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. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman