Pubdate: Sat, 19 Aug 2006
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2006 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Daphne Bramham
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

MISGUIDED TORY PLAN WOULD JAIL MORE KIDS

Children need homes, safe schools and safe places to stay to keep 
them from crime. The courts aren't the answer

Children as young as six are jailed in India for being homeless, poor 
and on the street. Most are innocent of everything but the crime of 
poverty and abandonment. But others were sent to jail after they 
stole or prostituted themselves to buy food or find shelter.

The Dongri Remand Home -- Mumbai's children's jail -- was built 
during the British raj as a prison for adults. It takes no 
imagination to conjure Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. It is joyless, 
grass-less and almost totally lacking in educational facilities. The 
children there face a bleak present and a bleaker future.

It's not such a great leap from the Mumbai children's jail to federal 
Justice Minister Vic Toews's musing this week that children as young 
as 10 should be within the reach of Canada's criminal justice system.

Toews contends his main interest in amending the Youth Criminal 
Justice Act to include 10- and 11-year-olds is to protect them, not 
put them in jail; to provide a means for judges to "intervene" with 
delinquents who have "fallen under the influence of criminal elements."

But there can be no doubt that if the act is amended, 10-year-olds 
will go to jail.

There is so much wrong with this idea, it's difficult to know where to begin.

So, I'll start at a point of agreement. Child protection services 
across the country are terribly under funded.

Toews provided no statistics or examples. But he believes most 
provincial welfare systems allow children in foster care to work as 
drug couriers, accomplices in break-and-enter thefts and other crimes 
on the assumption that when they turn 12 the justice system will deal 
with them.

By the time kids are 12, Toews says it's too late to rehabilitate -- 
"They're already criminals."

But it is simply wrong to conclude that because 10- and 11-year-olds 
fall through gaping holes in the child protection services and into 
the clutches of modern-day Fagins, court is the only solution.

It's also naive for Toews to suggest that because a judge orders 
treatment for a 10-year-old or any juvenile rather than jail, that 
the facilities would magically appear.

If Toews wants to protect children, he should apply the same logic to 
this proposal as to his earlier one to raise the legal age of sexual 
consent to 16 from 14. What he said then is that children up to the 
age of 16 aren't capable of giving informed consent to have sex and 
are, therefore, vulnerable to predators.

There are reams of credible studies on brain development indicating 
that children under 12 can not fully appreciate the consequences of 
their actions and can not make good decisions.

So if children up to 17 are vulnerable to sexual predators, aren't 
Grade 4 and 5 kids easy picking for a smooth-talking drug dealer who 
asks them to drop off a package, or a nice-seeming guy who says just 
crawl through a broken window, open the door and let me in?

There's another complicating factor to Toews's simplistic solution. 
There is also growing evidence that fetal alcohol syndrome is a major 
factor in criminality. Like children under 12, people suffering from 
it have little capacity for abstract thought and aren't able to 
anticipate the consequences of their actions.

There are no Canadian statistics on how many people in jails suffer 
from FAS because there is no comprehensive screening. But recent 
research suggests as many as 900,000 Canadians have FAS and each 
year, 1,200 babies in B.C. alone are born with it.

Research done in 1998 found that 60 per cent of the FAS victims 
studied had been in trouble with the law. Half of the 251 adults and 
adolescents had been incarcerated. All were more likely to have been 
incarcerated than received treatment.

Since FAS is totally preventable, Toews could keep more children from 
a life of crime by taking on FAS than he will by building children's jails.

A national screening program so that children with FAS get the help 
they need early would go a long way to protecting many of them. And 
Toews could act on a 1998 recommendation that the federal justice 
department institute its own comprehensive, pre-sentencing 
investigative screening for FAS so that all criminals -- adults and 
juveniles -- can get treatment.

Even those are just Band-aids.

What would have helped is the $5-billion, national, early learning 
and child-care program.

But that program was one of the first cut by Stephen Harper's 
Conservative government.

The root causes of children's vulnerability are poverty, drug and 
alcohol abuse and homelessness. More than a million Canadian children 
and their families live in poverty. An estimated 65,000 kids aged 16 
to 24 are homeless.

The way to keep kids from a life of crime and running in the company 
of drug dealers, pimps and thieves and scam artists is to give them 
other options. They needs homes, safe schools and safe places to stay 
while their parents are at work.

But Harper's Conservatives are opposed to those kinds of big social 
programs. Yet it's hard to see in the long run how criminalizing kids 
and warehousing them in jails can be a cheaper, more effective option.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman