DRUG PROHIBITION ENCOURAGES VIOLENCE

Re: Less Jail, More Crime, editorial, Dec. 11.

This editorial repeats unwarranted assertions and errors of fact.
Let's take the latter first: The Young Offenders Act (YOA) was
incarcerating too many young people and for the wrong reasons -- and
follow-up evidence showed that incarcerating young people generally
made them harder to rehabilitate. So the YOA was not "widely
discredited for being too soft" but for exacerbating already bad
situations. There is no reliable peer-reviewed evidence, of which I am
aware, to suggest that "the leniency with which young criminals are
treated in our criminal justice system ... may be tempting them to
commit more crimes." If you have some, you should share it.

Youth crime fluctuates for a variety of reasons: (a) the number of
youth in any given cohort, (b) the social and peer-group attitudes
that characterize a cohort and (c) the legitimate economic and
employment opportunities that are available to them. None of these are
affected by changes in youth criminal justice legislation -- though
this fantasy is endlessly repeated by opportunistic fearmongers in
politics and the media.

The issue of youth and guns comes back to a dysfunctional drug control
policy that emphasizes supply suppression despite 100 years' evidence
that drug prohibition does not work. Drug prohibition encourages
violence. Always has. Always will.

Craig Jones

executive director, The John Howard Society of Canada

Kingston, Ont.