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.