy would certainly
be in keeping with the government's commitment to crime prevention.
- I plead guilty. I have not financed the crime-prevention initiative. ... I think it's a mistake not to
finance it because the more you spend up front on prevention, the more you save later on the
social costs of crime.
Ms Pate: Thank you. I think I addressed some of that a bit in terms of my previous responses. However, I think there are some more direct ways in which we could be looking at directing more moneys toward crime prevention.
Certainly one of the suggestions that have been made many times over is on the cost-sharing agreements that currently go between the provinces. These are in the process of being renegotiated now, as I understand it, for the juvenile justice system. There could be a very clear direction that this money is to go to community services.
Some of you will recall the history in 1982 through to 1984, as we waited for the Young Offenders Act to be proclaimed, of the very clear negotiations and wranglings between the provinces and the federal government. The federal government's choice was to direct moneys toward community-based options; however, there was a very strong lobby from the provinces to have moneys going into custodial options, because there was an assumption that there would be increased numbers of young people coming into the system. This was largely because of the age range, the uniform age that was being imposed, and the differences in terms of age ranges prior to the Young Offenders Act.
.1010
I think at that point we started on this track of spending more and more money on custody. I think we do need to turn this ship around, if you will, at this point.
I think clearly there are resources now going into custody settings that could be.... If we closed some of the institutions and had those young people in the community taking the resources and transferring the options directly into the community, I think we could see some of those benefits.
I think if we looked at some of the ways in which we are now devoting moneys to the back end of the system, if you will, particularly at the federal level for prisoners serving two years or more, we see a tremendous amount of money going into that system.
Right now, we have a law reform effort in the form of the attempt to repeal section 745. We estimate this will increase the costs of incarceration for women alone by anything up to $1 million per prisoner if that repeal goes through.
Those are some examples in which I think there are moneys being used in very different ways. We've long known that the majority of the money goes into putting people into the system, not trying to keep our communities safe.
Those would be some of the suggestions.
I think some of the community-based options that have existed and have been incredibly effective have been seen as expensive for community-based options. I will give you some examples of the ones I know best that existed in Alberta and have disappeared.
There was a wilderness program called Enviros. It was based on Project DARE, which was initiated here in Ontario. A number of staff members who had been with Project DARE went on to improve the model and develop an urban component, as they referred to it. They had the wilderness model and then an urban component.
They basically took young people, most of whom were of dual status, such as child welfare and young offender or juvenile justice, and worked with the young people on everything from self-esteem to educational upgrading, to vocational training, to job placement, to psychological counselling and all of those sorts of areas.
They worked with them in the wilderness as well as in an urban setting. They actually had their own school, their own residential placement. Young people went into the community every day and came back to the group home to work. Or if the young people were seen as higher risk generally to themselves, not to anybody else, they would stay in the house and be schooled with resources and programs right in the house.
It was seen as an incredibly expensive community program, running at something in the neighbourhood of $200,000 to $500,000 per year. I believe they had in-house young people, as well as those who lived on-site, as well as those who did it as a day program. They had something between 30 and 50 young people, I believe it was, each year.
It was seen as a fairly expensive program. But by comparison, the cost of putting all those young people in institutions would have been far greater.
Similarly, I was involved in a program that started out as a victim-offender program and an alternative measures program. By virtue of needs we identified, we ended up, after consultation with our police and correctional folks in the community, focusing on young people who had been labelled by the system as serious habitual young people. We had 10 new young people each year in that program, and an average of 20 in total who would be going through the program at any one time.
They were made aware of the impact of their offences on victims by meeting with their actual victims or meeting with other victims if their victims were unavailable or in the very few circumstances in which their victims weren't willing to meet.
There was intensive involvement in community counselling and treatment programming, as well as job placement and basically a number of educational support services as well. That program cost $50,000 to administer, and it was seen as an expensive program for 10 new admittances a year.
Those are the sorts of programs that we've seen come and go, largely because of cuts. I think we could see more of those resources being allocated to those sorts of programs with a far greater impact in terms of a positive impact for keeping young people in the community.
.1015
Those are young people who are already in the system. If we go even earlier, we know from the Perry preschool research and from examples of other head start programs the impact of working with young people at ever earlier ages. Those were some suggestions.
I would encourage any committee members who are interested in Jerome Miller's work. He's the man who headed up the decarceration of young people in Massachusetts. Much of what he's written about since then has said that one of the deficits of their plan, if you will, was they didn't ensure that the moneys allocated to young people when they were in carceral settings followed them into the community. So although it was seen as a fairly successful decarceration approach, it could have been improved had those young people had added supports in the community.
I would suggest that the public would be much more amenable to having more jobs available by having more people available in the community to support young people and to provide supervision of those young people than would be the case right now, and than is the case right now, as we're seeing ever more static ways of trying to control young people through electronic monitoring, cameras, jail cells, fences or whatever.
Mrs. Ablonczy: Following up on that idea of community-based resolutions for youth crime, particularly alternative measures or community service rather than the custodial alternative, I wonder what your comments would be on the effectiveness or appropriateness of these alternative measures for non-violent youth offenders as compared with violent youth offenders.
Ms Pate: Some of you will know I have written in this area and in fact was among some of the first people in the country to do victim-offender programming and alternative measures.
One of the reasons we changed our program to focus on the young people who had been identified as serious, habitual and often violent was the trend we saw in our alternative measures programs - and unfortunately the trend that I think persists to this day - towards a diversion away of young people, both pre-YOA and even now, if the programs did not exist, who don't need that sort of intervention.
They often benefit by the intervention. We began to work with our schools in the local area in developing conflict resolution programs, peer mediation and those sorts of areas, because we saw young people coming into the system who previously had not been seen by the system and likely would never be seen again. In 1987 we stopped doing strictly alternative measures programs and looked at the statistics of who was in our program. The largest group, approximately 33%, was comprised of 14-year-old, middle-class, white girls who were being picked up for the first time for shoplifting.
We know in self-report studies that anywhere from 90% to 99% of young people admit to and acknowledge their involvement in behaviour that, if they were caught, convicted and sentenced, would result in their having youth court records. So we know the majority of young people engage in that behaviour at some point. That's self-reported. Yet that does not in any way represent the number of young people who are being diverted.
Comparatively, 33% of the jail population were first nations young people, and less than 3% of those being referred for alternative measures were first nations youths. So we clearly were not receiving all first-time young offenders and were seeing, very clearly disproportionately, certain young people being referred.
The other thing we saw is that the protections that aren't in place for alternative measures.... It's not that I support the increase of process, particularly the adversarial process, at that level, but what we saw.... At that time I was the only person doing the work who had a law degree. We saw many young people coming through who would not have been convicted had they proceeded through the courts. That was the other place we were seeing skewed statistics, in my opinion.
If you look at the numbers, we had many young people in as accomplices. So you might see a young woman in the situation I was talking about: she was in a store with five of her friends, and they may or may not have known she was going to shoplift, but all would end up being processed through alternative measures. In a situation where in consultation with crown prosecutors we would not agree to take those young people, almost inevitably their cases were thrown out and they didn't proceed through alternative measures or through the courts.
.1020
Again, I don't think that necessarily taught those young people much positive about our system. It did show them that at the same time, retailers were increasing their efforts to prevent loss even though they knew that only about 10% of their losses were coming from shoplifters, and a very low percentage of that was young people. That's who the majority of their apprehension efforts were directed against. We saw very little in terms of them looking at in-house theft, in-house destruction, the things that they knew contributed most to their loss of resources. So we very much saw a skewing of those statistics.
I've wandered a long way over there. Let me come back to violent young people.
When we focused on the experiences of young people who had been in the system for a long time...I'm talking six to eight years depending on.... They may not have been criminalized that early - obviously they couldn't have been if they had been in for eight years - but they would be young people who had been identified as problems in the child welfare system. A few of them would have been involved in arson cases, that sort of thing. We were referred by a number of people within the corrections system, some of these young people, and they requested that we see whether we could tailor some of the programming to them.
I can tell you that after two to three years we were seeing some of those young people coming down what the police refer to as the ``crime curve'', the increase from more petty theft to increased property offences, from shoplifting to commercial break and entry to residential break and entry up into personal violence offences. And we're seeing some of those young people coming back down that crime cycle, from the perspective of the police.
We were seeing young people, for instance, dealing with the fact that break and entry is not just taking property out of a home but that it directly impacts people. This was after they had met with victims of their break and entries. Those individuals had often already been involved in robberies and that sort of thing on the street. They were at a point where they might still get picked up for an offence, but it was more likely to be a commercial break and entry, something lesser in terms of seriousness and certainly in terms of personal invasiveness. So it was a moving down.
We did not see for those young people an absolute stop to their activity. That was certainly our aim, but it was not where we got to for most of those young people. I would suggest that even now some of those young people have never been involved in the system again. Although they had been fast-tracked and identified as candidates for the federal system, they have not gone into that system. But it does involve long-term work. Too often we're looking in the system, both in the criminal justice system as well as others now, and increasingly in our communities, for fast, quick and easy solutions to very complex, long-standing problems. That's very much the response or the reality we faced.
To sum up my response, very clearly we have seen the positive impact of taking those sorts of alternatives. But we've also seen that by comparison to other programs in the community, they have to be very holistic in terms of meeting a complex series of needs - everything from education and psychological needs to dealing with basic empathy to understanding your own victimization and on and on. They're long-term programs. They're not quick-fix, one-shot solutions. I think an investment in those sorts of programs is also necessary.
The Chair: Ms Torsney.
Ms Torsney (Burlington): Thank you. I apologize for having to leave to present petitions, but unfortunately that happens sometimes.
I read with interest your comments on page 4 about physical and sexual abuse, the early childhood experiences of young people, and how we need to provide appropriate training and professional development opportunities to those who come in contact with young people. I assume we're talking about teachers and others in the educational system who see our young people most frequently.
.1025
Have you made presentations to the education minister in Ontario, for instance, where they are cutting all the school boards? It seems from my newspapers that the people they are going to cut are the psychologists, the speech pathologists, the people who aren't teachers, because those are viewed as superfluous to the needs of children.
Ms Pate: Most of my submissions have actually been given under my hat as a parent of a child in the Ontario system. However, our provincial organization, the Council of Elizabeth Fry Societies of Ontario, has certainly been making submissions. Last year we helped coordinate a coalition of national criminal justice, social justice, and economic justice groups to do a press conference and press release around this very issue. So we have done some general submissions.
Because part of my training is also as a teacher, I have made submissions to everybody from the Canadian Teachers' Federation to individual teachers as the opportunity has been provided. I would certainly welcome the opportunity to have more access to and more involvement with those groups. However, I haven't myself made specific representations to the Minister of Education for Ontario, or to any other ministry for that matter.
I do think that teachers are one group and doctors are another. In the past when I was working directly in the community doing young offender programming, I was also involved in training new doctors as well as psychiatry interns. We often see some of the first referrals being through a family physician for support and assistance, as well as some of the prenatal and post-natal work that often needs to be done with young moms, which is some of the earliest prevention. So we have done some of that.
Ms Torsney: It seems to me that we need a coordinated approach. If you look at Ontario, for instance, the school boards are going to cut a $50,000 social worker who could perhaps save 100 kids from the young offender system at $100,000 a year. No one seems to be focusing on those psychologists and others as being crime prevention people. It seems a shame to me.
Some of the submissions have talked about the time delays. Is that particularly a problem for young women as well as for young men in the youth system? Is that something you're concerned about?
Ms Pate: The time delays are certainly an issue. Quite frankly, I think the whole adversarial process is part of the issue. Many members of the public - not the least of which include people who are in the process of going through the system, whether as victims or offenders - have a great deal of difficulty understanding that process, understanding why the time delays exist. They're often dealing with what are, at the very root, emotional and practical issues in a system that is not based on dealing with those emotions or those very real human needs. We're dealing with a system that is based on abstract notions.
When I do public education around these issues, I am concerned that people still believe that the system is there to meet the needs of individuals. We know that it isn't. I think we can change it. Something this committee may feel it appropriate to suggest, which we would certainly support, is that many of the fundamentals of the system be examined and be refocused around youth-positive approaches and more multifaceted approaches as opposed to one-dimensional approaches.
There should also be an appreciation that the legal system and the laws are based on community standards that are very much rooted in the centuries-old ideology that the law is a standard by which we live; to break that standard means you are then held accountable to the state, but you are not at all held accountable to the individual who has been harmed. As we know, the law does not recognize that victim as having any role in the system except as a witness, to show that the state's standard was violated.
It's fundamental to the whole system that this is why we have some of the delays - because we have to safeguard the freedoms and protections of the individual who is now likely to face the sanctions of the state. It's more than just the delays. I think it's going to the fundamentals of what the system means and why so many people involved in the system, whether as perpetrators, as victims or as the general community watching, don't understand those fundamental pieces and how they contribute to all of the delays, difficulties and misunderstandings, and to a belief that there's been absolute injustice. I think they're absolutely right from the perspective of meeting human needs.
.1030
Ms Torsney: They're often expecting the justice system to repair the damage, and that's just not what it's currently designed to do. Perhaps with the young offenders system we might have some hope of changing it and making it more of a social tool rather than just a legal tool.
There are two other issues I'm wondering if you can comment on. One is the role of gangs when it comes to women, both young women's gangs as well as women who are pulled into male gangs. The second is adults and their role in either enticing young women into crime or perhaps further victimizing them. Do you have some comments in that area?
Ms Pate: I need to start out by saying I think both of those phenomena have been in essence created by those of us outside of the youth experience looking at the youth experience and forcing it into pigeon-holes that we can then understand. I need to frame it by saying that.
I first started working on the gang issue in Calgary. It was around Asian youth gangs and Vietnamese kids. What we really uncovered was the usual groupings that young people, and for that matter adults, make. Certainly peer grouping is an important facet of adolescent development. It was normal peer grouping with an overlay of racism, economic problems, social problems and integration problems, and then a focusing on those young people in what I think was systemically a fundamentally racist way, as well as biased.
We know all young people do some things that are inappropriate. We know that. That's a given. Yet when we focus on only certain young people and identify them by culture, race, class or gender, we can often find things about them that can identify them as problematic.
I don't have current information, but I believe it's fair to say that by the end of the task force that was developed to look at this Asian gang problem, as it had been framed, it was clear that what we really had was an integration problem. We had a problem of young people not having access to the education system and literally being drop-kicked out of school. We had a problem of young people having no place to hang out, so they were hanging out at the Mac's, the McDonald's or whatever was around. We had a problem of young people starting to congregate and then almost living up to a name they were being given.
Suddenly we had the creation of a gang problem in a situation where, I must say, as I looked around and saw what was happening...I could have identified those same groupings when I was in high school. We weren't called gangs at that point.
Certainly we've seen more young people being picked up and publicly identified as involved with adults in committing offences. Again, the information and the stats - and if anybody has something different I would love to see it - shows we're not seeing a vastly different scenario from what we saw even twenty years ago. What we are seeing is more publicizing of it.
We must remember that it was only with the advent of the Young Offenders Act that we saw the publication of anything around juvenile justice issues, because prior to that time the media wasn't even allowed in a courtroom. They were completely in camera hearings. So suddenly, with the advent of the Young Offenders Act, we have the creation of juvenile crime, if you will, and increased public focus.
I don't need to remind anyone here about what happened when the Thomson chain lost their court case at the Supreme Court of Canada. Immediately, in every paper in this country that ran their stories, we saw a caveat at the beginning that they could not publish the name of the young person involved because the Young Offenders Act precluded it. That created a fear. It created an issue that, from our experience, had not existed before. I don't remember, when I was working with young people under the Juvenile Delinquents Act, ever hearing a big issue around publishing names. It created an issue.
There are increasingly some concerns as we're seeing more young people being scapegoated and being pushed to the margins of a grouping. Potentially we could see increasingly dangerous behaviour, but I think we've created much of it in terms of the way we've framed and identified those young people. I think they're happy to call themselves gangs if they'll be accepted as gangs.
.1035
Ms Torsney: You mentioned something about groupings when you were a teenager, although now they might be perceived as gangs. You brought up shoplifting, and that's interesting, because in my polls of the fine upstanding individuals in our community, I'm shocked at how many of them shoplifted in their youth. Under the current system they might have faced a criminal conviction. It's interesting how many people have that in their closet.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mrs. Ablonczy.
Mrs. Ablonczy: Thank you, Madam Chairman. We're talking about prevention again. I have two quick questions on this.
On the idea of parents being held financially and legally responsible for the criminal actions of their children, if it can be shown that a parent's neglect or abuse of the child contributed to his or her committing the crime, would that have any impact on deterrence?
Second, on the attempt by some municipalities to set curfews to keep youth off the streets and out of trouble, have your studies or observations shown that either of these measures is helpful in prevention?
Ms Pate: The allocation of responsibility to parents is part of the model that existed prior to the Young Offenders Act. Part of our concern here is that it's not that parents don't have a role to play, but we're talking about criminalized behaviour. My fear is that increasingly more parents would be criminalized, in particular those who are least able to meet their own needs, much less their children's needs, and especially as we see increasing cutbacks to the social and economic programs that support them.
I think single moms would most often be the ones dragged into court. That would not be unrelated to the total lack of both personal and communal support for the same single moms in their community, as well as the lack of financial and other sorts of resource support.
It seems wrong-headed to be doing what really amounts to an extension of what we're already seeing in blaming the victim, particularly in family violence. Your colleague mentioned the increasing marginalization of those who are most living on the margins in our communities, and I think we would see more of that, although I hope I'm wrong. What we're seeing now I think would be consistent with the current trends.
In terms of deterrence, it's long been known that the ability to think abstractly, to reason and to determine the future consequences of current actions are are not abilities that just come to us, they are learned. Cognitive abilities and the ability to think abstractly some people never acquire, others don't reach until they're in their twenties, and some acquire in the early stages of adolescence, but I don't think it's a surprise that for most people involved in the criminal justice system the deterrence theory has little application, either general or specific.
Very few of the people I've met in my time working with young people and women in the criminal justice system actually thought they would be apprehended and dealt with by the criminal justice system as a result of their actions. It's not surprising that most people assume they won't be getting caught. As we know, the stats are such that most people don't get caught doing what they're doing.
Those areas fit in what I think of as the quick fix category of things that are likely to please the public and those of us who want to see things change rather quickly, but I think it's unlikely they'll achieve those results. I would fit curfews into that category. However, we know that the more involved people feel in their community, the more involved they are in activities that are relevant to them, the more unlikely they are to be violating that environment.
.1040
I think we'll see far greater success if we provide young people with constructive places to be, places where they can be safe in an environment that encourages them to be involved in other kinds of positive behaviour. They also need an environment that encourages them to be involved in positive self-determination - not where they're being directed or told what to do all the time, but where they're given some challenges.
Young people have come up with some examples. I can't tell you of any places at this point, but in my adolescence some of the youth drop-in centres were probably responsible for many young people not being involved in the juvenile justice system.
Young people have said that if they had a place to go and be safe, to work on programs for other young people, a place where their health care needs could be at least minimally addressed, their legal needs - I'm not talking about criminal justice but family needs - social service needs, mental health needs in some cases...those sorts of services would be much more appropriate.
Some good street youth services have been developed over the years. I don't know how many of them will survive for much longer. The resource base for most of them is such that they're not able to survive, whether in Vancouver, Toronto or Calgary, and those are some of the ones I know best.
I think we would do far better to invest in some of the approaches and experiences of young people like Cherry Kingsley, who appeared here last year or the year before on Bill C-37 and talked about the need to invest in some of the self-organized youth groups that have been developing. They also want to be involved in educating other young people, and they would have far better results than we would have as adults going and talking to those young people.
Mrs. Ablonczy: Thank you.
The Chair: Mr. DeVillers.
Mr. DeVillers (Simcoe North): Ms Pate, on page 12 of your brief, under the title ``Increased Youth Court Sentences'', you indicate that your association continues to oppose any increases in the maximum youth court sentences.
That gets me to the issue of longer sentences as a deterrent or perceived deterrent. I had a symposium on law and order in my riding on the weekend, and there were professionals from various fields. We had a judge, a lawyer, psychologists, a youth worker, a seniors representative, a media representative, a representative of CAVEAT, the victims' organization, a young offender and a graduate from our correctional services.
The general agreement on the question of deterrence was that increased sentences are a deterrent to people who don't need to be deterred - the general public. The general public doesn't want to go to jail and doesn't want to have a longer sentence. That would act as a deterrent to us, but to the targeted group, the people who are at risk of offending, that's not necessarily the case.
Do you have an opinion on that? Is that part of your association's position?
Ms Pate: For many of us it's not because we fear a long sentence that we don't commit offences. If we get to the point of thinking about that, we have probably gone through a number of other processes. Many of us have invested in our communities in a different way than have many of the young people or adults we find in our system, and I think that's fundamental.
So in terms of longer sentences deterring some but not others, I think longer sentences really don't deter anybody. There are some of us who will probably never end up in the system, but there are some who, by virtue of their circumstances and the response they will have to those circumstances, we can predict fairly early on will.
.1045
So we do not support longer sentences. Although our organization disagrees and I personally disagree with that approach, I certainly take responsibility as someone who is part of this country and has been part of the process as we've gone through these progressive changes. We're heading gradually in a direction that we know is not effective.
I suggest that you will find very few people who will say that putting more and more people in our prisons is going to change crime. There may be an initial response that this is the response we want to have, but most people will acknowledge.... We look at what happens in the United States and we know that crime rates are increasing there. We know that violence and the experience that people have is increasing. Yet we also know that they're now incarcerating a million citizens a year. It's their largest growth industry.
We need to stop that process in this country. I think we have a prime opportunity with the review your committee is doing to stop this process very quickly, turn it around and demand that those resources go into our communities. I would suggest that your constituents, and my neighbours and friends and family, the circle of community that we all have around us but that many of the people in the system do not have around them, would then be in a position to provide more support.
As we see increasingly that we're scapegoating a certain segment of our population, it becomes easier to have them be a faceless group that we can just hive off and punish forever, and somehow feel that this will accommodate our needs and the community's needs; that it somehow will be addressing crime, and at least these bad things are not happening to us. We need to take responsibility for that and stop it as well.
It has been instructive for me, for my community and for my family to know some of the people involved in the system. I know that the prisoners' committee at the Prison for Women, the lifers group, is very keen to meet this committee if you would like. Obviously they can't come here, but they have invited you to come and meet with them.
From everybody I have met, particularly those who have never been in a prison before - whether it's a community volunteer going in for the first time to do a bingo in Cape Breton, or someone going in to do advocacy work, or an MP going in to visit and see the conditions in the prison or to respond to an issue a constituent has raised - almost invariably the uniform response I've heard over the last twelve years that I've been going into prisons is, wow, it's just like my dad or my brother or my sister or my mother, or my grandmother now. I think we need to put a face to some of those people who, yes, are committing offences and, yes, need to be held accountable. But we need to be holding them accountable in some way that is going to mean something positive for their victims, for the rest of our community and for others as a whole population.
I strongly suggest that we can turn some of that around. It does require investment and long-term solutions. Some of the quick responses and quick fixes that are being proposed will not meet those needs, will just continue along that path.
The Vice-Chair (Ms Torsney): Ms Ablonczy, do you have more questions?
Mrs. Ablonczy: Yes. Prior to the Young Offenders Act coming into effect, teachers, school principals and the police used quite a bit of discretion when dealing with youth. For example, they might take them to talk with their parents or give them a stern warning but not formally charge them. But according to our research, more formal charges are being laid by the police. Some say this is because of the zero tolerance attitude toward youth crime. Others claim that the police are afraid to discriminantly deal with youth on their own because they could be charged with using unreasonable means of discipline.
What role has your experience led you to think would be appropriate for people in authority, particularly in schools and police officers, in using discretionary means for both the prevention of crime and in dealing with minor infractions or trying to discourage youth from actually committing more serious offences?
.1050
Ms Pate: As the Young Offenders Act was coming in at that time, I was involved in a number of sessions with school boards, particularly counsellors, who are often the staff members approached first by young people directly impacted or victimized by fellow students. Counsellors may also be approached by other teachers.
One of the things they were hearing was that they had to refer people. They made assumptions initially that they would have to refer people increasingly to the police. They thought it was now the law, and they didn't have the discretion any longer to deal with these cases.
We spent a lot of time trying to encourage them to develop alternate means in their schools. I mentioned conflict resolution approaches, peer mediation programs, and those sorts of things.
We also encouraged the teachers to try to involve more of the parents of most of the young people and the community more in the school. We saw some of the best examples of that happening in community-based schools, whereby they had boards of directors comprised of parents and other community members.
The trend was certainly there. It was developing and has continued to develop to a point at which the response has been to cut. I think this is largely as a result of increasing cuts to education programs.
As Ms Torsney pointed out, many of the support services have historically existed in places like schools, child care centres and those sorts of areas. The result has been that we've increasingly seen a focus on approaches like zero tolerance as one means of meeting the needs.
I think it really is, from my perspective, part of the despairing of our collective communities when our schools, and then ultimately our communities, can't determine any other way to deal with someone except to basically banish them from their presence. We know that is what we're seeing happen when we see those sorts of approaches. It's a recognition that we don't have the resources or the creativity to be able to deal with these cases.
This is not meant as an indictment of the school system or the individual teachers, but I think they are feeling increasingly overextended. I would refer back to some of the points I've already raised around the need to invest more in some of those sorts of services and preventive actions that have been available, as opposed to encouraging more of this zero tolerance type of thinking.
Mrs. Ablonczy: This would hold true for police discretion?
Ms Pate: Certainly. In 1987 I was in Australia. Some of those programs have now been cut there, incidentally, but they had quite extensive police cautioning programs, as they referred to them.
I brought the material back to some of the police. I was working specifically then with a number of the departments of the Calgary police service. I was in fairly regular contact with their senior deputies as well as the police commission.
There was a hope that we would see that sort of regime start to develop in Canada. Unfortunately, we've seen the opposite trend, as they have in Australia. They had a very extensive young offender support system, as they called it, and the police cautioning scheme that resulted in keeping many young people out of the system. In fact, for their entire state of New South Wales, they had fewer young people in custody for 3.5 million young people than we had in Alberta at the time for the population of Alberta.
It was instructive to me to see just how, with that investment early on, they basically put all their resources into any apprehension/detention/detection types of resources, like policing, probation officers who might be called, or youth protection workers. They were all focused on immediate intervention. Within 24 hours there was supposed to be a plan in place for a young person who had been picked up by the police. These were serious offences also. They were generally offences for which people were being held in custody overnight. Immediately, resources would be put in place.
.1055
The primary objective was to get that young person into the community in a way that was safe for that person and obviously for the community.
They had a tremendous success rate. I think we could learn from that. I still have some of that old material. I'm hoping to see what they're doing now. I hope they haven't gone too far along the same route as we have. I'll be getting more of that information later this year directly. I'd be happy to share it with you.
Mrs. Ablonczy: It'll be interesting to see.
The Chair: Thanks, Mrs. Ablonczy. Ms Bethel is next.
Ms Bethel (Edmonton East): You said that the provincial authorities should be encouraged to develop more gender-specific and culturally appropriate services and programs and that the provincial authorities should be held more accountable and take more responsibility for providing an adequate level of these kinds of services.
I guess the difficulty there is: as a federal government, what is it we should be doing to ensure that this happens?
Ms Pate: I would suggest that you could be putting in some standards and requirements in terms of the cost-sharing agreements that are in place. As I've suggested already in terms of limitations on custodial spending, spending for custody beds is one area. You could also be putting some direction in for gender-specific and culturally specific resources.
I'll give you a bit more of an example of what I was referring to there when we were talking about the lack of resources. The reality is that I believe we're now left in this country with one young-women-only setting with open custody. It's a house in Brampton that still exists. It's run by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Peel.
Save that exception, we do have young people sometimes scattered in child welfare services. We do have mixed-gender housing. Historically what we know, as we've seen with the adult system as well, is that the small percentage of young women in the system means that their needs very much get basically submerged. They're put into the same sorts of programs as those that exist for young men.
For instance, we have an increasing number of teen moms. Again, we would like to see that situation be different; however, it's not. And yet there are no resources for those young women. So we're seeing more and more young women being put into the child welfare system themselves, and their children are being seized.
Even more problematic than that is young people not being taken into the system or being provided with social services support. The young people are going into the child welfare system and then into the criminal justice or the juvenile justice system.
Ms Bethel: My second question is: why has Alberta, and certainly other provinces, been as averse, as a worst-case scenario, and slow, as a best-case scenario, in establishing community youth justice committees? What can and should we do to encourage the use of section 69?
Ms Pate: Encourage it and perhaps tie it to some of the cost-sharing. The reality right now is that a lot of provinces, as well as the federal government, are focused on economics. Given that this is the reality we're facing, perhaps focusing on some of the standards and the manner in which moneys can be spent around that very issue might assist the process.
I find it antithetical to the approach to be arguing this way. But clearly, if we can link it to the cost-sharing, I think that would be of assistance.
One of the cautions I would have for youth justice committees, and this is my fear, is that if they're implemented by provinces in which there's not an investment in really looking at some of the hard cases - these are the cases that really challenge our communities and us as individuals, as well as the system, to meet the needs of those young people - then we will see the same experience we've seen with alternative measures, which is many people coming forth before those committees who really don't need those resources. They probably need a good deal of community support, but they are being criminalized in order to get that support.
I'm sure all of you know of stories - you've heard of them in this committee - of parents coming to the system and being told that unless their child gets into difficulty with the law and is charged, there are no resources.
That's now increasingly even problematic in the juvenile justice system. I think it is an incredible indictment of our country that the reality many of our young people and their families are facing is that the only place left with any resources is the criminal justice system. I think we need to flip that.
Ms Bethel: Is there any good research out there that shows clearly the effectiveness of alternate measures? We talk about provinces cutting back, yet at the same time we're saying that alternate measures are more cost-effective. Is there any good research out there?
.1100
Ms Pate: Unfortunately, as I mentioned, many of the most intense and, I would argue, most successful programs in terms of recidivism, self-actualization of young people, progression of young people out of the system and independence of young people from social service supports, all of those sorts of things, have been wiped out.
There is certainly some research. For instance, there's the program I worked on. I'd be happy to share some of the material we've produced. But the reality is that whenever we venture down that path I think we get faced with how many of the programs have been cut. Suddenly the research is called suspect, or it's not long enough.
Those are all completely accurate conclusions in light of the fact that we haven't had a long time during which programs like that have been supported in this country - or elsewhere, I would suggest - although there are some longitudinal studies. It's why we keep going back to programs like the Perry preschool project, one of the few longitudinal studies that was funded, monitored and evaluated.
What I would suggest, and what we at the National Crime Prevention Council have been looking at, is trying to flip that argument a bit, saying let's evaluate how effective the criminal justice system is right now. Is putting young people in prison helping? No, we've seen no appreciable.... Looking at it that way, is it worth the risk of investing the same amount of money in our communities that we're now investing in imprisoning young people? I would suggest that then we'll see some very different changes.
I also think we need to be investing in a way that encourages it to be for at least the period during which a government is in, so that we can see that evaluation. I recognize some of the political and economical realities we face. I think we need to do much more focusing, in the public as well as within our own members, whether it's your constituents or my neighbours, to challenge them to think about that, about where the effectiveness is.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms Pate. Our time is up. We really thank you a great deal for your presentation. It was very helpful.
Ms Pate: Thank you very much.
The Chair: We'll adjourn this session and take a couple of minutes to stretch our legs and get organized while our next witnesses take their places.