EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Monday, June 3, 1996

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[English]

The Chair: I want to welcome you. This is the Ontario Social Development Council multi-disciplinary round table phase II review of the YOA. That's quite a mouthful.

We have with us, in addition to the chair, Brian Scully and a variety of other people. I can introduce you all or I can let you do it as you speak, which I think is better, because we're more interested, quite frankly, in your content than we are in following the niceties here.

We're very happy to have you here. I'm very pleased. This is a rather unusual way for a parliamentary committee to hear evidence, but it allows us an opportunity really to benefit from your experience and your research, so we're very happy to be able to do that.

The other thing that's unusual is for a parliamentarian, having achieved the position of chair of the justice committee, to turn it over. But I'm going to ask you, Mr. Scully, as we agreed in advance, to take over from here and run interference for us and let us hear what your group has to say.

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Mr. Brian Scully (Chair, Youth Justice Committee, Member of the Board, Ontario Social Development Council): Thank you, Madam Chair.

First I'd like to thank you and your committee for allowing us to attend here and speak to you today. The Ontario Social Development Council has addressed you twice before, but in Ottawa.

We are an organization that's been in existence for 88 years, and we have a focus on social policy, comprised of volunteers from around the province of Ontario.

Since 1984 we've had a particular focus on the Young Offenders Act. We've had three conferences dealing with the Young Offenders Act in that period of time.

I'd also like to thank the individuals who've given of their time to come here today. You will note from their areas of work that they come from all different walks of the young offenders system. They have an amazing amount of experience to give to you today.

I've asked each of our presenters to try to limit themselves to up to five minutes, to allow some time for questions thereafter. I would ask you to exercise some discipline and to ask your questions when we'll have finished our presentation, in fairness to the individuals towards the end of the list, who otherwise would get lost.

We should move directly to our first speaker, Dr. Alan Leshied. I think you heard from Alan this morning.

Dr. Alan Leshied (Director, Young Offenders Services; Assistant Director, London Family Court Clinic): It's been my privilege to be asked by Brian to give specific comments on the declaration. In keeping with my five minutes, I want to read some comments to you.

I wish to make specific comments on revisions to the declaration in Bill C-37. Further, I wish specifically to identify the important additions made in that bill regarding the place of rehabilitation and the place it holds in the pursuit of community safety.

As I indicated to the committee this morning, both research and commentary specific to the successful rehabilitation and reintegration of young persons within their communities are possible. It is heartening, therefore, to have had entrenched in Bill C-37 the specific importance of rehabilitation as a concept that is coincidental with the pursuit of community safety.

However, I challenge this committee, in reviewing this part of the declaration, to encourage operationalizing the concept of rehabilitation through the promotion of innovative programs that are consistent with the evaluation literature concerning effective service. Specifically, I am speaking of programs that can provide meaningful reductions in offending while being cost-effective at the same time.

As I indicated this morning, there is an incarceration rate across our country, again with the exclusion of Quebec, of one in three within the young offender population. Costs have become prohibitive, with 80% of all young offenders funding being directed toward custodial facilities.

It is important for this committee to support actively alternatives to traditional delivery of youth justice services that have become burdensome in their costs and ineffective in their delivery. Hence, while the declaration now endorses rehabilitation, the next phase must be to extend support to programs that can meaningfully give voice to that rehabilitation ethic.

Second, I wish to bring to the committee's attention the important highlight of the declaration in Bill C-37 relating to prevention. Once again research tells us that many of the young persons who end up in our youth justice system can be identified from a very early age because of a variety of circumstances and conditions in which they are socialized within their families, schools, and communities.

Recently the family court clinic, in collaboration with the Crime Prevention Council of Canada, provided a model for the delivery of prevention programs with the working title Preventing Crime by Investing in Family. This model of prevention can serve as a blueprint for implementing prevention strategies that can reduce the financial and social costs of youth offending.

In the few minutes given to me for review of this portion of the declaration, I wish to emphasize two important points.

The first is that we need to extend integrity to that declaration in supporting rehabilitation in practical ways. Without extending such support, programs inconsistent with effective service, such as boot camps, will continue to flourish. There is the possibility of national standards in the delivery of effective service. This committee should review the potential for establishing national standards.

Second, this committee also needs to highlight the importance of prevention and early identification within high-risk families and communities in order to redirect funding away from the deep end of the system to the point where more meaningful inroads can be made to reduce the numbers of young persons in the youth justice system.

Thank you.

Mr. Scully: Thank you, Alan.

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I meant to say one other thing, if I may, before we get any further. You will note from your list of persons presenting to you today that there are some people here from various government ministries. I think it would go without saying that they are here representing their own personal points of view and their experience in the system but not representing government policy. In fairness to them, that should be said.

Secondly, I call on Michele Peterson-Badali.

Ms Michele Peterson-Badali (Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education): I am a psychologist at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I've been studying children, adolescents, and adults and their understanding of the legal system for the past eleven years, since I was a graduate student. I'm also a member of the board of directors for the Canadian Foundation for Justice for Children and Youth; you'll be hearing from their executive director a bit later. I'm also a member of the Youth Justice Education Partnership. I hope you'll be hearing from them when you go out west. I think you will be hearing from them.

Many of the concerns I think the committee is examining in the review of the YOA and the youth justice system stem from developmental issues facing children and adolescents. I want to touch on some of those. I'm coming at this really from the perspective of a developmental psychologist. I'll also touch a little on what we know from some of the research we've done.

I think these issues have implications for things such as the age boundaries of the act, the provision of additional safeguards to protect the rights of young people, the processing of young people through the court system, timeliness, the effectiveness of various dispositional alternatives in preventing reoffending, and so on. I have a strong concern with the apparent perception that children and adolescents are somehow miniature adults; that somehow they are just smaller versions of adults and therefore should be treated in the same way as adults are, with the same kind of system and so on. Of course one of the reasons we have a separate youth justice system is that children and adolescents are different in many important ways from adults.

Adolescence is an especially complex transitional period for young people. Adolescents retain some of the characteristics of childhood while in other respects they're more like adults. For example, during their teens kids are moving towards greater independence and autonomy. On the other hand, they also like some of the boundaries and the safety of home. There's an increasing influence of peers on their behaviour, as we all know.

Although kids sometimes look like adults - and this is something we've studied - they tend to have a shorter time perspective than adults. They don't think in terms of the same long-term consequences as adults do. They reason differently about issues. Even if they possess the same information as adults, they think about it differently. They're more vulnerable to power differentials in relationships, to coercion, and so on.

I think these characteristics and our position on the complexity of adolescence as a phase of development are reflected in our position on giving teens responsibility for their own behaviour in different stages, in different handings-out. For example, we let kids drive at 16, but we don't let them drive by themselves at night. They can't purchase cigarettes or drink alcohol until they're 19 years old. They can't vote until they're 18 years old. There are all sorts of different boundaries for what kids could do at different ages, and I think this is a reflection of the fact that there is this complex and rather contradictory period of life called adolescence. The creation of a separate justice system for youth is part of this recognition of adolescence as a complex and contradictory period in people's lives.

I want to talk for a second about youths' understanding of the legal system and what the research tells us.

Young people have particular difficulty with some of the critical legal principles and concepts of our justice system, for example the role of defence counsel and the principle that lawyers defend clients regardless of their actual guilt. A significant proportion of young people, delinquent young offenders, think lawyers are there to defend the innocent but not the guilty. They don't understand the presumption of innocence. They don't understand the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality or what it means to plead not guilty. These place young people at a disadvantage in the system.

These findings are in relation to adults. Adults do better than kids when you ask them about these kinds of things.

Young people also have significant difficulty understanding the function and significance of the Charter of Rights, such as the right to silence and counsel. They may be able to paraphrase or parrot back rights if they are asked what they mean, but they don't understand the consequences of waiving those rights.

About public knowledge and opinion about the Young Offenders Act, here certainly the government has a real PR problem. There seems to be fairly widespread dissatisfaction with the act. But I think public opinion about the YOA and the youth justice system is based on a whole network of biases, and in fact, on a number of misconceptions about the way the act works. My point is that when people are dissatisfied they're dissatisfied based on what they may think about the way the youth justice system works, but in many cases it's not the way it really works. There's a lot of ignorance and misconceptions out there.

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The public, for example, tends to overestimate the prevalence of youth crime. I'm sure Professor Doob will tell you in a couple of minutes that they tend to base their opinions of the Young Offenders Act on a picture of the repeatedly violent serious young offender, which isn't a typical young offender. Typically, offences are not violent; they tend to be property offences and so on. So the kind of picture people have in their minds when they're saying things like the Young Offenders Act is too soft, or it's too lenient, or it doesn't do enough for kids, is of a very specific type of offender and it's not the most common type.

The public also has quite poor knowledge of the Young Offenders Act. Most people don't know the age boundaries of the act. They don't understand how youth court records work. They underestimate the prevalence of custodial dispositions for youth.

Whether greater public knowledge would result in a more favourable public opinion of the act is an open question, but my contention is that we need to start by real public education around the act and the youth justice system as opposed to changing the act in response to misguided public opinion.

I think some of the things I've said have some implications for a number of things you've been interested in in your review.

First of all, for the minimum and maximum ages of the YOA, I firmly believe these should not be reduced. Children under the age of 12 understand less about the legal system than young people12 years and older, especially around the critical issue of representation by counsel. There would be real questions, I think, of competency of kids in many cases if you were to drop the age below 12. You would subject even younger kids to processes that were developed and intended for adults. The prospect of subjecting children to jury trial is rather ludicrous. What kids would understand or what they would be able to do in terms of sitting through a jury trial is something to think about.

It also needs to be pointed out that there are in fact systems in place to deal with children under 12 who are involved in criminal behaviour. Our helping legislation is there for that - child welfare legislation in Ontario, the Child and Family Services Act.

In terms of procedural safeguards to young people's rights, section 56 for example, my view, based on the research that I and my colleagues have done, is that procedural safeguards should be strengthened and certainly not weakened. The kids do not understand the function and significance of their rights. They are more vulnerable to coercion, to power differentials, than adults are, and certainly police officers generally don't have trouble getting kids to waive their rights. Kids will often waive rights and not realize they've even done it. They will give statements and not understand that they've even done that. They won't realize what they've done. Kids also, as I've said before, tend to look at the short-term but not the long-term consequences of their actions.

I think the federal government also needs to signal the need to move further away from criminalizing youth and towards primary prevention, diversion, and rehabilitation. I think they need to give the right message with the YOA in order to shape provincial response, provincial implementation of the act. We know that custodial dispositions do not act as either a specific or general deterrent to crime. Kids don't commit crime because they think the Young Offenders Act is soft. They commit crimes for a whole host of other reasons, and coming up with more punitive dispositions for youth isn't going to reduce the rate of youth crime.

In addition, a strong predictor of whether kids are going to reoffend is their contact with the system in the first place. You get kids into the youth justice system, and chances are they may well stay in the system. So just having that contact as opposed to diverting them away from the system initially is predictive of them getting involved and reoffending.

I think a significant number of second and subsequent offences end up being offences that are related to the administration of justice. So, for example, a kid does something, is convicted and ends up on probation, and one of the conditions of probation is a curfew. A young person breaks the curfew and ends up back in court for violation of probation. Other kids who don't have that particular condition in their probation order aren't committing a crime, but because this kid isn't home by nine o'clock at night he has violated probation and is back in the system.

I think reducing the age boundary of the act from 12 to 10 would intensify this effect because you would be sweeping in all sorts of minor offences. The serious offences are so rare that you'd be picking up thousands and thousands of kids doing relatively trivial things and really subjecting them to the possibility of ending up deeper in the system at some point later in their adolescence. I think that focusing on primary prevention, early intervention, diversion, alternative measures, and alternatives to custody makes a lot of sense in both human and fiscal terms, and I'm sure that other people will talk to you about that.

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I also have a hand-out. I know I went really fast, but I have this down on paper for any of you who want it.

Mr. Scully: I'll call next on Ken Jeffers.

Mr. Ken Jeffers (Director, Alternative Measures Program, Harriet Tubman Community Organization): My name is Ken Jeffers, and I'm the founder of what is called the Harriet Tubman Community Organization, one of the first black multi-service community agencies in Toronto.

We've been working with African-Canadian youth for a number of years. I just want to share some of our experiences, to help you understand what is happening with African-Canadian youth in the criminal justice system.

We currently have two major programs. One is called the heritage counselling program, with the ministry of corrections. We've been doing this for five years. We have developed a method of counselling young people that combines traditional forms of counselling with an understanding of racism and heritage and how that impacts on their lives and how they can overcome barriers that prevent them from progressing as young people.

In the court workers program, we've been working out of four courts in Metro.

The experiences we have with young people make it very clear that we need to review and look at the Young Offenders Act not as a barrier but as a way in which we can work with our young people.

The committee on systemic racism, which you may have heard of, recently concluded a study of the incarceration rate of African-Canadian young people in the criminal justice system. Black youth, along with the aboriginal people, represent the highest number of incarcerated young people. These findings have moved the long-standing accusation of bias and racism in the criminal justice system from the realm of the so-called historical emotional response of the black activist crying racism to the very clear documentation of African-Canadian youth being criminalized because of race. Any prevention strategy has to address this.

The Tubman organization has developed and run a program that was funded by the Ministry of the Attorney General in the summer of 1993. We provided support and rehabilitative services in the form of counselling in the court system to the young offenders and their families - helping with the selection of lawyers, providing assistance such as employment, etc.

Our experience has clearly shown that young people are ignorant and sometimes are very frightened and overwhelmed by a system that seems very confusing to them. For example, we've had situations where young people have told us that the court system is bad because they are often in front of judges who are white. There are white lawyers, they are arrested by white police officers, and they feel very victimized.

Again, our intervention has been to work with families to help these young people understand what is happening in their lives.

It certainly doesn't take a lot to determine the conditions that produce these offenders. We have known for some time that poverty often sets the conditions for criminal offences. However, it is ominous that young black males in particular describe themselves, as one of the popular T-shirts says, as ``Black Male - Endangered Species''.

As the report on systemic racism indicates, the police are more likely to stop, search, and detain African-Canadian youth than any other individuals.

There's also the domino effect of increasing difficulty, where more and more youth are finding it difficult to get work and their parents are finding it difficult to get work. So we see an absence of mentorship. There is no intervention in their lives by positive role models.

I was involved after the Yonge Street riot four years ago. I was on a four-level government committee. We asked a number of young people to step forward to talk about what they thought about the criminal justice system. There was emotion and passion in how they spoke about the system. They mistrusted adults. They felt a sense of hopelessness and they felt that there was a need for strong support within their communities in addressing the problems they face.

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We have proposed several solutions to early intervention with African-Canadian youth. We feel there needs to be development of a new training package that addresses the idiosyncrasies of these youths, who are often seen as gang members and who are often stereotyped into positions where they become criminalized.

We feel that community professionals who are trained in this new understanding should be an integral and legitimate part of the delivery of education to support and complement teachers and other school officials. We've seen too many young people coming before the courts who are fighting in the school yard, and that's when the criminalization process begins. We feel the school officials are now abandoning their responsibility and in fact are incapable in many instances of understanding the new youth, as we refer to them.

African-Canadian youth who are being disruptive and dysfunctional should be required to attend individual and group sessions, like community groups that have an understanding of the counselling methods that work. There should be a reinstatement of community recreation programs that provide excellent opportunities for trained mentors to relate to young people in a non-threatening environment.

We have seen in these provincial cuts in particular that a number of programs where adults and mentors are in a position to influence a number of these young people have been cut and removed. So we have this sense of alienation, as I mentioned before, which has really become a major problem in this community.

There has to be a massive public education campaign in an appropriate manner that helps young people understand rights and responsibilities in the criminal justice system. Alternative methods should provide an opportunity for peers and elders to recommend and monitor courses of action for minor offences. This is also cost-effective.

There should be detached youth development workers whose responsibility it would be to make contact with young people in areas they frequent as an early intervention method. The purpose would be to develop these relationships with a view to advising and counselling in an informal setting. All stakeholders in the criminal justice system should be made aware and educated about current methods of prevention and alternative solutions on an ongoing basis.

We feel the young offender age should not be lowered. We feel early intervention is in fact a major part of where we have to see solutions. I have some material here that has some of the findings we gathered through our work in the court system, which I'd like to leave with you at the end of the day.

Thank you.

Ms Catherine Beamish (Barrister and Solicitor, Sioux Lookout Member, Youth Justice Committee and Board of Directors, Ontario Social Development Council): Members of the committee, I am a practising lawyer in the town of Sioux Lookout, which is in northwestern Ontario. It's a town of about 5,000. I'd like to talk about a couple of things I've learned over the last 16 years in my practice.

First of all, I represent a number of young offenders in my small town. We must remember that it's kids like the ones I represent who probably constitute the bulk of the young people in the young offenders system in this country. These are really the kids next door.

My observations about this group are that we're probably over-criminalizing the behaviour of the kid-next-door kind of young person. There's no need for the criminalization of every school yard fight, every broken window, and every shoplifting incident at the Wal-Mart. I think what we need to do for kids of this sort is to expand the available community alternatives, including expanding the use of alternative measures programs.

The other group I spend most of my time working with is aboriginal young people. Sioux Lookout is the regional service centre for approximately 30 first nations to the north, the majority of which are fly-in only. The court flies in and administers justice on a regular basis.

The young people who come before those courts are really troubled, damaged kids. The majority of them have a substance abuse or solvent abuse program. They're sniffers, hairspray drinkers, kids who have a really bad problem with solvents or alcohol. In addition, many of them are operating in dysfunctional families and dysfunctional communities. They're really not criminal in the normal sense of the word. They're troubled kids, but their needs are primarily for treatment for the development of healthier senses of identity and the development of options.

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I might point out that this is the same group of kids you hear about almost annually in the media for high rates of suicide. Pikangikum is one of the communities I go to. The situation in these communities is very much like that of Davis Inlet. The kids are severely addicted to solvents and are really in need of treatment programs.

The criminal justice system really doesn't do anything for these kids. I've had more workers in custodial facilities telling me, this kid doesn't belong here; they're not a criminal; they really have a treatment need; they don't even have a custodial need.

I'd like to speak a little about the way in which the system works in aboriginal communities.

The adversarial system is really inappropriate for dealing with aboriginal communities. The fundamental value, the fundamental traditional justice in the aboriginal communities, is what we call ``restorative justice''. It's to restore community harmony. The adversarial process, the process of our criminal justice system, really is the antithesis of the cultural values of the community.

I would strongly encourage the committee to look at the use of alternatives in the aboriginal community, alternative ways of dealing with things. We don't use the term ``sentencing circle'' in our area, although that's roughly what we do. Our judiciary have become very sensitive to the needs of the aboriginal community. When court is held in the majority of aboriginal communities, the chief counsel, elders, family, child, lawyers, police - everybody - really do sit around in a big circle, and input from all those persons is obtained prior to the sentencing of any young person, but adults as well. I think these alternative methods of dealing with crime in the community are particularly appropriate for aboriginal communities, and I'd urge you to consider them.

I want to make one point. We can't expect these sorts of community programs to develop instantly in the community. There is a need for some developmental work, for some community development, and for some funding to put some resources into the communities to assist them in developing these programs. Once the programs are up and running they're relatively low-cost to maintain. So I would urge you to look at the possibility of some developmental money to facilitate community alternatives.

I'd like to talk to you for a minute about the youth gangs in Winnipeg. The town where I practise is only about four hours from Winnipeg. The kids who are in those youth gangs in Winnipeg are the cousins of my clients, people who've moved from their northern reserves to the city, looking for a better life. I think we should look carefully at what's happening in Winnipeg. I'm sure you'll probably hear about it as you travel across the country.

I'd like to refer you to a recent article in The Globe and Mail. On May 18 there was an article by David Roberts on the street gangs of Winnipeg. It struck a chord with me. It said:

Police, sociologists and outreach workers agree the street gang phenomenon is the consequence of an endemic and unrelenting cycle of poverty, racism, family breakdown and unemployment.

In the aboriginal community that one sentence really tells the whole story. Unless we begin to address the factors in the aboriginal community that are leading to the development of such troubled adolescents, the growing young aboriginal population is going to be filling our jails for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Scully: Thank you very much, Catherine.

I'd like to call on Edmund Duarte next.

Mr. Edmund Duarte (Youth Street Worker, Central Toronto Youth Services): I'm a youth street worker with Central Toronto Youth Services. I want to thank Mr. Scully for inviting me to the committee.

I'm not going to throw a lot of statistics at you. Perhaps what I can do is inject a little dosage of reality, because by the time I get to work with these kids, they've already through the system, the majority of them. They've already gone through workers. They've already gone through counsellors. They've already gone through Lord knows what. My greatest challenge is always trying to establish contact with them and getting them to trust me, first of all.

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I work primarily with the Portuguese community within the city of Toronto. I work primarily with the families and the youth, not just the youth. We try not to isolate them. Our community is very tightly knit. There are a lot of religious implications. A lot of cultural things go on but get lost when the generations drift apart. A lot of culture shock is involved.

Our community has the second-highest high school drop-out rate in the city of Toronto, after the African-American community. Consequently our crime rate in our community has risen in direct relation. What I feel personally, in working with a lot of these youth, is that again we're looking primarily at prevention through education and youth involvement in positive programs in the community, programs that in many cases are non-existent.

A lot of the education system in the city of Toronto tends to abandon these kids I end up working with. I find one of the greatest problems right now is the lack of responsibility by the boards when it comes to dealing with youth who are showing signs of becoming involved in criminal activity or not following the right path. There is a lot of over-criminalization in the school yard, as was mentioned before. When I see a kid go into custody for six months for knocking somebody off a bike it really pains me, because the guy just got up off the ground and beat the hell out of him. He got beaten and ended up in custody for six months.

In dealing with the families, in many cases I find there is a lack of communication between the child and the family. In a lot of the families I deal with, the parents speak absolutely no English and the children speak no Portuguese, in this case. I'm sure it happens in other communities. There's an inability to communicate between the parents and the children when it comes to anything more complex than ``I'm hungry'', ``I want my pants done'', or ``I'm going to visit grandmother''. This would throw out a lot of the theories about parental responsibility when it comes to young offenders. The inability of these people to communicate with each other would certainly rule that out.

There should be more imagination on the part of judges and justice administrators in implementing the Young Offenders Act as it currently stands. Currently they're limited by the number of agencies out there to provide services. It becomes a vicious circle. They are limited in what they can do with the act because there are limited resources out there, and because there are limited resources out there it comes right back to limited courts.

In my community what we definitely need is something like one-stop shopping social services, such that you can help not only the youth who are involved in these situations but also the families. We cannot separate one from the other, not in my community anyway, with the strong religious backgrounds we have.

Obviously in Metropolitan Toronto the situation may be different. There are a lot of cultural biases, a lot of alienated youth. In my particular case, and with other communities, I would suggest the services would be better delivered by workers who are of the same cultural and social backgrounds and can understand the intricacies of the cultures and the things that go on and sometimes cause the alienation of these youth and propel them into the court system, making them - I wouldn't say victimized - subjected to the Young Offenders Act as it stands now.

I don't want to take much more time. Basically what I would like to say is that we should not forget we're still dealing with children. We should not allow the media to dictate the policy. You can look at the statistics on violent youth offenders. There are provisions to deal with these, and they are out there. Perhaps there are more now than there were twenty years ago, but still the numbers are minimal.

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The majority of youth I work with just need a little bit of attention, a little bit of time with them. It goes right back to prevention, early detection, and a little bit more accountability of the people who are involved with these children on a daily basis, and primarily that's the school system.

We shouldn't forget... I have an 11-year-old. He spent all day yesterday playing with a Tonka toy. He had a rock that was his driver, and he put grass all over a piece of tin - that was his garage - because he didn't want it to rust. I can't see that child in a court being tried by a jury because he knocked his brother over and his brother hit his head on whatever. It's ludicrous.

We have to be realistic about what we are doing. Children may commit what we consider to be adult crimes; this is true. But we are still dealing with children. They process information differently than we do. They look at things differently than we do. A pimple on a youth's face is the end of the world. To us, it's just a slight skin problem that goes away. So we have to take into consideration what we're dealing with, and we are dealing with children.

So let's keep that in the forefront in everything we do.

Mr. Scully: Our next representative is Professor Tony Doob.

Professor Tony Doob (Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto): Thank you very much.

Your report can be a very important turning-point for Canada's approach to youth crime. You have the opportunity to choose between two very different approaches to youth crime. You can endorse simplistic views about youth crime and the youth justice system that suggest that simple changes in the law are needed to reduce the amount of crime committed by youth in Canada, or you can do as many of the speakers before me have suggested and you can urge the federal government, the provincial governments, and Canadian communities generally to address the real problems of youth crime.

It seems to me that it's likely that we can all agree on two points. The first is that we're all interested in reducing the amount of crime committed by youths and by adults in our community. The second is that there should be consequences to young people for their misbehaviour.

As many of the speakers before me have already pointed out, the evidence is mounting that interventions outside of the youth justice system are going to be more effective in dealing with the problems of youth crime than is more criminal justice or changes in the Young Offenders Act.

The data from some of these evaluations are stark and cold. Researchers have asked a question, which is, how many serious crimes can be avoided per million dollars spent? The answer, almost invariably, is that programs outside of the youth justice system and the criminal justice system are more cost-effective in dealing with crime than more criminal justice, more youth justice, and more law.

The difficulty in this area is that youth justice and youth crime are very complex and in fact are very different from one another. We shouldn't assume that issues related to youth crime are automatically the same as the figures coming out of the youth justice system. As I'm sure you are well aware, there is enormous variation from province to province in the use of the youth justice system.

Let me give two simple examples.

In Quebec, for every 57 kids of young offender age, one case goes to court. Line up 57 young people in Quebec of young offender age, 12 through 17, and there will be one case that will make it's way into the youth court. The corresponding figure for Ontario is one case for every 17 kids.

I find it very difficult to believe that the young people in Ontario are really that much worse than the kids in Quebec.

The variation we're seeing is variation in the way in which we use the youth justice system. There's no reason to believe that there's variation in the behaviour of the young people themselves. In fact, when you look across provinces, you find that the use of the youth justice system does not track well with the actual reported crime rate. It's what we do with the kids themselves after they've been apprehended that seems to vary enormously.

In that context, one has to question or look beyond the figures that were given to you this morning by the Attorney General and Solicitor General of this province.

I believe I gave this to one of the staff of the committee. I have prepared for you some statistics, which were, in a sense, put in the same way as the statistics that were put to you this morning were. Unfortunately, I used some 1994 and 1995 statistics that were released two or three months ago. The minister has presented statistics from a year ago. The figures are different by 1% or 2%, but the point they make is really the same.

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In understanding what's happening in Ontario, for example, we have to remember that Ontario has about 36% of the kids of young offender age in this country. The minister was absolutely correct that we bring a disproportionate number of violent cases to court. The figure for 1994-95 was 46%. Remember, we have 36% of the kids and we're bringing 46% of the violent cases... That sounds as if we have a serious problem in Ontario.

Our problem in Ontario is a problem with the way in which we deal with violence. The figures are quite clear. What we are doing in Ontario in comparison to the rest of the country is that we're bringing a disproportionate number of the minor cases to court. We have in Ontario 51% of the minor assaults.

So now the question becomes what about the more serious ones; what about the cases that we're all very concerned about and that probably have to go to youth court? It turns out that we bring our fair share of the serious cases to court. We have 36% of the young people in this province and we bring about 37% of the serious assaults, of the serious violent crimes... The same sort of statistics can be shown for property crime. It is absolutely true that we bring a disproportionate portion of property crime to court compared to other provinces, but that's all due to the least serious kind of property crime and not the most serious property crime, break and enter.

So what I think we're doing in this province and in some other provinces is that we're actually not using our resources very well. When we hear various people around the table talking about the use of resources, I think we have to remember that what we have to do is move beyond the way in which we're presently using resources and redirect those resources to do something about crime.

At the moment the public blames you, the lawmakers and the judges, as the most visible group administering the law for youth crime. They do this because they're repeatedly told that youth crime is controlled by the law and by the legal consequences that follow a finding of guilt in youth court. This focus on the law as a means of controlling crime is largely wrong and is certainly counter-productive.

To focus your report on additional changes in the law will only serve to reinforce the public's view that more changes is the best way to protect us from youth crime. I urge you instead to focus your report on the real problems of youth crime. Thank you very much.

Mr. Scully: Thank you, Tony. I'd like to call next on Michael Cushing.

Mr. Michael Cushing (Executive Director, Halton Social Planning Council; Member, Youth Justice Committee, and Past-President, Ontario Social Development Council): My remarks today are my own. You have identifying information on me as being associated professionally with a couple of organizations here in the province and as a volunteer with the Ontario Social Development Council. I want to make plain that I'm expressing my own opinions today.

The message from the Ontario Social Development Council is that the Young Offenders Act has not changed much over the years. OSDC became involved, and I became involved as a volunteer, with it in the early 1980s, when it became all too apparent that Ontario was not preparing for the implementation of the act but instead was preoccupied with the issues of age and compliance with federal will. Sadly, as today's news reflects, some of that distraction still has not changed.

OSDC, on the other hand, has continued to focus on issues of youth justice since 1983-84 and continued to assert certain principles, that youth justice was and is a very important social justice issue. These principles are about the future of this province and our country. They are that communities and families need to be supported and assisted, and the support and assistance should come from professionals working in an interdisciplinary kind of fashion, and that communities should be given the support they need to problem solve.

We count on our institutions of community and family to raise our kids, to nurture and support children, to guide and to challenge our adolescents, and to redirect our children and our youth when they're heading off course. I'm reminded of the expression: it takes a community to raise a child. We're counting on our communities, we're counting on families. We know that all of our youth do things at one time or another that require redirection, that require support.

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One book I'd recommend to the standing committee, if it has not already come to the attention of members, is Professor Schissel's work out of the University of Saskatchewan, Social dimensions of Canadian Youth justice, where, among other things, he does a very good job of compiling some of the international evidence on deviant behaviour, if I can use that expression, of youth - delinquent behaviour.

We're talking of 90% or 95% of our young people at one time or another doing something for which in Ontario, at present, they could be charged under the Young Offenders Act for and their behaviour would be criminalized.

Although we're counting on communities and we're counting on families, we're aggressively eroding their capacity and we're exacerbating what is already a difficult situation. We know we're in a period of profound, rapid social change. Families are destabilized by that, by unemployment, by economic insecurity, even if they're even fortunate enough to have work, and by issues of poverty. Families, identifying special needs in their children more and more, go without the services that they go looking for.

In more affluent times, 10 years ago, the Ontario child health study told us that on average 15% to 20% of Ontario's children suffer from a diagnosable psychiatric condition, in many cases conduct disorder. In southwestern Ontario, where I reside, the rate was 19%. More to the point, the Ontario child health study told us that even in more affluent times, those kids in most cases weren't getting services. Those families were not getting support. Now, those very supports are being much further eroded.

To talk of the so-called child welfare approach to issues of delinquency, we're talking in Ontario of Children's Aid Societies and children's mental centres. We're talking of special education services of boards of education. In relation to prevention and early intervention, in some cases we're talking of child care, day care services.

If we look at what's happening with all of those systems of service in this province, they're crumbling. As Professor Doob put it, we have to look to the institutions outside of the youth justice system. I want to highlight for your attention what's happening with those very resources.

At a time when the provincial government is preaching about the responsibility of families and exploiting politically the situation of families often trying their best but being defeated by their kids, at a time when that kind of political exploitation is going on, this very government is eroding the support families need. I hope the federal government won't acquiesce to the calls you heard this morning from provincial representatives.

Sadly, I think we have to be realistic; there has been a loss of federal leverage. An unintended consequence of federal deficit fighting has been a decline in transfer payments to provinces. The end of the Canada Assistance Plan has done damage. Leverage has been lost. I hope at least you won't acquiesce to some of the more cynical requests emerging from this government.

My second area of comment really has to do with whether we have a youth justice system in the province of Ontario. My credentials, such as they are, really involve community planning and trying to systematize what are often isolated services.

In relation to youth justice, we have a lot of individuals, a lot of agencies, a lot of services doing their best, but I would suggest we don't have a system as such. The implementation of the Young Offenders Act has been badly flawed in Ontario from the outset. If it were to viewed as a demonstration project, I would suggest it is not a valid demonstration.

No government of any stripe in this province - because they've all had a shot at it over the 12 years of the implementation of the Young Offenders Act - has addressed the need to really establish a system. By a system, I'm talking about something with a coherent philosophy. Perhaps the principles underlying the Young Offenders Act would be a great starting place.

By a system, I'm talking about the absence of fragmentation. The most profound representation of Ontario's failure in relation to fragmentation is the continuous split jurisdiction. I'm sure committee members are aware that different ministries deal with kids 12 through 15 and 16 and 17.

By a system, I think we're talking of continuity of service. Rather than services that place all too many kids in custody and rip them out of their families and their community supports, very often special education, very often additional agencies - they're torn out - rather than that kind of discontinuity, we need continuity of service. We need maintenance of kids in the home, in the community, and we need much more after-care when kids are removed for a period of custody.

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A system would be self-measuring. It would be committed to improvement.

Again, as a dramatic example, Ontario was a non-participant in the federal Centre for Justice Statistics until roughly 1991. When the Ontario Social Development Council heard presented two years ago from the provincial justice review, people seemed to find remarkable the rates of custody that were going on. It was ten years down the road, on very high-cost service. I'd suggest in Ontario we've not had a youth justice system, again despite the best efforts of many people.

Perhaps most important, any expensive system surely would be attentive to trying to reduce people coming into the system, to trying to reduce expenditure by turning off the tap. The message about prevention that others around this table are giving today has largely fallen on deaf ears in the province of Ontario.

As a final note on children and youth as a priority, about 25 years ago I got into children's services, so to speak. I was told then by people that the needs of children and youth would never assume any priority because kids don't vote. I thought that was a pretty shallow and cynical expression, and yet I've come to mostly believe it.

It's interesting, though. We can hold kids up for positive attention when governmental bodies want to draw positive light on themselves. The federal government signed into the World Summit for Children declaration in 1990 in which it was said that all of the countries signing promised that children would have the first call on the nation's resources, in bad times as well as in good. Here in Canada we would give high priority to the rights of children, to their survival and to their protection and development, to ensure the well-being of all societies of the world.

The year before, the House of Commons voted unanimously to achieve a goal of eliminating poverty among children by the year 2000.

Mr. Scully: I'm sorry, but I'm afraid going to have to ask you to wrap up, if you can.

Mr. Cushing: Twenty seconds.

Mr. Scully: Okay.

Mr. Cushing: My point is that we don't match our pronouncements with our actions. Our actions have been insufficient to the needs of kids, youth, and young offenders in particular. The debate we really need in this community and in this country, and one in which I'd avidly participate, is about the future of our most important resources. I don't think then the debate should be limited to a justice committee. It's the finance committee; it's the House of Commons; it's the entire nation.

Mr. Scully: Thank you, Michael.

We are starting to run short -

The Chair: I can assist you because I have a clock and a gavel. So if you would like, I can signal to your speakers when they have one minute left.

Mr. Scully: I have my watch here, too, and I will be more rigorous. Thank you, Madam Chair. I know we have been -

The Chair: I'm very pushy.

Mr. Scully: Okay.

I would next call on David Day.

Mr. David Day (Director of Research and Evaluation, Earlscourt Child and Family Service): My name is David Day, and I'm a psychologist and director of research and evaluation at Earlscourt Child and Family Centre, a children's mental centre in Toronto. I'm also the manager of a school liaison program for children who are living in Toronto shelters and who have witnessed family violence.

I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss two issues that I think are important. One concerns the early factors that place a child at risk for engaging in criminal activity, and the second concerns crime prevention.

If we're going to make a dent in the problem of youth crime, we must address the early risk factors that children experience and which may tax their ability to cope with difficult life circumstances.

Many adolescents within the juvenile justice system, particularly the chronic offenders, are reported to have experienced an early age of onset for their delinquency. Studies have found that boys who commit their first offence prior to age 12 or 13 commit twice as many offences as those who start later.

As early as 4 or 5 years old, children at risk experience serious problems with aggression. Moreover, given that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, a child who is aggressive at age 5, without intervention, is at high risk for continuing to act aggressively at age 14.

Other problems that high-risk children experience include a tendency to misinterpret other people's ambiguous or innocuous intentions as being hostile. As a result, if you misperceive other people as having hostile intentions toward you, you'll be more likely to respond to them with aggression - that is, to retaliate where no retaliation may be warranted.

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For some children this hypervigilance toward hostile intent is an effective coping strategy to deal with the untoward aggression, violence or sexual abuse they have experienced in their home. This attributional bias and tendency also has the unfortunate effect of leading to peer rejection, often setting the stage for hooking up with a deviant peer group. Association with a deviant peer group at age 9 or 10 years old, particularly one comprised of older youth, may tend to speed up the stacking process, that is, the tendency to engage in a greater variety and more serious delinquent behaviours. This further increases the risk of having police contact and eventual youth court contact.

Children who are at risk also experience problems in school, particularly with reading. Studies have found that by second grade, 45% of anti-social children are delayed in reading. This may be the result of long-standing speech and language problems, learning disabilities, or excessive impulsivity and hyperactivity and problems with attention. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, co-exists in 45% to 70% of children with chronic disorder.

So as a result, difficulties with early aggression, academic problems, and problems with peer relations set the stage for many children at risk for eventual school suspension and expulsion, further marginalizing them from mainstream institutions to which many have never felt a strong connection.

Finally, some of the family factors that are associated with the development of delinquency include family stress and marital discord; financial and housing problems; poverty; parental psychopathology, particularly depression; parental criminality, substance abuse, multiple partners and a lack of stability of caregivers in the child's life; and living in high-crime neighbourhoods. These factors disrupt effective parenting practices.

Parents of children at risk often inadvertently reinforce their child's aggressive behaviour through coercive parent-child interaction. Furthermore, these parents often use harsh, punitive and inconsistent discipline techniques, ineffective and conflict-ridden problem solving, poor parental monitoring and supervision, and display a lack of involvement and emotional availability towards the child.

In an effort towards crime prevention, it behooves us to address these early risk factors that place children on a trajectory towards anti-social behaviour and eventual criminal activity.

Mr. Scully: One minute.

Mr. Day: As well, the earlier we can intervene with a broad range of services, the greater our chance of success. These risk factors and markers for delinquent behaviour suggest specific intervention strategies, and while we know a great deal about the risk factors for youth crime, we also know that there is no single pathway to delinquency. Therefore, successful crime prevention efforts will require a range of services addressing the complex and multi-faceted nature of the problem.

Thank you, David.

Mr. Scully: Thank you.

I'd like to call on Sheena Scott next, please.

Ms Sheena Scott (Executive Director, Justice for Children and Youth): Good afternoon. I'm Sheena Scott. I'm a lawyer and the executive director of the legal clinic Justice for Children and Youth.

Our organization has been in existence since 1978. We provide community outreach, including legal education to young people, and we act as lawyers for children in the youth court, family, including child welfare, education and social assistance system. So we're very familiar with how the various systems interact. We also do policy work in all of the areas I mentioned.

I'm going to try to be fairly brief and just highlight some trends we have seen, because I will have an opportunity to appear before you again on Thursday.

What I would like to address is who are some of the young people we see in our work. We've seen many, many who are involved in the youth justice system. Most of them really are, as Ms Beamish said, the child next door. The other youth we see are youth with learning difficulties, mental health or child welfare difficulties. These are young people who should perhaps be dealt with in systems other than the youth justice system, and that's one of the things we try to do.

These are not necessarily evil youth. Historically, youth have always been looked at as either inherently good or inherently evil. So for them it's a lose-lose situation because, regardless of how we look at them, they'll never meet our expectations of them.

Some of the offences we've seen youth charged with exemplify a trend in recent years of over-criminalization, as has been discussed this morning. Those include a youth who was charged with attempted theft of orange juice - and the crown attorney refused to divert that youth - as well as a youth who was charged with assault with a weapon for hitting another youth with a gym bag. As well, we've seen a youth charged with weapons dangerous to the public peace for shooting a.AA gun in a protected area of a small park. These are some of the crimes that make up our statistics, violent or otherwise. We've seen a real trend toward charging young people for school yard fights.

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I also wanted to address briefly how Ontario has dealt with the Young Offenders Act. Since day one, I think they've been very resistant. You can look at Quebec and see that they haven't been that way, and Quebec doesn't have a lot of problems with perception of the Young Offenders Act. One of the things Ontario was reluctant to do was to set up an alternative measures program. It took a court action, which our organization was involved with, to get them to do so. That's a sad commentary.

When you look at the messages Ontario has given people about the act and the messages the media gives people, it's no wonder people want to change the act. What people don't know is what can be accomplished under the act. They're always hearing you can't do this, you can't do that, this can't happen to this person. They don't hear the whole story, and it would be unfortunate to change something that works because people have misinformation. I won't go into that in too much detail, but it's a very important thing to keep in mind.

With respect to alternative measures programs, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was peer mediation. We have been involved with several high schools in the Toronto area and are now moving into Newmarket and hopefully Brampton to set up peer mediation projects. These are projects where youth deal with other youth and try to come up with appropriate resolutions. It's a means of diverting matters from the criminal justice system and dealing with them effectively and teaching young people responsibility and respect. There needs to be more of an emphasis on this type of program and less on criminalization.

I'm now going to let Mark Persaud from one of the peer mediation projects give you more detail about this project. Thank you.

Mr. Mark Persaud (Grade 12 Student, Member, Peer Mediation Program, Emery Collegiate Institute): I am Mark Persaud and I'm representing Emery Collegiate Institute.

At Emery we have a course called peer mediation. Peer mediation has one or two mediators who mediate two or more students who have a conflict. The conflict can be brought to us from VPs or the police.

We are involved with the legal aspects of things. We have to go through the police before we get an agreement to mediate. If there is a charge, the police can say no, you cannot mediate this; this is a problem and you're not qualified to deal with weapons or drug-related incidents. If it's an incident of a fight or a verbal argument, the police can tell our teachers to refer it to peer mediation.

I'm a mediator. You have to be trained to become a mediator. We learn about body language, tone of voice, eye contact, and all the different things that give us insight about a person and the way we interpret it.

We sit down with the disputants and we do not give any input. We're the ones who keep the peace. We let the disputants talk it out. We let them decide what it is they want to do. We just give them a chance to talk and to hear each other's story so that they know what really happened. It's not, oh, I thought this, I thought that. The real story comes out and everyone understands what happened.

Both parties have to agree to mediate. If they don't agree to mediate we cannot do anything about it and they will be referred back to the police.

Peer mediation is a preventive measure. What I mean by that is that we are there to stop the incident before it goes any further. Instead of having two people arguing on school property and going back after school to fight and to beat each other up, we're there to help stop the fight so they'll be able to talk it out before anything else happens, before it escalates into a bigger problem.

On the constructive side, out of 25 mediations we've done so far, some of them were not successful. It depends on the people. It is confidential. There is a big emphasis on that. People can talk openly to the mediators and they know that anything that is said in there will be held in confidence. Tomorrow, they won't hear their best friend saying, oh, I heard you said this, you said that. It's trust. That's what it comes down to. They trust us. We're there to help them. We're not there to make the problem worse.

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Peer mediation really helps. I think it helps the people a lot because it helps the mediators who are involved. It teaches us about self-discipline, respect, trust, and we really get to know people. I think that's what it comes down to, to understand each other.

Thank you.

Mr. Scully: Thank you very much, Mark.

I call on Ben Moss next, please.

Mr. Ben Moss (Chair, Justice for Children and Youth): Good afternoon. My name is Ben Moss. I'm a recently graduated social worker and I'm also the chair of Justice for Children and Youth. I had the opportunity during my education to work in both the youth justice field, an open custody facility, and also with the adolescent mental health system through a hospital in-patient program.

Most of what I'm going to say this afternoon is probably echoing a lot of what has already been said. Primarily I'd like to focus on two issues that I think are at the forefront of everyone's mind at the moment, that is, in respect of the minimum age, with the Young Offenders Act and with parental responsibility.

First I'd like to speak to parental responsibility. I'm very much in favour of keeping parents involved in the process, but I think to make a parent responsible for their adolescent's behaviour in terms of criminal liability is to actually defeat the purpose of the Young Offenders Act. We're then taking responsibility off that young person for his or her behaviour and saying it's the parents' responsibility to pay the penalty or to sustain the consequences for that young person's behaviour. I think that's contradictory to what we're trying to do. As has been said, kids already have some problem seeing the long-term consequences of their behaviour. I think if you then make their parents responsible for their behaviour, that can even be exacerbated.

As I said, I think it's important that parents be involved in the process, and I think the act makes provision for that, but I think that sometimes this is problematic, at least here in Ontario. We've seen the police and in some instances custodial facilities that are not really supportive of allowing youth to talk to their parents or have as much contact as might be necessary or appropriate.

It has also been said that if we want parents to be involved and to actually have some impact on that youth's behaviour, we need to support families and parents and the people who are important to that kid, whatever that family make-up might be. I think that has to be from the beginning, even before, hopefully, the child becomes involved with the criminal justice system.

People have to explain to parents what's going on. Often parents know even less than their kids about what the criminal justice system actually means, what the kid has actually been accused of, what his rights are, what their options are, those types of issues. Some of it comes down to public legal education, but some of it really is resources.

I have more on the minimum age thing. What I'd like to address there is my opinion that a lot of what we're talking about is tinkering. As has been said earlier, I think the committee has the opportunity to take a much more broadly based look at youth crime. I think playing with numbers - even when we are talking about this with sentencing, too - is not going to make a really large impact. If we're going to have a separate youth justice system, the age limit has to be somewhere, and given what some of the psychologists have said and what I've heard, 12 seems to be a pretty good place to do that; much younger and they really are children, not even youth.

I think there are more appropriate ways to deal with kids of that age. Serious offences committed by kids under 12 is a rarity. When it happens it's horrible, but I think the criminal justice setting is inappropriate to deal with that. We already have child welfare provisions and mental health provisions that are much more treatment based. I think in this age of increasing fiscal responsibility such a highly expensive system as the criminal justice system should be a last resort, especially given that we've seen it's not necessarily the most effective way to prevent crime. In fact, it can't prevent crime, because it's reactive rather than proactive, and it doesn't serve the purpose of deterring other 11-year-olds from committing offences, or any other person I know of.

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So given that we're strained for resources, those resources could better be spent, first, in trying to prevent occurrences of the behaviour, in treating the underlying issues, because I don't think 11-year-olds commit serious personal injury offences because they're bored. I don't think normal kids do that. If you have an 11-year-old doing that, incarcerating him or her is not going to address any of his or her issues. It's much more appropriate to spend the money we would spend keeping them warehoused in a custodial facility in trying to get at some of those problems.

As with Sheena, I'll have an opportunity to speak to you again on Thursday, so I'll wrap it up here. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to address those later on.

Mr. Scully: Jim Worling.

Mr. Jim Worling (Director, Sexual Abuse Family Education and Treatment Program, Thistletown): I'm a clinical psychologist and a researcher at the SAFE-T program. SAFE-T stands for sexual abuse, family education, and treatment. We are a sexual abuse-specific outpatient treatment program that's part of the Thistletown Regional Centre for Children and Adolescents here in Toronto. It's operated and funded directly by the Province of Ontario. At least it was this morning when I left.

I just want to emphasize that I'm not speaking on behalf of the Ontario government. I'm speaking as a psychologist who has worked with teenage sex offenders for several years, not as a ministry employee.

I was originally hired eight years ago on a pilot project. This pilot project was originally intended to be a three-year pilot. It's now in its ninth year. It's a collaboration between probation services in Ontario and the SAFE-T program, which, as I said, is an outpatient program, community based. More than that, the money originally allocated for the pilot project has gradually been increased over the years and rolled into our base budget.

For an annual average cost of about $128,000, we provide treatment and assessment for24 adolescent sex offenders and their families. We provide supervised internships for social work and psychology students and child care work students. We provide quarterly workshops for probation officers in Toronto. We provide research in the area of adolescent sexual aggression. We also provide local, national, and international workshops. That cost is the same cost as warehousing one teenage sex offender in our local secure custody facility without sex offender-specific treatment. I just wanted to highlight that this might be a nice alternative to some of the other programs.

The other thing I'd really like to highlight, because I work at the other end of the Young Offenders Act - I work in the treatment end, like some of the other folks here - is the importance of providing treatment. In my 8 years of working with sex offenders I've probably met with about150 teenage sex offenders, and the average boy across from me when I'm doing an interview is15 years old, he's usually had a history of physical and/or sexual abuse, he has great difficulties in expressing anger, he is very impulsive, he has very poor social skills, very few close relationships, and deviant sexual thoughts and interests. It's really hard for me as a clinician to see how either doing nothing at all, which sometimes happens, or giving a 12-month secure custody sentence with no treatment will actually help make this young person make changes to prevent further offending.

Even more than that, it's important to keep families involved. I know we've heard a lot about family involvement, but it's also essential in treatment. You can have the most expensive and expertly drafted individual sexual offender treatment program for teens, but as soon as you put them back into their family environments - environments that helped contribute to the development of their offending behaviours - it's no surprise their recidivism rates are so high.

A study came out of the U.S. this year comparing kids who received individual treatment... They followed them up for four years, and 71% of them reoffended, compared with only 22% of those who received multi-systemic therapy including the community and families. I just wanted to highlight that.

My last point is that in my clinical work the most discouraging thing about the young offender system overall is when I'm reading a file on a 15-year-old, just the number of times some very well-written, well-documented reports will identify early warning signs but little has been done.

I think a really good young offender system is no young offender system. I hope we're all working toward that end. Thank you.

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Mr. Scully: Thank you very much, Jim.

Next is Paula Teeter, please.

Ms Paula Teeter (Probation Officer, Early Release Support Program, Central Toronto Youth Services): Hello, my name is Paula Teeter. I'm a probation officer for young offenders aged 12 to 15. I've had 12 years' experience as a probation officer. I supervise young people on probation and provide case management to youth serving any custody dispositions. Also I acted as a court liaison officer. Currently I am on secondment to Central Toronto Youth Services as the coordinator of the early release support program. This program supervises and supports youth who are released from detention on bail. I have program descriptions, if anyone is interested.

It's an honour to be part of this hearing. Thank you. I'd like to reiterate before I begin that any of my comments are my own, based on my own personal experience and work experience, and they do not reflect the ministry's position or any of my colleagues', necessarily.

I've divided my topic areas into three categories as outlined by this committee: youth crime, the youth justice system, and the operation and implementation of the YOA. I will speak about those issues as they relate to my experience and opinion.

First is youth crime. As many people have already said, while crimes such as property crimes and those involving violence are escalating, it seems that more young people are being charged for offences that they may not have necessarily been charged with in the past - shoplifting or school yard fights, for example. There is no doubt that youth crime and violence is currently in the forefront of the media, which in turn has influenced the community's impressions today. I believe that preventive programs need to be available for young people at an early age, and continue in their adolescence.

We as a society should take responsibility for our children and their future, in hopes of preventing their involvement in future criminal activity. Therefore these programs should involve the community and the young person's parents as much as possible. They should also be made available within the children's home or community environment. If this is not available, then it becomes easy to turn these young people over to the responsibility of the criminal justice system once they become older and commit illegal acts.

It is important that those other systems that are mandated or legislated to work with young people - such as schools, child welfare or mental health programs - are given the support and tools to provide adequate preventative services to children and their families.

While some young people's behaviours are sometimes more difficult to control today, it seems that the individual young person's needs and issues remain the same. Most are receptive to change, and accept direction if it's implemented in an effective and supportive fashion.

Second is the justice system. Young people have separate and special needs and therefore should be dealt with differently from adults. It is important that the justice system be clear to the young person and consider their cognitive and emotional ability. Immediate and natural consequences for behaviour are necessary when dealing with young people. Short time lines in bringing matters to court are therefore critical. Also, community and family involvement is important. When appropriate, alternative measure or diversion should involve victims of crime.

It seems that many more people today are incarcerated. For some young people this has a potentially negative impact. For example, school and family life can be adversely disrupted. Programs such as the one I'm currently involved with, the early release support program, have the potential to decrease recidivism while also saving the cost of detention stay while the young person is back in his or her community.

There is, however, no doubt that some young people's behaviour in the community, and the seriousness of the crimes they commit, suggest that incarceration for a significant period is necessary to protect the community. The recent amendments to the YOA have addressed this issue. More time, however, needs to be given to assess the impact of these changes. Relationships between the child welfare, educational and criminal justice systems should be productive and cohesive.

Third is the operation and implementation of the YOA. The YOA is broad and diverse and has many options available. It is the interpretation and implementation of it that affects its impact. If more preventive programming within other systems were available, then it would not be necessary to decrease the age of criminal responsibility. Pre-adolescent needs are different and unique, and therefore service for this age group should be so.

There needs to be a balance between punitive and rehabilitative services. As a probation officer, I have seen caseloads and responsibilities increase over the years. Less time is available to address all the needs of young people. Should more people be held criminally responsible for their actions, this will be further increased. Therefore there also should be an increase in preventive programs - whether they be within the community or within the custodial systems - to balance this increase in order to bring about productive change.

Thank you.

Mr. Scully: Thank you, Paula.

I'd next like to call on Mavin Wong. I should just point out that Mavin co-authored Defending Young Offender Cases not in 1984 - she wasn't that prescient - but in 1994.

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Ms Mavin Wong (Barrister and Solicitor, Co-author, Defending Young Offender Cases, 1994): I've been a criminal lawyer for the past ten years, and the focus of my practice, and the area that I receive the most satisfaction from, is dealing with youth.

The public has been and continues to be misinformed about the Young Offenders Act. In my travels I've heard every imaginable societal woe blamed on the Young Offenders Act. Whether it's the increase in crime or even the taking away of prayer in schools, I've heard someone say it's because of the act. I've heard how sophisticated and informed these young people are, how they know their rights and know how to beat the system. I'd like to meet these bright, informed young people, because these aren't the kids I represent. In my view, the media, the politicians and special interest groups have spread and continue to spread myths about the act. In my opinion, the Young Offenders Act is a comprehensive and well-balanced piece of legislation. It ought not to be tinkered with.

Myth number one is that section 56 ought to be done away with, that kids know their rights and that police are hampered in their investigation by having to comply with section 56. As you hopefully know, section 56 provides safeguards to ensure that before a statement is given by a young person to a person in authority, the young person be afforded his or her right to consult with a lawyer, a parent, an adult relative or another adult person - period. It doesn't mean that the police officer can't take a statement from a young person or that the police investigation is stymied in any way.

In Metropolitan Toronto the police have created a four- or five-page questionnaire that incorporates the requirements of section 56. The police officer simply starts at page 1 and reads. The youth is asked general background questions such as his name, his age, his birth date, and so on, and then is advised in very simple and easy-to-understand terms that he has the right to speak to any of the above-mentioned individuals. The youth is then given what is called his primary and secondary cautions and is eventually asked if he or she wishes to give a statement. If the youth wants to give a statement, he simply signs the form. It's all very straightforward and, if properly done, takes no more than 10 to 15 minutes.

Most youth bureau officers in Toronto will tell you it's easy to have a young offender fill out a waiver form and to have that young person agree to give a statement. As a defence counsel, I can tell you from experience that it's very difficult to argue that the client doesn't understand his rights, once you see how thorough these forms are.

I think the public feels that these kids know their rights - as if, by the way, this is somehow a bad or negative thing. Everyone, whether an adult or a young person, ought to be told of their right to remain silent and their right to counsel. That's the law. But it's one thing to know that right, and another to understand it. It's one thing to know you have a right to speak to a lawyer, and another thing to know how to access that right.

Here's a perfect example of the differences, and one that typifies the kind of young person I represent. One day I was in youth court in North York. A gangly 16- or 17-year-old kid comes up to me and asks if I've seen his lawyer. I said, ``Who's your lawyer?'' As it turns out, it was Brian Scully. I said, ``No, I haven't seen him, but why don't you give him a call?'' He said he didn't have his phone number. I said, ``Well, why don't you look it up in the phone book?'' So I sent this kid to the phone booth by the front door and told him to look up the number.

A good while later, I happened to pass by this bank of phones and I saw this same kid looking through a phone book. I asked him if he had called Brian, and he said he couldn't find his number. I thought, that's strange, and went over to give the kid a hand. He was looking under ``B''. I would bet that this kid in a police station at 3 a.m. would rather not call his lawyer for advice than tell a police officer that he doesn't know how to use a phone book.

Myth number two is that we should lower the age of responsibility, that kids as young as 10 are getting away with murder. The problem with changing legislation to lower the age of responsibility - because of recent headlines of 10- and 11-year-olds involved in serious crime - is that no matter what you do, there are always going to be exceptions. That 11-year-old who made front-page headlines was not sent home but, rather, placed in a secure psychiatric facility. There are other existing pieces of legislation that can and do deal with these children. The problem is that by lowering the age of responsibility and thus bringing younger and younger children into the system, the harder and harder it will be to get them out.

For example, one client I represented was 12 years old when she was charged with mischief under $1,000. She had been placed in a group home through Children's Aid because she had been sexually assaulted by her father. At the group home she got involved in a water fight, which got clearly out of hand. She and two other girls flooded a bathtub, which eventually caused damage to the floor and ceiling of the group home. She was charged with mischief and placed on probation. She was ordered, as part of her probation, to reside where the provincial director had placed her.

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But one of the reasons why she was in the group home in the first place was that she kept running away from her own home. Typically, she ran away from the group home and was charged with failing to comply with that order. She was then released on bail, but she ran away again and was charged with breaching her bail. She missed court because she was on the run, so she was charged with that, too.

Without exaggeration, I found this young person with a record a page long and her only substantive offence was a water fight.

I'm just not satisfied that by lowering the age of responsibility you are going to stop any serious crimes. I worry that you're going to criminalize youth early and that thousands of dollars will be spent on arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of these young people. The money would be better spent on treatment for these young people, an alternative to incarceration.

Myth three is that the kids don't get sent to jail and that when they do they think it's a joke. If I occasionally have a client who prefers jail to going home, this usually speaks more about the state of their home life than about the comforts of incarceration.

Typically, kind of client I see comes from a disadvantaged home life in which there are common scenes of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, inconsistent parenting, and lack of education and support.

I once had a client whose name was Perry. He was around 13 or 14 years old and he was charged with trafficking in cocaine, which in most metropolitan centres is a very serious crime. Perry's family was typical. His mother was a crack addict. He had very little support. He was denied bail. While we waited for his trial, every day Perry would call me from St. John's Training School, a secure-custody facility, and he would beg me to get him out, because he hated the place. I told Perry that the chances were that he might be out of that secure facility but he might have to go to an open-custody group home, if I could persuade that judge on the sentencing date. The next day I'd get the same kind of call.

Finally the sentencing came, on December 21, and we went in front of the sentencing judge. I argued; I vigorously defended the fact that Perry should no longer be placed in a secure facility, besides the fact that he hates it, because other issues prevail, and he should be placed in open custody.

The judge turned to Perry at the sentencing and asked, ``Perry, what do you want to do?'' Perry said, ``I want to stay at St. John's''. Did I look the fool!

I got a recess and I asked Perry what was going on. ``You've been asking me for three months to get you out of there. Why do you want to stay?'' Perry told me that apparently they had been saving up points and the points were going to go for some Christmas gifts or some privileges for Christmas. He'd never had a Christmas and he wanted to stay where there was going to be one.

That's the kind of client I represent.

Mr. Scully: Fern Weinper, please.

Ms Fern Weinper (Assistant Crown Attorney, Ministry of the Attorney General, Government of Ontario): I introduced the expanded alternative measures program on behalf of the Attorney General in 1994-95, and I was also responsible for implementing Bill C-37 in Ontario. My comments are my own and are based upon my experience as a crown attorney in the field, prosecuting young offenders. They're not the views of the Attorney General.

I'm going to speak more specifically about some problems associated with the implementation and operation of the Young Offenders Act, as set out in the guidelines, and I'm going to be offering some suggestions for some amendments to the act.

Alternative measures programs recognize that there are many young people who commit relatively minor offences who can be dealt with swiftly and effectively outside of the criminal justice system. In these times of severe economic restraint, it no longer makes sense for me, as a crown attorney, to spend a full day prosecuting a shoplifting case. The resources need to be spent on prosecuting serious youth crime, in particular violent crime.

After the expansion of the alternative measures program in early 1995, we in Ontario saw a sharp increase in the use of alternative measures in this province. However, over the course of the last year, we have seen a decrease in the use of alternative measures, a back-pedalling from the program as it is structured in Ontario.

In Ontario we have a system whereby we request the clerk of the court to note that there is a stay of proceedings on the first appearance.

I've had some telephone calls recently from probation officers who've indicated to me that because of the time constraints in recommencing a prosecution for those few young people who fail to complete their alternative measures sanctions, they are no longer going to permit in York region young people to go through alternative measures programs. So we're going to be punishing the majority of people because of a logistical problem it may mean in the future.

What I would suggest is that we strengthen section 4 and possibly consider mandating using alternative measures as a first resort.

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I'm also suggesting an amendment to section 3, the declaration of principle, in particular paragraph 3(1)(d), to recognize pre-charge diversion as well as peer mediation projects in order to put some teeth or some strength into those. We've seen in this province that the use of these programs, the pre-charge diversion and the peer mediation, has had a salutary effect and I would like to see some legislative change in that area.

I'm also suggesting a change to the disposition section, subsection 20(8), to make the sentencing enhancement provisions of Bill C-41 applicable to young offenders. The profile of the perpetrator of a hate-motivated crime demonstrates that these types of crimes are being committed by young people, whether or not they fall within the jurisdiction of the Young Offenders Act.

In my submission, there's no reason to distinguish young people who fall within the jurisdiction of the YOA. Hate-motivated crime is always a factor in sentencing. However, in my submission, by incorporating the sentencing enhancement provisions in the Criminal Code into the Young Offenders Act we will help achieve a general deterrent.

With respect to presumptive transfer to adult court, obviously we haven't had a lot of time to see how that's working. I do note, however, that there's no express time limit in the amendment for when a 16- or 17-year-old young person charged with the offences of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, or aggravated sexual assault may make an application to be proceeded against in youth court. There's arguably nothing in the amendment to prevent a young person from bringing this application under subsection 16(1.01) at any time.

For example, in the middle of the preliminary hearing during the trial, when all the evidence is in, there's a potential problem. We need an amendment to limit the time for bringing the application.

With respect to section 56, of course, I bring a crown attorney's view to the statements that are made by young people. As it is currently worded, it is an all or nothing proposition. It highlights the impact of the Young Offenders Act in affording young people formal and procedural safeguards. In many cases, serious charges are dismissed because of a failure to comply with an aspect of section 56. In my respectful view, section 56 fosters among young people this attitude that they're just a young offender so they can get away with it and nothing will happen to them.

In my respectful submission, the impact of section 56 is unduly restrictive, especially in the case of 16- and 17-year-old youths. What's the difference between a 17-year-old offender who murders his mother, his father, and his sister about a day before he turns 18 and gives an inculpatory statement that is subsequently ruled inadmissible and that same offender one day later?

In my respectful submission, this committee ought to consider a subsection 24(2) analysis pursuant to the charter before a judge could reject or admit a section 56 statement, instead of making it an all or nothing proposition.

With respect to the protection of privacy of young persons, subsection 38(1.13) regarding the protection of privacy of young persons now permits us to release information, particularly to school boards, to ensure compliance with bail, probation, or conditional supervision, or to ensure the safety of staff, students, or other persons. But for some reason the amendment failed to include other orders of disposition. That means we are stymied. We can't tell the school about an order of prohibition against possessing weapons, an order of community service in relation to the school, a non-communication clause, and other such orders of disposition. We're restricted, and I would request an amendment in that regard.

Also, the way the disclosure of records provisions are worded in section 44.1, the Crown is not permitted to release information regarding a youth court record of a co-accused or a witness who happens to have a youth court record. The Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Stinchcombe as well as the Martin committee report in Ontario on pre-trial Crown practices has dictated that this is the kind of information we must give to the defence counsel. It would be very simple to make an amendment to section 44.1 to permit us to disclose that information without the necessity of asking the defence to bring an application to court to disclose that information when they have no idea who we're talking about.

I'll stop there. That's probably five minutes.

Mr. Scully: Thank you very much, Fern.

Because of the strictures of time, I'll be very brief. It's difficult being a defence counsel following a crown attorney who has been so eloquent. I would certainly take issue with some of the things Fern has said to you.

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I'd like to deal with section 56 in light of the education function that I think the federal Parliament can deal with in the Young Offenders Act. I hope and trust that you will embark upon a program to educate the public to the realities of this system. It's not just the public. Unfortunately, it happens to be also the professionals who work in this system.

Fern gave you the suggestion that a number of serious cases are thrown out because section 56, the confession section, is not being complied with. In my experience, that has happened invariably with officers who do not deal with the Young Offenders Act on a regular basis.

The amount of ignorance in the police force with regard to the Young Offenders Act is amazing. I'll give you a good example of it.

I had a 16-year-old kid who was charged with a very serious matter, aggravated assault and robbery. He spent three months in pre-trial custody and he was then sentenced to a further period of fifteen months of custody, nine months secure and six months open. He was eventually released after eleven of those fifteen months. He received an appropriate sentence for what was a very serious matter.

The victim, in leaving the courtroom, of course did not see fifteen months as being appropriate. The victim never really had a chance to talk to my client and understand where he came from.

When we speak of sentencing circles, that's something that I think we could hopefully have at some time in the system, whereby the community would be involved and victims, with appropriate screening, would be able to express their feelings in the presence of the accused and have the accused also talk to them.

Going back to the point, a police officer with seventeen years' experience spoke to the victim and said, ``Of course, if this young man had killed your mother, father, and everybody in your family, he would have received only three years as a maximum sentence under the Young Offenders Act''. This was two years ago.

He was laughing with me a little bit and we were joking as people in the court system often do, and he mentioned this to me. I then turned to him and asked him why he had said that when obviously it is not true. He asked what I meant by that, and I mentioned section 16. He asked what section 16 was, and I told him it was the transfer section of the Young Offenders Act. He asked what I was talking about. With seventeen years' experience, he was ashamed and embarrassed to admit that he had arrested some thousand young people since 1984 and he didn't even know about the transfer section of the Young Offenders Act.

He went on to say to me that he was concerned because he felt that a lot of people in his force do not understand the act, don't know it.

I suggest to you that this is why we end up in a situation where an officer normally dealing with adults deals with a kid on the street, takes what he thinks is a statement, doesn't comply with the act, and that statement ends up being thrown out.

As Mavin pointed out, taking a section 56 statement is a no-brainer. It's filling in the blanks; it takes five minutes and it ensures that the kid understands what his or her rights are.

I've picked on the police here, but I don't mean to. There's an amazing amount of ignorance in the defence bar, in crown attorneys who don't practise in the youth court, and in judges who don't practise with the youth court. I think there is a real function of the federal government here in working with the provinces to educate not only the people within the system but, most importantly, the public as to the realities of this system.

I would like to speak to one other issue I think you could address. It is placement.

With the amendments of the Young Offenders Act as you've had them, there is the possibility of a young person being sentenced to up to ten years for murder. There is the possibility, pursuant to section 16, that after a transfer to adult court a young person can be returned to the youth system, the provincial system, or the penitentiary system, and for varying periods of time.

It seems to me that this saddles the provinces with quite an expense in terms of placement. If you are going to have someone in the youth system for seven to ten years, that is a very expensive proposition as opposed to having them in the penitentiary system. It seems to me that the federal government should work with the provinces and develop very special placement facilities for young persons, for those very few kids who end up in that category.

I'd like to tell you a success story emanating from a remarkable tragedy. I had the responsibility of representing the young man who was responsible for the death of a girl from a shotgun blast through a door in the Parkdale area of Toronto. He was transferred to the adult system so, if you like, the young offenders system worked in that case, I suppose, for those who support transfer.

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He was transferred to the adult system. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a sentence of 12 years. He was given credit for one year and was then to serve 11 years.

Having graduated from high school while in Bluewater - we were successful; he was the second kid placed in the youth system after being transferred to the adult system - he was admitted to community college starting in the fall, and last Friday was granted day parole.

Nothing can ever be done for that family or, obviously, for the girl who was killed, but it is an example - and I would like you to think about this seriously - of how a young person who was kept in the youth system rehabilitated himself, addressed the issue of his violence and addressed the issues of his education to the point where all of the people at his facility, Bluewater, both correctional and educational, supported his release back to the community at this point.

I think we should keep in mind that we're always going to be returning these young people back into the community. Had he gone to the penitentiary system, there is no treatment program in the penitentiary system - just for sex offenders at Warkworth - and I would suggest to you that he would have been released in 10, 12, or 15 years as a menace to this society. As we have it now, we at least have the opportunity of having a young man returning to the community not as a menace. I think that has to be seen as a positive gain.

Diane, would you like to make a few comments?

Ms Diane Mandell (Director of Programs and Communications, Ontario Social Development Council): I'm sure you'll all be very relieved to know that I'm going to be very brief.

First, on behalf of the Ontario Social Development Council, I would like to thank the committee for listening. I would like to thank the clerks of the committee for their assistance, and a special thank you to Brian for chairing and for his unflagging support over the years. I'd also like to thank all of the witnesses who have participated in this round table. I think we will agree that this has been a very rich experience for all of us.

If you will permit me a personal reflection for a moment, when I actually heard the name of the meeting room, the Winston Churchill Ballroom, a thought came to mind. So if I may paraphrase that renowned gentleman, today we have asked you to give us the tools to do the job but I hope that this has been a two-way street and that you will have taken from this meeting the tools for you to do your job as well, to prepare a report that will uphold the principles of the act, that will speak to prevention, that will support children and families, and that will address recidivism from a treatment and rehabilitation perspective. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you.

This has been quite a session with an awful lot of information. In order to accommodate what I know are a lot of questions and our next group, I'm going to make an executive decision and cut us back to seven-minute rounds so that we can hear from all three parties.

Madame Venne.

[Translation]

Ms. Venne (Saint-Hubert): Don't worry about me, Madam Chair. It might be on my left that you'd have problems.

I'm sorry, but my plane was a bit late and I wasn't able to hear the first four people.

Roughly, based on what I've hear, you're telling us that, in certain cases, there isn't a judiciary system for youth. Others have come to tell us that young people should be treated as young people. Others say that they don't want youth ten years of age to be included in the Act and others again, that they don't want young people 16 and 17 years of age to be excluded.

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On the other hand, if I look at what I read in the Globe and Mail this morning and that you probably heard here, your two ministers have viewpoints almost diametrically opposed to yours. How will you adjust to what you have heard this morning and how will you react in actual fact, as the ministers have told you and told us that they obviously want to cut spending? We know they want to change the Act, but not in the same way as you; they would even agree to lower the age of application. Overall, it's an entirely different approach. I'd like to have your comments on that.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Scully, would you please direct the answers that might be of help to us? I can see about 30 people who want to respond.

Mr. Scully: Tony suggested I take a crack at it.

There are a couple of comments I would like to make. First of all, from what I read in The Globe and Mail - and I wasn't here this morning when the ministers presented - there's an inherent contradiction in Runciman's position in that on the one hand he says he wants you to address the issue of keeping keep people, non-violent offenders, from being incarcerated, and at the same time he replays the same story that has been played over and over again by that philosophy, and that is let's get tough on kids.

As long as you maintain the punishment-custody attitude as being the treatment of choice, it's very hard to move judges in disposition hearings away from the concept of custody. We have to take a major change of attitude towards dealing with kids. Serious violent offenders should be incarcerated. There's no question about that. I go back to placement; we should spend some money on those facilities.

The contradiction is that at the same time as he is saying we should keep non-violent offenders out of custody, the other minister, the Attorney General, with whom he is associated, is suggesting that they cut out the bail program. The bail program addresses non-violent offenders and keeps them out of jail.

So there is no global thinking going on here. I think what we are frustrated with in this province is that one side says one thing, and they often are contradicting themselves in terms of their policy. Nobody is thinking about the big picture, the cost of custody, alternative programs to custody, and keeping people in their jobs and in their families - kids as well as adults.

I don't know if that really answers your question. We hope this committee does not accede to their request. That's my feeling and I think the feeling of the majority of the people around this table. I can't, of course, speak for Fern, who may have a different attitude than I do.

Ms Weinper: If I could comment on my personal position, there is tremendous concern most recently with respect to the commission of offences by very young people. I would ask this committee, before recommending a lowering of the age, to consider a middle ground, which would be to place the discretion in the Attorney General, if that's the way you are leaning. I don't necessarily believe it's the way to go, but if you are leaning that way, consider a discretion in the Attorney General to prosecute those who are 10 and 11 years old as a middle ground, before going the entire other way.

The Chair: Madame Venne, you have two minutes left.

[Translation]

Ms. Venne: My final question has to do with the media. I didn't hear you say much about the media, and yet they are the ones who influence people and who, often, highlight cases and ensure that people react quite unfavourably to the Young Offenders Act.

Couldn't we try to direct them differently? They always take the most scandalous cases for their papers, for their ratings, to sell their papers. Do you think we can do something with the media?

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[English]

Mr. Scully: I think somebody else should have a chance. Do you want to try that one?

Prof. Doob: Yes. I think the issue about what the media are doing is actually very important. Part of the difficulty is that since they do focus on individual cases, what we know from studies that have been done, here in Toronto at least, is that they're focusing on a very small number of very serious crimes. In fact, one of the ironies of people's view that the Young Offenders Act isn't severe enough in its dispositions is that people have almost no information from the mass media about what's going on in youth court, so we have this generalized belief, it seems, that the youth court isn't being tough enough.

But, for example, here in Toronto last summer when there was a lot of discussion about youth crime, there were 12 reports in the 3 newspapers during a 3-month period having to do with dispositions in youth court. Most of those were for murder and almost all of them were for serious violence. So the view people have that the youth courts are not tough enough is really based on a belief that I'm afraid is being expressed by many people who speak out about the Young Offenders Act. Then what you're getting is not a rational distillation of information but rather an acceptance of what people say: Why do you believe youth court dispositions are too lenient? Well, it's because everybody says so. So it's not really based on anything that goes on.

We did some preliminary work here in Toronto that suggests people in fact are much more in line with the dispositions handed down in youth court than one would believe.

The Chair: Thank you, Madame Venne.

Mr. Ramsay, you have seven minutes.

Mr. Ramsay (Crowfoot): Thank you, Madam Chair, and I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed this afternoon.

I am following up on what Madame Venne touched on with regard to the media.

I don't think the media is to blame. I think what causes the long-term concern about youth crime is the pain and the suffering that violent offences caused by youth create and leave with the next of kin and with the families and the communities. The news media reports one thing one day, and it's on the bottom of the bird cage the next. In my mind, that's not what is causing the concern that in some... Some of you have pointed out today - and we've heard other witnesses - that it has created myths.

No, it is the actual true suffering caused by the 42 murders that were committed last year, and if the statistics hold true - somewhere in that area - there's going to be another between 30 or40 murders by young offenders. That is what I think has caused the public to be so concerned about youth crime and want something done to stop it.

When we as a steering committee first looked at a round table discussion like this, I was interested to see that we addressed three areas: one was the early detection and intervention; the other was, of course, the alternative measures for the non-violent offences that are being committed -

The Chair: Could I interrupt? I want to give a point of information, Mr. Ramsay.

At the steering committee, what we discussed was a national forum. This is not the national forum.

Mr. Ramsay: Oh, I'm sorry. It was the national forum which...yes, okay, we're going to have a national forum. I hope we have more time than we've had this afternoon, because I'd sure like to have more time with some of you ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, to me, when we approach this whole area of the youth legislation, we should be looking at that early detection and prevention. That's what Quebec has. They've poured resources into that area, and that's why you see the difference. We should be looking at that. We should be, again, looking at the non-violent offences committed by youth and the use of alternative measures where they can get the help, like this young 11-year-old kid who has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl. According to the police reports in the news media, there was case after case in which he came to their attention, but there was nothing that they could do about it.

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When I talk about reducing the age, in fact Professor Bala, the associate dean of law at Queen's University, also recommends that the age be lowered. This is not because we want those young people in close custody, but to allow due process to identify that individual's needs and ensure that they will get the kind of rehabilitative help they require.

Of course, the third area is that very small percentage of our youth who are committing the violent crimes. What do we do about that? What do we do after three years when the person has to be released but they're not rehabilitated and, according to the professionals, they are likely to reoffend and injure someone, murder someone, attack someone?

Those are some of the problems that we as a committee have to wrestle with in our recommendations. I've made as many notes as I could while listening to everyone speak, and of course we've got everyone on record and we'll be going back to that when our report will be prepared, but I think those are the main areas.

The problem is that we should not be taking the blueprint to deal with that small percentage of violent young offenders and applying it to the non-violent offenders, or applying it to the young people who are beginning to fall through the cracks in the educational system, losing their self-esteem and acting up inside and outside the classroom, and eventually getting drawn into crime. This is where I see unnecessary debate and unnecessary opposition to something that we should all be working towards.

I have lots of questions, but I don't have the time to ask you any questions individually. Those are my comments. I think we should be focusing on those three particular areas. We've got to start bleeding off the $10 billion at the back end of the system into the front end, where we can stop the flow of youth into the justice system.

We have visited some programs that give me great hope. The one that comes to mind is the Sydney Mines facility in Sydney, Nova Scotia. They've been so successful in helping these young people who have fallen through the cracks and got in trouble with the police that I asked the manager on the way out to the bus, because we didn't have time - we're always rushed for time... I said, ``If you become as successful in an expanded way as you are here, then I suggest that you're going to get some real resistance from components of the criminal justice system that don't want to change the status quo because their empire, their job, or their livelihood depends upon it.'' He said, ``Yes, we're already feeling that''.

So we're going to face some real problems in changing an expanding criminal justice industry - and I refer of course to the adult system as well - that gobbles up $10 billion a year. We've got to change some attitudes and the way we approach the problem. But to me we've got to focus in those three particular areas and direct our resources accordingly.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

The Chair: Mr. Gallaway.

Mr. Gallaway (Sarnia - Lambton): This morning we heard from Mr. Harnick andMr. Runciman. Although you weren't here, many of you undoubtedly read the account in The Globe and Mail this morning, and although they didn't report everything that was said, I think it's fair to say that it was a fair representation of what was said to us this morning.

I want to ask, through you, Mr. Scully, if you believe that the accounts such as you read in The Globe and Mail this morning of the reports of the Attorney General and the Solicitor General actually represent the positions of experts within those two departments at Queen's Park, or do you believe their representations are in fact not indicative of what the experts in the field say, and perhaps what politicians in the field say?

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Mr. Scully: That's a difficult question, except I can answer, sir, that I did have The Globe and Mail with me this morning and I was at at a court house in this city where I mentioned to five crown attorneys in that building, two of whom were senior crown attorneys, what their minister was supposedly going to say to you today. None of them supported the position with regard to age and parental authority and all of them bemoaned the fact it appeared the bail program was on its way out.

I certainly wouldn't name those individuals. I go back to what I said before; I have a feeling that there's not a lot of global thinking going on here. There is a certain mentality about going after certain programs and slashing them, and there's not a thought being given as to the consequences of that. As was pointed out with regard to the bail program, to incarcerate someone costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day, whereas supervising them under the bail program costs a pittance and it keeps them in their family; it keeps them in their community.

Paula Teeter and her organization are involved, finally, in dealing with kids who come from families that needed support. They didn't want to just take their kid back, because they felt the kid needed counselling and supervision and they wanted some help with that. Paula's organization addresses that issue, and it's been very successful.

I think it would be most unfortunate if the policies they have presented to you were followed by this committee.

Mr. Gallaway: Okay, but I would like to follow up in that direction one more time. I'm quoting Mr. Runciman now - this is verbatim from his speech - and he's talking about what he regards as the inadequacy of sentences for young offenders:

Many of the people involved in the youth justice system are concerned that young offenders convicted of very serious crimes spend relatively little time in custody, even those treated as adults and tried in adult court.

Would you agree with that?

Mr. Scully: No, I think Professor Doob would be able to establish that the sentences of young persons sentenced in youth court often end up being longer than they would be if they were for adults sentenced to the same thing.

Did any of you ask if either of those gentlemen had ever been in a youth court? I think it would have been an interesting question. It is a public arena, as you know, and I think if members of the public, people who denounce the system, ever walked into a court and saw the number of kids who are trotted in in custody every morning to be dealt with and the kids who go out every day in custody, they would be shocked. That is the problem, not the problem of kids getting away with light sentences.

Mr. Gallaway: I can tell you that Mr. Harnick on more than one occasion told us it wasMayor Lastman who was putting him up to it. You don't know where many of these people are that Mr. Runciman refers to?

Mr. Scully: No, I certainly don't. I don't know if anybody around this table does, but I don't -

Mr. Gallaway: Excuse me if I'm asking leading questions.

Ms Weinper, you, Ms Beamish, and a number of others from the legal profession talked about the over-criminalization of behaviour. I'm not certain who said what precisely, but that was the gist of it. As a crown attorney, do you receive instructions as to where the tolerance line is in terms of what will be a charge and what will not be a charge? I think it was you, I'm not certain, who made the point that there seems to have been in the last year an increase in the number of young offenders entering into the system.

Ms Weinper: I can indicate that in terms of what will be a charge and what won't be a charge, that's up to the police. They're the ones who lay the charges when they have reasonable and probable grounds to believe an offence is being committed. However, when we, as crowns, are reviewing a matter to determine whether alternative measures would be appropriate, we have a policy and procedures manual - which I assisted in drafting - which is supposed to be implemented throughout the province and it was to provide some consistency throughout the province.

I think the comments being made with respect to using alternative measures for young people have something to do with the attitudes that may prevail in the community that they be impacting upon crowns when they're reviewing a matter. But we do have a policy and procedures manual and we ought to be implementing it; we ought to be using it.

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Mr. Gallaway: My final question has to do with rights and young people. We've heard from some witnesses that young people thumb their noses. One of our witnesses this morning said young people laugh at the police because they know nothing is going to happen to them. I think the gist of it is that if you're under 18 you can do what you want and really nothing happens to you.

Someone talked about young people having problems dealing with the Charter of Rights and understanding youth court records. Yet we here, on this side of the table in any event, hear about what I refer to as the legal industry, the lawyer industry, the justice industry, and we are told that in some way we should radically change the system so that the series of rights we know as adults would in some way be amended for young children.

Do you have anything to say about that? I believe it was our first witness who talked about the fact that the task or duty of the 15-minute questionnaires, as used by the Toronto regional police, is not difficult or onerous to fulfil.

Mr. Scully: I know Mavin did speak to rights and I think Michele also spoke to that, because Michele speaks to it from the point of view of what kids understand as their rights.

Ms Wong: We hear that, and I quite truly am amazed and baffled. Where do they get this from? We deal with kids every day. Every day I have a client come into my office.

As to the question about laughing at the police, I don't see a lot of youths coming to court laughing at the police. They may come in with baggy jeans down to their knees and baseball caps and they may have the swagger that we sometimes associate with being menacing or threatening, but when it comes down to the procedure they're going through, they've been arrested. A lot of these kids are in custody, or if they've been given release they have a lot of conditions. I don't see that. I quite honestly don't see that.

They look to me for advice, sometimes perhaps too much. You have to be careful with young people because they are easily persuaded. I have to make sure they are the ones who advise me how to proceed in the case.

I honestly don't know where those comments come from. Perhaps when a police officer or a parent is dealing with an adolescent they deal with the attitude, but I don't see that.

As far as the industry goes, I think most people, certainly from our perspective, entered the business of being a lawyer because they wanted to serve their clients. I don't think those of us who deal with youth have chosen this area because it's somehow lucrative and is going to make us rich. We do it because we care about the clientele, we care about these kids.

I think all of us have come here today having spent the time to find something in the kids to like. It's hard, certainly as a defence lawyer, to represent these kids unless you like them. Sometimes you have to scratch the surface a lot and sometimes you don't have to scratch the surface very hard. As far as your comments go, I've heard them but I don't know where they come from.

Mr. Scully: Could we give Michele Peterson-Badali a chance to speak? I think she has some understanding from her research about what kids understand as their rights.

Ms Peterson-Badali: The point I was making earlier was that when you go beyond the simple act of parroting back or paraphrasing a right that's been read to a young person, adolescents have substantial difficulty understanding the function and the significance of rights. In other words, when they waive the right to silence, a lot of them don't understand that what will follow is that the police are going to take a statement from them. So there's a broader context to rights that I think needs to be looked at.

To direct the other issue you raised about them laughing, I agree with Mavin. I don't imagine that's something that's very common. Even when it happens, I think one of the things that we as psychologists are aware of is that kids sometimes do things when they're scared that you would not expect. Sometimes what appears one way on the outside has very little to do with what's going on inside, and they may in fact be very afraid.

We did a study where we talked to kids who had just walked out of the court room after having been given a disposition by a judge in youth court. We asked them what their disposition was. They askud us what a disposition was. That's the level of understanding we're dealing with. They told us that the scariest part of the whole process they'd been through was being in court. This is not something they take lightly, and I think that's rhetoric, I think it's myth. I think it makes a good story.

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Ms Wong: I interview so many clients who have no knowledge of their records. I ask what happened to their last case, and they say they got off. I'll say, what do you mean you got off? He'll say he was placed on probation.

The conditions are pretty extensive, pretty exhaustive. I don't think they use it in terms of beating the system, getting off, but they don't understand the difference between open custody, probation, community service, a fine, and a conditional discharge, as we now have. I think their ability to describe what the process was is limited because of how they perceived it, not because of any bravura or because they actually think they've beaten the system. They're appointed a probation officer and therefore they're on a curfew. They certainly didn't get off.

The Chair: I want to thank you all so much for being here. I have a feeling there is going to be a bit of a rush to ask you some individual questions on the way out, so we'll let that happen.Ms Torsney is just shooting daggers at me and I know she has some questions.

Our next group is coming in so we have to clear the room, but I want to thank you very much. I know we'll be hearing from others of you later this week and also later in the process. Thanks again.

The meeting is adjourned.

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