'TOUGH-ON-CRIME' POLICIES ACTUALLY MAKE US LESS SAFE

The federal government's recent changes to the Youth Criminal Justice
Act and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, part of a series of
legislative fixes announced in the past month, introduced a number of
ideas that are clearly out of step with expert thinking on crime
prevention.

Tougher sentences for young offenders, the jailing of teenagers until
their trials are over, mandatory minimum jail terms for drug crimes
– all were part of a law-and-order agenda introduced by Justice
Minister Rob Nicholson over several days in November.

The federal government didn't do itself any favours in terms of the
timing of these bills, as they coincided with a newly released report
called "Unlocking America" from the Washington-based JFA Institute.
The report points out the number of people in U.S. prisons has risen
eightfold since 1970, with no significant impact on crime rates.

The idea brought forth by Nicholson that "tough on crime" is clearly
the most effective judicial model comes across as ideological
sloganeering as opposed to sound policy. This is especially true when
juxtaposed with the JFA report's grim findings – including the
enormous cost to U.S. society of jailing its 2 million inmates ($100
billion a year).

The most troubling new bill is the one that rolls back progress under
the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the 2003 legislation that brought
Canada in line with how the western world deals with its youth
(unbelievably, until the YCJA, Canada incarcerated its youth at 10
times the rate of its adult population and twice the rate of
American youth).

Specifically, the new bill reintroduces the role of punishment as a
deterrence and denunciation. This premise, that stiffer,
incarceration-heavy sentences will deter others from committing
similar offences, represents a definite step backward in thinking and
is contrary to the major evidence about youth in conflict with the
law and their behaviour.

The concept of deterrence, which proposes that youth will understand
and be deterred by the potential consequence of a stiff sentence, is
beyond the capability of many youth, and therefore useless as a
strategy for community security. Current research on youth brain
development shows delays long past adolescence in the area of the
brain that understands consequences.

The Star's Andrea Gordon penned an illuminative article on the
subject where she reported "the pre-frontal cortex –
responsible for executive functions such as judgment, impulse control
and decision-making based on assessing consequences – isn't
fully formed until the early or mid-20s."

Moreover, a meta-analysis prepared by and for Canada's Department of
Justice Research and Statistics division in 2001, found that
"restorative justice is a more effective method of improving
victim/offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with
restitution and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared
to more traditional justice responses."

The U.S. experience is quite instructive, especially as it leads us
to the next two pillars of the proposed legislative changes in
Canada, the clampdown on drug crime, and the use of mandatory
sentences as a deterrent to that crime. The two issues are quite
intertwined in the United States, as the War on Drugs and the 1990s
phenomenon of "three strikes" laws are both deemed massive and
interconnected failures.

A 1997 Harvard Medical study found that jails are overpopulated with
non-violent drug offenders: "Mandatory sentencing laws are wasting
prison resources on non-violent, low-level offenders and reducing
resources available to lock up violent offenders."

The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice more recently reported
that America imprisons more than 1 million non-violent offenders,
more than half the country's prison population.

While Canada beats the drum for "law and order," U.S. researchers,
legislators and leading newspaper editorials are calling for a major
justice-system overhaul as they try to run away from the failed
law-and-order experiment south of the border.

Finally, our failure in dealing with youth crime is not due to a lack
of punitive sanctions to deter criminal activity.

In fact, the proposed bill amending the YCJA would serve only to
overcrowd our youth detention centres once again with minor crimes
while depleting court resources such as judges and Crown attorneys
needed to deal effectively with the most serious and dangerous
criminals. It would, in effect, make us less safe.

With less serious offences, it is important to provide high-risk
youth an opportunity for positive change through life skills, life
planning, coaching and community restorative processes. We must give
youth in conflict with the law a chance to make restitution for
their negative behaviour within their community, thereby allowing
them to begin the process of reintegration into that community.

Barbara Benoliel is a restorative justice coach and Terance Brouse is
director of community relations with the PACT Youth Crime Reduction
Program.