Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 3 - Evidence - March 3, 2014
OTTAWA, Monday, March 3, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 5 p.m. to monitor issues relating to human rights and, inter alia, to review the machinery of government dealing with Canada's international and national human rights obligations (topic: visible minority youth and the criminal justice system); to study the issue of cyberbullying in Canada with regard to Canada's international human rights obligations under Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; and for the consideration of a draft budget.
Senator Mobina S. B. Jaffer (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, welcome to the fifth meeting of the Second Session of the Forty-first Parliament of the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights.
[Translation]
The Senate has tasked the committee with studying issues related to human rights in Canada and internationally.
My name is Mobina Jaffer. I am a senator from British Columbia and chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights. I am pleased to welcome you here today, but before we begin, I would like to introduce the members of our committee.
[English]
We will start with the deputy chair of the committee and I ask her to introduce herself.
Senator Ataullahjan: I am Senator Salma Ataullahjan and I represent Toronto, Ontario.
Senator Meredith: Senator Don Meredith, Ontario.
Senator Ngo: Senator Thanh Hai Ngo, Ontario.
Senator Unger: Senator Betty Unger from Edmonton, Alberta.
Senator Eggleton: Art Eggleton from Toronto.
The Chair: Most of this committee consists of members from Ontario.
At a meeting on December 2, 2013, our committee agreed to receive a briefing to examine measures being taken to prevent visible minority youth from being involved in the criminal justice system and from reoffending with the hope of changing the current overrepresentation of certain groups in the criminal justice system.
To begin our hearings today, I would like to welcome our first panel of witnesses. We have with us, from Public Safety Canada, Mr. Bobby Matheson, Director General, Crime Prevention Directorate. From Justice Canada, please welcome Donald Piragoff, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Policy Sector; Elizabeth Hendy, Senior Director, Policy Implementation Directorate; and Hana Hruska, Director, Programs & Corporate Affairs, Youth Justice and Strategic Initiatives Section.
I understand that Mr. Matheson will start with remarks and then we will hear from Mr. Piragoff. Is that correct?
Bobby Matheson, Director General, Crime Prevention Directorate, Public Safety Canada: Yes, that's correct.
Good afternoon, honourable senators. I thank you for the opportunity to address you today. I understand that you are interested in learning about federal programs and funding to prevent visible minority youth from becoming involved in the criminal justice system. I will be glad to speak to the work of the Department of Public Safety, particularly in the area of crime prevention within the National Crime Prevention Centre.
First, I would like to give a brief statistical overview of some of the data currently available to us on visible minority youth and crime. "Self-reported delinquency" asks samples of youth whether they have committed offences in the past year. These surveys have been conducted for many years in various countries. Canada last participated in the international survey in 2006. The 2006 survey, which targeted school age adolescent young youth in Toronto, found that the prevalence of delinquent behaviour reported by foreign-born youth was lower than it was for Canadian-born peers: 15 per cent and 23 per cent respectively. While the category used in this study was youth from immigration, it is fair to say there is some overlap with youth from visible minorities.
A second data set is "police-reported crime statistics" report offences that are brought to the attention of police. While many police services may capture information on race for investigative purposes, this information is not part of nationally available statistics. As such, we don't have systemic data on police-reported crime among visible minorities at the national level.
[Translation]
The third type of data comes from victimization surveys conducted every five years. The 2009 survey only contained limited analysis on visible minorities, but observed nevertheless that rates of violent victimization were lower for people who identified as a visible minority (76 per 1,000 people) than for non-visible minorities (124 per 1,000 people).
According to the 2004 findings, visible minorities experienced comparable rates of victimization for violent crimes to non-visible minorities, for both sexes. The report also found that being both a visible minority and Canadian-born reduced the odds of being the victim of a violent crime by 40 per cent.
The three data sources I've discussed provide but an initial glimpse into the experiences of visible minority youth in Canada in relation to the criminal justice system.
[English]
From this data it may appear that visible minority youth are not at particularly high risk of offending as compared to their non-minority counterparts. However, we must be cautious in the generalizations we make given there remain significant gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between being a youth from a visible minority and crime.
In terms of public safety, the department is responsible for providing advice and implementing responses that address a vast array of issues from national security to cybersecurity, emergency management and responses to crime. In this latter respect, our branch is responsible for the continuum of initiatives that include proactive preventative measures to divert at-risk youth from involvement with crime, through effective policing, border strategies, as well as evidence-based corrections and community integration programs.
I am pleased now to speak about Public Safety's National Crime Prevention Strategy, managed through the National Crime Prevention Centre, and the types of community-based projects that we fund, including those with youth from visible minorities.
Through this strategy, Public Safety aims to develop and disseminate knowledge of effective crime prevention interventions in order to help decision makers at all levels of government and in communities make informed decisions about the most appropriate preventative measures. This is achieved through providing time-limited funding to organizations to implement evidence-based crime prevention projects with at-risk populations and conducting robust evaluation studies of selected projects.
Individuals are considered at risk for offending when they present a number of risk factors. At the individual level we look at prior delinquency, aggression and early substance abuse, for example. Peer-related factors considered are a high commitment to and/or interaction with delinquent peers. Within-the-school factors are poor school performance, expulsion or suspension. At a family level, the factors are a history of family violence, and there are community-related factors such as high levels of crime and feelings of insecurity.
These NCPC-supported projects work with participants to reduce the impact of these risk factors, and many of these projects have proven successful in reducing youth crime and involvement in the justice system, including a number of which work with youth from visible minorities.
NCPC is currently funding 17 projects that work with visible minority youth. These projects, over their lifetime, represent an investment of approximately $36 million and are expected to reach more than 3,000 children and youth from visible minorities.
A few examples:
[Translation]
The Wraparound Surrey project in Surrey, British Columbia.
This project is based on the Wraparound Milwaukee model, which is a unique system of care for children with serious emotional, behavioural and mental health needs and their families. The model focuses on strength-based, individualized care through the delivery of a comprehensive array of services to delinquent youth and their families.
The city of Surrey is home to a diverse ethnic population, so the Wraparound model was adapted to ensure that it was culturally appropriate and that ethnic affiliation was taken into account when assessing risk and protective factors, as well as developing plans of care.
This project has facilitated an effective school-RCMP partnership response to youth who are at risk of joining gangs or who are gang-involved
Evaluation results show a significant decline — 67 per cent — in police contacts among participants relative to the comparison group.
The partners affirmed that the Surrey Wraparound gave them more resources and tools for addressing youth gangs and youth violence in their neighbourhood.
The Stepping Out project was developed and launched by the Edmonton-based Centre for Newcomers in April 2010. The project aimed to prevent immigrant adolescents and young adults aged 17 to 27 from joining gangs and to help those who are already involved with gangs to discontinue their gang association and criminal involvement.
Further to a very successful symposium attended by 160 representatives of 63 organizations, the centre developed a community action plan to support gang-involved and at-risk immigrant youth.
[English]
In Toronto, Project Intervention Toronto for youth at risk of gang involvement is implementing an integrated, targeted and evidence-based community program that reduces and prevents the proliferation of gangs in vulnerable Toronto neighbourhoods. The approach includes: an outreach and referral process that is linked to other community resources likely to have contact with gang-involved and at-risk youth; an intake process that will be used to develop an in-depth needs assessment for youth; individual case management plans; intensive group-based training opportunities; practical supports for families of participating youth; and broader community education, engagement and evaluation activities to increase awareness about gangs and gangs prevention.
This project has achieved numerous positive results, including a statistically significant decline in criminal victimization, a greater short-term decline in non-violent offending than members of the comparison group, and a slight decline in self-reported arrests between the pre- and post-test periods. There was a large, statistically significant decline in arrests between the pre-test and six-month follow-up period.
Finally, in Montreal, we have provided funding for a Strengthening Family Program project in a Black anglophone community. The project includes child training sessions where participants learn about anger and stress management, emotional management, conflict resolution, peer resistance, as well as build knowledge of the effects of drugs and alcohol. This model also includes parental training sessions, which focus on learning to clarify expectations of children's behaviour, using consistent and appropriate discipline techniques and using effective communication. Finally, in combined family sessions, the families learn about conflict resolution and practise communication skills.
This project has demonstrated positive results as well, including statistically significant improvements in all measures of family functioning and parenting, family organization and communication, parental self-control, involvement and positive parenting.
I hope this has provided you with an appreciation of some of the types of projects supported by Public Safety Canada to prevent youth, including youth from visible minorities, from coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place. The results achieved so far are impressive and provide practical information that local communities, governments and decision makers at all levels can use to implement appropriate prevention measures in their respective jurisdictions.
I would be pleased to answer any questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Matheson. There will be questions at the end.
May I please ask you to clear up something you've said? With regard to police-reported crime statistics and the reported offences that are brought to the attention of the police, in the investigation there may be information on race and ethnicity for investigative purposes, but statistics are not available nationally. Why is that?
Mr. Matheson: At the moment there's no reporting mechanism, and in some cases it remains a privacy issue, as far as I understand.
The Chair: Is any other data collected for other groups or any other issues collected nationally?
Mr. Matheson: Not that I'm aware of.
Senator Eggleton: Mr. Matheson, just to pick up on that, it's not available from the police records, but you have it for adults. Is that true?
Mr. Matheson: Yes, but not by subgroups.
Senator Eggleton: Not even for adults? I read in the briefing note from our analysts that we do know that, in fact, there is a disproportionate number of people from the Black population: Black inmates make up 9.5 per cent of the prison population, although Blacks only represent 2.9 per cent of the general population. Is there not a statistic involving Black youth, or any other colour?
Mr. Matheson: In terms of police interventions, we don't have that at the national level.
Senator Eggleton: What about in the penal system? This is in the penal system, this statistic I just read to you.
Senator Meredith: The OCI report is the one that we're basing this on, and that's corrections. My colleague's question is: How is that data collected?
Mr. Matheson: Within the corrections system.
Senator Eggleton: So we do have it from the corrections system, just not from the police?
Mr. Matheson: Correct.
The Chair: We also have it for Aboriginal people. We have some corrections statistics for Aboriginal people federally.
Mr. Matheson: In terms of interactions with police?
The Chair: Yes.
Mr. Matheson: I'm afraid I would have to go back and check.
The Chair: Could you please let us know? Thank you very much.
Donald Piragoff, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Policy Sector, Justice Canada: Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today.
[Translation]
As the chair said, joining me today are Elizabeth Hendy and Hana Hruska.
[English]
We look forward to our discussion on funding support for diversion and rehabilitation programs for visible minority youth. We will particularly focus on how the Department of Justice's Youth Justices Services Funding Program and the Youth Justice Fund are addressing the needs of this demographic. To a large extent, funding programs of the Department of Justice are focused on young persons who are already in conflict with the law as opposed to crime prevention.
Let me first provide an overview of the youth criminal justice system. The federal, provincial and territorial governments share joint responsibility for youth justice. The federal government is responsible for criminal law, including the Criminal Code and the Youth Criminal Justice Act, or YCJA, while, on the other hand, the provinces and territories are responsible for the administration of those two acts. The Youth Criminal Justice Act, which governs Canada's youth justice system, applies to youth at least 12 years of age but under 18 years old who are alleged to have committed criminal offences.
The act came into force in 2003. It introduced reforms to, amongst other things, reduce the use of the courts and incarceration in less serious cases, support the effective reintegration of young persons released from custody, and better take into account the interests of victims. It was amended recently in 2012 to strengthen the ways in which the youth justice system deals with repeat and violent offenders. The recent changes were intended to respect the rights of the accused without allowing these rights to take precedence over other interests such as community safety.
The Youth Criminal Justice Act aims to reduce the overuse of the formal court system and of custody for all youth by ensuring that alternatives to charges and to custodial sentences are used whenever appropriate. Under the act, a youth sentence must be the least restrictive and most likely to rehabilitate and to promote a sense of responsibility and an acknowledgment of the harm to the victim in the community. The act specifically states that all available sanctions other than custody that are reasonable in the circumstances should be considered for all young persons.
In addition, the declaration of principles in the Youth Criminal Justice Act states that measures taken against young persons should respect a variety of factors, including gender, ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences.
[Translation]
The provinces and territories are responsible for the administration of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, including the provision of youth justice programs and services.
[English]
Let me speak specifically first about the Youth Justice Services Funding Program. Through the Youth Justice Services Funding Program and the Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision Program — those are two separate programs — the federal government provides financial support to the provinces and territories for the delivery of programs and services that target youth in conflict with the law.
The Youth Justice Services Program has existed since 1984 under various names. Federal support assists each province and territory in providing a wide range of youth justice services and programs. The funding agreements provide $141.7 million annually for youth justice services that directly support the policy objectives of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Services, programs and activities include diversion or extrajudicial measures and sanctions, rehabilitative and reintegration services, judicial interim release programs, intensive support and supervision programs and other community-based sanctions. The funding is particularly instrumental in supporting programs designed to deal safely with the high-risk group of offenders.
In youth custody centres administered by the provinces, custodial staff work very hard to match youth justice services with the individual needs of the youth. Staff are educated to create an unbiased, accepting environment to meet the needs of young people in order to enhance their experience within the youth justice system. Custodial staff ensure that services accommodate special needs and circumstances.
As I mentioned, the Youth Justice Services Funding Program provides all provinces and territories with an annual financial contribution totalling $141.7 million to assist in the delivery of various programs and services that target young persons in conflict with the law. These programs and services aim to protect the public by, first, encouraging proportionate and timely accountability for unlawful behaviour; second, encouraging effective rehabilitation and reintegration of young persons into the community; and third, reserving the formal court process and custody for the most serious offenders.
I would like to say a few words about the Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision Program. In addition to the youth justice services funding agreements, provinces and territories have supplementary agreements in place to assist the jurisdictions in providing specialized assessment and treatment services for serious, violent youth offenders with mental health problems. These supplementary agreements fall under the Intensive Rehabilitative Custody and Supervision Program. There is approximately $11 million made available to provinces and territories under this program.
Under this program, eligible costs associated with the treatment of these serious, high-risk, high-need youth may include, for example, reports and assessments, custodial programming, and rehabilitative and reintegration services. The funding goes as a priority to intensive therapeutic programs for individual youth to reduce the likelihood of future offending.
I would now like to talk about the Youth Justice Fund, the third major fund. The Department of Justice administers the Youth Justice Fund, a $4.5 million discretionary grants and contributions program, that supports projects that encourage a more effective youth justice system, responds to emerging youth justice issues, and enables greater citizen and community participation in the youth justice system.
The Youth Justice Fund has three components, or three smaller separate funds. They include the main fund, the drug treatment fund and the guns, gangs and drugs fund. The main fund supports a broad range of projects with youth involved in the justice system; the drug treatment component supports drug treatment programming for youth involved in the justice system; and the guns, gangs and drugs component responds to youth in the justice system who are involved in or vulnerable to gun, gang and drug activities. It promotes the provision of community-based educational, cultural, sporting and vocational opportunities to these youth to allow them to make smart choices and resist gang involvement or exit gangs.
Youth justice funds generally involve youth in the deep end of the youth criminal justice system; that is, those in custody or on probation and those who have high needs. This includes, in particular, gang-involved youth. Projects last up to three years.
The fund also supports smaller projects, such as community assessments, workshops and planning sessions. For example, four years ago, the fund sponsored community assessments and workshops across the country to develop anti-youth gang action plans. Many of these took place in communities with high visible minority populations, such as Toronto's 13 priority neighbourhoods.
The Youth Justice Fund's flexibility makes it a valuable addition to our tool kit in addressing youth crime. The fund has no pre-determined regional allocation and is therefore able to effectively target priority regions and youth populations.
The fund has supported many pilot projects to assist visible minority youth who have come into conflict with the law. For example, here in Ottawa, it is supporting the Rideauwood Addiction and Family Services initiative for an addiction treatment project involving Somali-Canadian youth. Staff at Rideauwood found that for cultural reasons their regular programming was less effective for these youth. In response, they developed programming using addictions workers from the Somali community to act as role models and provide culturally sensitive interventions for Somali youth.
Another example is the 9 Heavens Healing Academy, which relocated mostly African-Canadian youth involved in gangs from the Jane-Finch area of Toronto to Georgian Bay for weekend camps with a curriculum involving life skills and substance abuse counselling and vocational learning.
In Winnipeg, the fund is supporting the New Directions program in implementing an educational and life skills program for newcomer refugee youth involved in the youth justice system and in gangs, or at risk of gang involvement. The program assesses the life, education and work skill levels of the youth and creates learning plans, mentors and supports the youth through development of a résumé and provides assistance in finding jobs or returning to school.
[Translation]
These are but a few examples. More information, including project descriptions, summaries of project evaluation results, and in some cases, project videos, is available on the Justice Canada website.
I hope that this provides you with a clear overview of some Justice Canada initiatives to address the over-representation of visible minority youth in the criminal justice system. We would be pleased to take your questions.
[English]
Senator Hubley: Welcome and thank you for your presentations.
I must say the number of programs that are there to support young people when they do come into conflict with the justice system is commendable. In the event that they are facing charges, what support system is in place to give them the needed information and education so that they can make the decisions that are best for them as they progress through the justice system? Are there such programs available and, if so, can you give us an insight into them?
Mr. Piragoff: Because these involve criminal charges, even though they are proceeded with under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, youth are entitled to legal aid if they qualify or have their own counsel. Primarily, advice would be provided by legal counsel or through legal aid programs.
Senator Hubley: I was somewhat taken aback at thinking of a 12-year-old who might be involved in that system, and I believe 12 to 18 was the figure. If that young individual does not have parental support there, would the advice from either legal aid or a lawyer be sufficient for that young person to understand exactly the system that he is being faced with and what the repercussions might be?
Mr. Piragoff: There are obligations under the act for the involvement of parent, the notification of parents, so it's not quite like the adult system where the accused is on their own. There are obligations to involve the parents.
Senator Hubley: Is that something that would be a priority, that a young person would have that kind of support with them?
Mr. Piragoff: It is a requirement in the law.
Senator Hubley: Okay, thank you.
The Chair: Before you go to the next question, we have a follow-up question.
Senator Meredith: With respect to those young people who are not given adequate representation, we see a correlation between those individuals who get legal aid or get counsel at the time of being arrested. Being involved within the system, I found that especially among visible minorities — as someone who has been working in the area for 12 years — there has been an overrepresentation of those individuals who are not getting access to counsel right away. Basically there is no counsel, there is no parental follow-up and they are more likely to be involved in the system compared to those who receive counsel. Can you elaborate the steps being taken to ensure young people are getting proper counsel, because there is a correlation between those who do not and the higher rates of incarceration?
Mr. Piragoff: As I mentioned, we share this area with the provinces and territories. While we fund programs to provide funding to the provinces, it is the provinces that administer the funds, prosecute and investigate the offences, and administer legal aid programs. That is beyond our ability to comment on.
Senator Meredith: The government is funding the provinces, so in terms of effectiveness of funding as to the results being achieved with of the number of young people who are getting caught up in the system, I'm asking if there is some sort of follow-up with regard to the province reporting back to the federal government to say this is how we've allocated our funds and where we see gaps where we possibly need more funding.
Mr. Piragoff: With the Youth Justice Services Funding Program I mentioned, we do negotiate goals and objectives with the provinces. That is part of the condition of the funding. It is not a pure transfer program where we just hand over the money. There are some goals. Our lead Canadian negotiator, Elizabeth Hendy, is sitting to my left. I will let her answer the question as to how we set goals and objectives with the provinces and how we follow up with them.
Elizabeth Hendy, Senior Director, Policy Implementation Directorate, Justice Canada: First of all, to get back to your first point, under the act there are specific requirements to ensure youth are provided appropriate counsel because of their young age. That is taken into consideration and is part of the preamble of the act. Unlike the adult system, it is to make sure no youth goes unrepresented.
As my ADM mentioned, we do have specific requirements we ask that the provinces adhere to. The agreement is tailored and flexible enough so that depending on the youth population within a particular province, they can tailor the requirements to meet the needs of that offender population. In Ontario, for example, if there is a greater visible minority population than in other jurisdictions, they would tailor the programs appropriately. They have to report back to us at the end of each year and explain how they use the federal funding.
Senator Hubley: I'll just clarify that, thank you. There is not a youth program, if a young person was charged, where they would be nurtured into knowing what to expect from the system he is facing from a legal standpoint or what options are available to them. I still go back to thinking of the very young youth that are involved here and how they would be very easily swept along by a system that they are not really comfortable with or know a lot about. I wonder if there is a program that might be there to intervene at that point in time for these youth.
Ms. Hendy: From a correctional perspective where the Youth Justice Services Funding Program would kick in on the correctional side, there is programming specific to the age of the youth. A 12-year-old would not be placed in the same area within a facility as a 17-year-old or 18-year-old. The age of the youth and the needs, in terms of intellectual capability of that youth to understand his or her reasons for where they are, are definitely taken into consideration.
Senator Hubley: You've pointed out several of the programs to us. Mr. Matheson, I think in your presentation you talked about the Wraparound Surrey Project, Stepping Out and so on. Are these ongoing projects? Do we have the confidence to know that there will be programs like this for our young people? Do they have a time frame, and is it a case of funding running out at some point in time and, if so, what do we do after that?
Mr. Matheson: The funding we provide is for up to five years. It's understood by the project proponents at the time. The main objective of our funding is actually to look at how these models work, and I mentioned the robust evaluation. We take the knowledge we garner from these projects and make it available to provincial and municipal governments and community associations so they do know what evidence-based types of interventions actually work with these individuals.
In terms of the sustainability of programming, federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice and public safety have actually made crime prevention a priority. In November, they approved an action plan, part of which is looking at how these evidence-based practices can be more broadly put in place. Sustainability is one of the topics we will be looking at over the next number of years.
Senator Meredith: Thank you again for your presentations. This is a very important topic we are studying here with respect to the overrepresentation of visible minorities in our correction system. It goes to the root causes of some of these issues.
We talk about crime prevention and funding — $36 million you mention, Mr. Matheson — and I'm always concerned about the effectiveness of these programs because we see the numbers keep rising. The OCI report indicated there is a 40 per cent increase, and they start out from youth.
How can we be more effective in preventing our youth from going into the criminal justice system and then, further, being incarcerated and becoming mature criminals?
We see the results of having young people over the last 12 years — and the escalation of gun violence in 2002-03 and 2005, the "year of the gun," with people being gunned down in metropolitan Toronto. We consistently see these young people being charged with heinous crimes and individuals being removed from society.
My concern has always been: What are we doing to educate those individuals while they are incarcerated, to make them better citizens when they leave the system so we don't see them become repeat offenders? Could both of you please elaborate with respect to not only the youth side of it, but even more so on the crime prevention side?
Mr. Matheson: In terms of crime prevention, the risk factors and protective factors are things we look at, and I talked a bit about them in my presentation. But as individuals go into these projects, we evaluate what their situation is in terms of attitudes, knowledge, contact with police — all prior to actually going through the interventions — and then we follow them through the interventions and see at the end of project what the results are.
We are able to determine what works in different communities for different groups. There are a number of models we test, but we actually do them in different communities in the North, large municipalities and smaller communities. In each case, we look at what the results are within that environment.
We started this in 2008. It takes a long time to actually get that type of information. It's quite intensive in terms of tracking data at an individual level. But it has been a real success in terms of the community associations that access the funding; they understand the value of having this evidence and are now starting use that to build community support for ongoing work for where the models work.
Mr. Piragoff: With respect to the question of recidivism and the type of projects or programs we have, I will ask Ms. Hruska to describe the projects we have to deal with youth and recidivism.
Hana Hruska, Director, Programs & Corporate Affairs, Youth Justice and Strategic Initiatives Section, Justice Canada: As Mr. Piragoff mentioned, the Youth Justice Fund deals with projects for youths already in the criminal justice system. So this is a slightly different and smaller population than Mr. Matheson's programs.
Our projects also have evaluations. We track the youth as they go through the project, not only in terms of how much contact they have with the criminal justice system but also other factors that we see are very related, such as: Are the youth going to school? Do they have an attachment to the workforce? What are the relationships with their family? Are they building relationships with pro-social peers?
In general, we get evaluations for those projects and see that, generally, the youth are impacted by the programs. We also make a strong effort to share the findings from these programs with other stakeholders, such as provinces and territories, and community groups, because many of our projects are run by community groups. For example, we have webcasts to share information learned from these projects so that these types of interventions can be replicated in other parts of the country.
Senator Meredith: Are they being effective in terms of your statistics? They give you reports. Have they shown a decrease in terms of certain communities that are being impacted by these young people who are getting into drugs, gangs and so forth? Are positive changes being made?
Ms. Hruska: There are positive changes being made in the course of the youth's involvement with projects. Tracking the youth once they exit the criminal justice system is more difficult.
Senator Meredith: Why, then, is there not a mechanism in place to say that this individual has been in contact with some sort of support system? Why is there not a recommendation that we track that individual to ensure they do not further offend and be caught up further in the system?
Mr. Piragoff: The Youth Justice Act holds youths accountable. It is not a welfare act; it's basically a mechanism to hold them accountable for any crimes that they may have committed. Like the adult system, once you do your time, you do your time; once the youth has essentially finished his or her sentence, even though that sentence might be in the community, it's over. It then becomes another job of other agencies, such as social welfare. The criminal justice system loses control of the individual once the probationary period ends or once their formal probation or conditional release ends.
Senator Meredith: So there is no formal tracking of them whatsoever?
Mr. Piragoff: Not once they are totally out of the system.
Senator Eggleton: First, let me try to see what we have here in terms of data collected. I mentioned earlier a number for Black inmates: 9.5 per cent of the prison population, but they represent only 2.9 per cent of the general population. So there are some statistics.
But then I note that it is not disaggregated based on race in Canada, and it is difficult to analyze the overrepresentation of visible minorities in the criminal justice system. We seem to have some data, but we don't have data. I think Mr. Matheson pointed out that it is not available from the police, but there is data that seems to be available from the correctional system.
Can I get it straight? How reliable is the information we have? What additional information would be helpful to get a better handle on exactly what the visible minority population is in terms of running into the criminal justice system?
The Chair: If I may add a supplementary, I am confused about whether there is any data to clarify the stats regarding youth. Do we know if there is overrepresentation of Black youth in the prison system? We don't have the data. We don't even have the data for visible minorities. What data do we have?
Mr. Matheson: From a crime prevention perspective, I wouldn't have that with me. I would have to go back to see what is available. My understanding is that at the national level we don't have much information.
Ms. Hendy: We would have to go back and check with Statistics Canada as to what they actually collect from the provinces. It is my understanding from what the provinces send me in their reports that they would not aggregate it to that level of detail.
Senator Eggleton: Well, I'll have to think about that further.
Let me ask Mr. Matheson about the 17 projects that worked with visible minority youth. Obviously, someone is figuring out who a visible minority is for purposes of these programs in the amount of $36.8 million. Senator Meredith has asked about the effectiveness of these programs. I would like to know how close they come to meeting the need. Are there a lot more applicants for these particular funds than there is money available? If so, how many more? Is this a drop in the bucket or is it really meeting most of the problem or is it somewhere in between?
Mr. Matheson: We have $40.9 million in funding available for projects each year. The projects are based on cross-Canada proposals that come from municipal governments, police associations and non-profits. In those cases, project proponents identified visible minorities as the target group within their community. In some cases, for example in Halifax, they saw problems in a Black community. That's how we arrived at projects with visible minorities.
We have calls for proposals periodically as funds become available. They are not always available each year, given that projects can last up to five years. There are always more proposals, but we have quite a rigorous process of reviewing them. As well, the requirements for managing these projects are quite rigorous because we require so much of an evaluation perspective to determine what actually works for these youth.
I would say that we're doing well with the funding we have. It is a significant amount of money that we are putting forward. Our ultimate objective is to take the knowledge from those projects and work with the provinces and communities knowing what types of interventions work, what the benefits are from a cost to the criminal justice system, in particular at the provincial level, and that these types of interventions get implemented and funded by other levels of jurisdiction.
Senator Eggleton: I'm still trying to get an answer. You have noted 17 projects here. How many did you turn down? How many other projects were proposed? You said that it involves a rigorous process, but are there many that you don't have money for.
Mr. Matheson: There are some, but I don't have the number on the tip of my tongue.
Senator Eggleton: I'll ask you something else. You evaluate all these programs and you have given some good examples of ones in different communities across the country. I assume you then determine whether they are effective. What about the ones that are effective? What about sharing them with other jurisdictions? If a Wraparound project works in Surrey, maybe it'll work in some other community. If you find a project that works well in one community, will you encourage and pay for it in another community, or do you only do it once?
Mr. Matheson: We do some replication in a different type of environment or community where we think we can learn more from the intervention. Where we have results, and we're just starting to get them in the last year or two, we disseminate the knowledge to communities via the Web. We also have networks of associations across the country to get that information out. Through our regional offices, we also have experts in crime prevention that can help communities set up these projects.
The Chair: I'm really concerned about the tack you have taken in funding programs. You have talked only about programs for youth. You talked about the youth justice funding that appears to focus on projects that work with youth to prevent them from making choices that increase their risk of coming into conflict with the law. Everyone sitting here knows there is a systemic problem. You don't have to be a Black youth to know that you will be stopped more than any other youth in Canada. Everybody knows there is a systemic problem. I'm really concerned. What are you doing to deal with the justice system and the correctional system in terms of the issue of visible minorities and the systemic discrimination?
Mr. Matheson: Some of these interventions, such as the Wraparound projects, bring in other services that try to help these youth attend school so they have a greater probability of finding employment.
The Chair: I'm not talking about youth. What about our systems that are systemically discriminatory? What about the police that will stop a Black youth in Toronto because he is in a fancy car? How are you dealing with systemic issues in the system? Both witnesses, from Corrections and Public Safety, have focused only on what happens to youth. What about focusing on the issues of systemic discrimination? You haven't spoken about that at all.
Mr. Piragoff: Senator, we have funded seven projects that have dealt with police discretion. The Youth Justice Act provides for diversion of youth at the front end so they do not go into the system. Basically, they are diverted into programs as opposed to going into the youth justice system, which then leaves them with a criminal charge and eventually going before a youth justice court.
We've had some programs in the past to educate police with respect to the provisions in the YJA concerning diversion and when it is appropriate to divert youth. In such a situation, police officers would exercise discretion to not send certain youth into the criminal justice system or to decide that for various factors they will proceed with a charge.
That's part of some programs dealt with under the Youth Justice Fund. To a large part, given the mandate of the program that justice administers, the youth are already in the criminal justice system. As I said at the beginning, we're dealing with the youth who are already in the system. We're not dealing with crime prevention.
The Chair: Sorry. Maybe I'm not making myself clear. Mr. Piragoff, justice deals with lots of issues. You deal with training judges on issues. You deal with the issues of training prosecutors on issues facing Canadians. There is no doubt that there is systemic discrimination in the system against visible minority youth. What are you doing to train on that issue?
Mr. Piragoff: As I said earlier, senator, the administration of justice, including the administration of police services, is a provincial responsibility, except for the RCMP, so that is a policing responsibility. It is a responsibility of the Attorney General of each province in terms of providing policy directions.
The Chair: Answer me. Are you dealing with it? We have almost run out of time.
Mr. Piragoff: Senator, I did mention we had some programs that dealt with training police officers how to administer the provisions of the act that provided for diversion.
The Chair: I wasn't talking about diversion.
We've run out of time. May I please ask that you provide that? Can you please provide it in writing? What I want is what programs you are doing to deal with systemic discrimination within the system, what is happening, how you are training RCMP when they first come in contact with a visible minority youth? How are you dealing with issues of systemic discrimination? Can you please provide that to the clerk in writing?
We have four people who have questions. I respectfully ask that you put your questions. If the answers are long, we will ask them to provide them in writing. If they're short, we will deal with them now. We will start with Senator Seidman.
Senator Seidman: If I might try to understand the jurisdictional issues in both the Public Safety programs you have spoken to and the Justice piece, clearly we're involved with federal, provincial and municipal governments. How much work do you do with the provinces? Do you work with cities? How do you disseminate to them? How do you divide up the work? If you could give me some idea of how the jurisdictional issues play out here, I would appreciate it.
The Chair: I will get all the questions. If you can answer them together, please do.
Senator Seidman: I had one more piece to that question. Is there a role for the private sector? Do you do work to encourage the private sector to get involved in some way or another? That would be as a partner along with the federal, provincial and municipal jurisdictions. Thank you.
Senator Ataullahjan: According to the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council, the most prevalent risk factors for youth gang involvement include limited attachment to community and poor parental supervision, which I think is a very important factor. Parents need to have some responsibility for everything that is happening and they need to be aware of what kind of activities their children are engaging in. Also, there are problems at school, alcohol and drug abuse, and poor educational or employment opportunities or potential. Can you tell us about the drugs component of the Youth Justice Fund and the importance of this component?
Senator Unger: I'm interested in the Stepping Out project. You say that it was after a very successful symposium, well attended, the project developed a community action plan to support gang involvement in at-risk immigrant youth. I was just also wondering about definitive results from that. You say it was successful. I know of the centre for newcomers, but I would be interested in that.
With regard to the funds that are distributed, when they get to the provincial level and are disseminated, are the police most likely to get the bulk of the funds or is there an equal distribution? When a youth commits, the police are called, so I'm just wondering if they get more than the others.
Senator Ngo: Could you provide us the concrete program or project funded under the youth services funding program and who is accountable for that project?
You say you funded programs. You funded other projects as well. Could you let us know the amount? Altogether, according to the Justice Department, $140 million, and where did it go? To whom did it go, who is responsible for it? Is that okay?
Mr. Piragoff: Yes.
Senator Meredith: My question is to Mr. Piragoff. You talk about $11 million in funding for mental health. We know that a lot of our young people are facing mental health challenges. Is $11 million enough funding for across the country? Can you provide us some more details as to how those funds are allocated and do we need to see a ramp-up?
Mr. Matheson, with respect to intervention and prevention, we spend more on the back end incarcerating. Why are we not spending more up front? In terms of some positive initiatives that can be shared across Canada when we look at Surrey, B.C., or Edmonton, or North Preston, Nova Scotia, or Toronto, there are initiatives that the department has taken on. We need to share these best practices. A report of some sort to this committee would help as we put our report together. I would appreciate that.
The Chair: Thank you, Senator Meredith.
As you can see, there are many questions.
Senator Meredith: Can we have an extension of that?
The Chair: No, we can't. There are many questions. Whatever you can answer in the next few minutes, please do, and the rest, you can provide us in writing.
Also, you have said that you have no jurisdiction over the police forces because they're provincial. I understand that youth funding is also provincial, yet you do fund that. Please answer that in your written answer.
Who wishes to proceed?
Ms. Hendy: I will answer questions 1, 4 and 5.
The Youth Justice Services Funding Program is a transfer payment between the federal Department of Justice and the provinces and territories responsible for correctional services for youth. It is a direct federal-provincial transfer, which has federal policy objectives that the provinces have to adhere to. I can provide by separate cover the amount of money provided to each jurisdiction.
In terms of the $141 million and how it is split between provinces and territories, the money is given directly to the provincial ministries. In terms of the involvement of the private sector, if they wish to bring in service delivery agencies that are not provincial, they can do so through subcontracts. That would be up to the province within each administration of justice to determine how to use that funding.
In terms of who is responsible, I could get you that chart so you can see exactly how the money is distributed.
In terms of the IRCS Program, just to clarify, it is dealing with young offenders with mental health issues who have committed serious violent crimes. It is not for youth at large with mental health issues. It is for youth within the youth criminal justice system with mental health issues. This is tailored funding per youth in the system. If there is an individual, for example, in Alberta under an IRCS sentence, that youth would be eligible for up to $100,000 a year working on a dedicated treatment plan to ensure that we work through the province with that youth to reduce the level of violence when that youth is returned to the community; there is a hope that the level of violence will be decreased and there will be reduced recidivism. It is a tailored program working with the needs of that individual youth.
Again, I can get you detailed information if you wish on that program.
Ms. Hruska: I can respond to the question relating to the drug treatment component of the Youth Justice Fund. That is money allocated specifically to projects that provide drug treatment to youth who have substance abuse issues who are already in the criminal justice system, so that may be youth in custody or youth on probation. It is often drug treatment provided by community drug treatment providers. That is essentially what those monies are for.
I would also like to add a little bit to the question relating to mental health. Youth Justice Fund projects generally have a mental health component because mental health issues are very prevalent in the youth criminal justice system. These are projects that deal with youth who may not have committed the level of crime that you need to commit to be under an IRCS sentence. However, they also provide mental health assistance.
Mr. Matheson: In the area of crime preparation, we're connected with provinces and territories. As I mentioned, ministers have this as a priority. Crime prevention work is reviewed by a committee of federal-provincial deputy ministers and ADMs, and there is a working group that is following along the action plan.
We network with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. There's actually a project through them at the moment. At the national and regional levels, we bring in non-profits that are interested in some of these models. We ask that a lot of the associations and projects that we fund, which get good results, get the word out about what works.
We're now starting to look at how we get the private sector more involved, and I think key to getting them involved is having this evidence that shows when you put your money into a community, you will actually get some good results.
Getting back to your question, if we do that more effectively and actually show the cost benefits for crime prevention, we're hoping that this really becomes a much easier business case at provincial and municipal levels for crime prevention to be stabilized and even expanded in those communities.
In terms of the Stepping Out program, I will get more detail on that. The funding is not allocated on a provincial basis, and the majority of the proposals would not come from police associations. Most of them come from non-profits or from the municipal government. A lot of times they do partner with police, but we have seen a shift where those community associations have taken more of a leadership role. It has been effective working in partnership with police.
The Chair: Thank you. You can see the interest we have in what you had to present, and we appreciate you making yourselves available on fairly short notice. We are very appreciative of that. This is not the first time you have all appeared here, whether it is here or in other Senate committees. We appreciate your presence, and we look forward to working with you in the future.
We will now carry on with our next presenter. Ms. Pomerant, the floor is yours.
Lisa Pomerant, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers: Thank you. We are delighted to be here today on behalf of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers. The organization was founded in 1992 to offer a national perspective on criminal justice issues, with a view to ensuring the preservation of constitutional principles that protect us all and seeing that criminal law develops in a practical and principled manner.
Our council represents the views of defence lawyers from coast to coast. The Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers is very grateful for having the opportunity to address the Senate today and to possibly assist with respect to any deliberations or issues.
My name is Lisa Pomerant. I'm a criminal defence lawyer. I've practised law for 25 years. Throughout the course of my practice, I have always maintained a large youth focus, whether I was practising law in B.C., Alberta or Ontario, and most of the youth that I have dealt with over the years and continue to deal with are marginalized, the visible minorities.
To my left is my esteemed colleague, Ms. Emma Rhodes. She's a criminal lawyer who has much expertise in youth matters. She's an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, teaching a course about the Youth Criminal Justice Act. She's an instructor at Osgoode Hall Law School, teaching trial advocacy. She is the Criminal Lawyers' Association representative at one of Toronto's busiest youth courts, and she volunteers weekly for high-risk youth.
Perhaps the only significance of our presence today is to tell you what goes on in the trenches, what it's like for these youth, what they're facing and what the current measures are achieving. We are here to tell you what is going on at the ground level, how these initiatives are practically playing out and to indicate that if these systemic issues are not addressed, these youth will continue to have trouble or enter into the criminal justice system.
Emma Rhodes, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers: Thank you for having me. It is an honour to be here.
I can tell you what I know and what I see. I can tell you that visible minorities are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Put another way, the justice system disproportionately impacts people who are visible minorities. They live in racialized neighbourhoods. They live in poverty. They lack access to education. They deal with being unemployable. They are struggling with mental health issues such as depression. They are more likely to come into contact with the police.
"Carding" is a practice where Toronto's police forces stop, question and document people they encounter on the streets, and statistics about carding in Toronto tell us that people who are Black or Brown are more likely to be carded than whites. Rates of carding are highest in racialized communities, and these youth report that they are often searched during these stops and that they feel criminalized by this process.
My typical client is a young Black man who is not doing well in school. He is in a single parent family where his mom is working several jobs trying to make ends meet. Because she's working several jobs, she's not at home. He has difficulty attending classes, and he can't pay attention once he's there. He gets involved in a schoolyard fight and is arrested for assault. He is put on a curfew pursuant to bail, but, because the fight happened at school, he is kicked out of his school as his bail says he is not allowed to have contact with the person that he got in a fight with. So he has to start attending another school mid-term.
He is unable to attend that school because he can't afford the bus tickets to get there, and a new school is not within walking distance. His mom works nights and is unable to monitor him, so like most teenagers he ignores his curfew, goes outside and is stopped by police because he is a young Black kid walking around alone at night in a racialized neighbourhood.
The police will run his name through the computer, and he is charged with failing to comply with his bail for breaching his curfew. He is arrested and taken into custody, and at 15 years old he is strip-searched because he'll be held overnight for a bail hearing.
He is released, and he again breaches his curfew, is again taken into custody and is strip-searched again. This time he is found with marijuana. Because his mother is working, she is unable to monitor him, and he stays in custody. The peer group that he comes into contact with him while he's in custody is not a pro-social peer group.
Because he was unable to get to school because he couldn't afford his bus tickets, he misses a year. Because a vulnerable person's police record check will show that he has assault charges, he is unable to get a job. I, hopefully, can get him into a mental health court, and I will get an assessment for him that his mother would not otherwise be able to pay for. It may be determined that he has ADHD, which explains his lack of impulse control, and he is diagnosed with depression, which helps to explain his anger and his self-medication with marijuana. However, he's now a year behind in school. He is still living in poverty. He now distrusts the police, and he's been criminalized for a schoolyard fight that, in our day, would not have attracted police intervention.
Court is the simple part for these kids. Dealing with housing, addictions, mental health issues and lack of access to education is the tough part. I can tell you that most of my clients, once I get these supports for them, do not come back, and they are no longer my clients.
Ms. Pomerant: The two key indicators — and I'm sure Professor Bala will back me up here in terms of future incarceration — are lack of education and prior incarceration, and the scenario that was just laid out is the typical client that comes in. It is not the serious violent offender.
As Ms. Rhodes pointed out, there's no schooling. Education is lost to this young man. Interestingly enough, what we call "the substantive charge," the original assault charge, will go in the garbage, so to speak. He'll be diverted. He'll do extra-judicial sanctions. It is probably something that could have been resolved by way of circling in the school system, but he's lost the year.
In addition, the statistics tell us that, nationally, 30 per cent of the charges for youth are what we refer to as "administrative charges," and that's true provincially as well for Ontario. They have around 27, 30 per cent. Once there's an original charge, and they're brought into the criminal justice system, the charges of failing to comply, failing to appear because the kids can't afford bus fare to even get to court, just multiply. You have kids in the criminal justice system. Quite possibly a youth is in the justice system for throwing a snowball or assault in a schoolyard, in custody because of these "fail to complies."
The other important factor is that approximately 40 per cent of youth in the criminal justice system are crossover kids. By that we mean that they're also in the child welfare system, and they have probably been in the child welfare system before they come into the criminal justice system. They're probably in the child welfare system because they've been apprehended. They're at risk. They have no food. They have no housing. They've been wandering the streets, and, lo and behold, they wind up in the criminal justice system. If the systemic issues can be addressed — the housing, the jobs, the education, the counselling — I think that would go a long way to preventing the youth from coming into contact with the criminal justice system.
While we applaud the measures that are being taken to date, we need more. We need more resources to help these youth.
Changes in the law in terms of bail provisions, where there's a presumption against putting kids in custody, are very good. However, I know there was a previous question from one of the senators about representation. The legal aid plans are in trouble. From a youth's perspective, whether it's a federal problem or a provincial problem, they need representation. Notwithstanding that there is a provision in the Youth Criminal Justice Act that counsel needs to be appointed, there aren't necessarily orders. As legal aid plans are coming into financial trouble, it is going to be visible minorities who suffer from that, and those are really the youth who need the representation the most.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will now go to video conferencing. I will start with Professor Nicholas Bala, Faculty of Law, Queen's University.
Thank you for making yourself available, and we look forward to hearing from you, Professor Bala.
Nicholas Bala, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen's University, as an individual: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here with you.
By way of introduction, I have been doing research and writing about youth justice and, more generally, family justice and child welfare issues for about 30 years. I have been involved here in Kingston as a volunteer with young offenders, and I serve on some provincial committees that try to coordinate services.
I think it is commendable that the Commissioner of Corrections has done the study that he has done. It's disturbing, but I think it also is very helpful in shedding light on various issues for adult offenders.
The Youth Criminal Justice Act and the youth justice system of course raise different but overlapping issues. One important point is that the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which has been in force since 2003, has significantly reduced the use of courts and custody for the majority of young offenders, without increasing rates of crime. So when we push down the use of courts and custody and make more use of community resources, we're not increasing youth crime. On the contrary, we've actually seen a slight decrease.
Having said that, it is clear that we have a disproportionate representation of visible minority youth and Aboriginal youth in both youth courts and youth custody facilities. As your questioning has noted already, we do not have national or provincial data on visible minority representation in the youth justice system. However, we have had a number of studies, particularly in Ontario and Alberta, that clearly demonstrate that there is overrepresentation.
Some of this is attributable to social conditions, and it was referred to whether it's poverty, single parenthood or living in a high-crime neighbourhood. Many of these things correlate with visible minority and Aboriginal status. It's clear that even taking all those social factors into account, there is disproportionate involvement in the youth justice system. As has been noted, we have research from Kingston, Toronto and elsewhere that police are much more likely to stop a visible minority youth than a non-visible minority youth. If they're in court, they are more likely to be detained and receive a custodial sentence, even when taking into account both the sentence and the prior record.
We have had important work done in Canada, most notably Ontario, in the report by Justice Roy McMurtry and Alvin Curling on the roots of youth violence, who go back and look at the social context of youth, offending and how we can address it both in terms of prevention for youth under 12 and appropriate intervention for youth who are 12 and older.
Your questioning was appropriately pointed in that we don't have the kind of data and research we need to understand the nature of the problems or appropriate responses. One thing we clearly need is better data and long-term follow-up research. It was pointed out that for many of the programs that are being funded, there is evaluation but it is short term. We don't follow up on the long-term consequences of intervention or long-term value of intervention in most cases. We do have some studies, more in the United States than in Canada, which demonstrate some programs have long-term payoffs, but until we can prove that to funders, we will not have the kind of services we need.
Certainly, you have identified services for training. Although they're primarily issues of provincial responsibility, there are significant federal responsibilities in terms of training for police, particularly the RCMP, prosecutors, particularly federal drug prosecutors, and judges on issues of visible minority status, Aboriginal status and fetal alcohol syndrome. We have the beginnings of education in this area, but we certainly need more.
We also need more in terms of specific targeted programs. Some of them will be based on ethnicity and race; some of them will be community-oriented but focused more on groups that are at higher risk.
In terms of legislation, it is important to remember that unlike the federal criminal law where we have seen significant changes that have resulted in increases in custody, fortunately to this point, we have not seen those kinds of changes in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Some of the 2012 amendments caused concerns, but others are balanced off. I certainly would not like to see legislative change that results in the increase in use of custody. To the contrary, I think we have to be careful with what we are doing with our Youth Criminal Justice Act. To this point, we've had some success. I think we need to build on that success, particularly with appropriate interventions and more support for community-based responses.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much Professor Bala.
Now we go to Siu Ming Kwok, Associate Professor, King's University College at Western University. Thank you for agreeing also on very short notice to join us.
Siu Ming Kwok, Associate Professor, King's University College at Western University, as an individual: Thank you for having me.
I want to talk about my research area about youth. I will talk about two areas — the reasons for their criminal behaviour and interventions.
For the causes, I highlight four factors. The first is about opportunities. If youth do not think they have a future in this country because of their skin colour, they are not related to the society. I will give examples from research.
For example, Black and Asian youth are more likely to be thought of as people affiliated with gangs, so when they are in contact with law, both of them are classified as gang members, even though most of them are not.
The second example is about first and second generation immigrant youth, even though some of them are second generation. From a research perspective, many of them are so alienated from the society in the sense that even though they are born in Canada and speak English without accents, they still encounter a systemic discrimination in their school as well as in their workplaces.
The second part of acculturation is stress. Many of them, actually, when they have criminal behaviours because of their lack of a solid cultural identity, they are in two worlds. They do not belong to Canadian society and do not have the solid self-identity in their ethnic cultures.
The third point is about their access to criminal opportunity related to undesirable peers in their surrounding area, maybe their friends, and they learned their criminal mindset and skill in the trade of the criminal world.
The last one is about the lack of adequate support systems for them, both formal and informal. The informal system like the family and their friends, and the formal system like housing, and in the community, they don't have the kind of services to support them.
On the interventions, I would like to say that research provides promising practices as guiding principles for youth, and there are four points.
The first one is about discrimination. The literature says that we need to address the systemic discrimination against youth. All institutions and organizations are recommended to conduct a diversity audit to see if there are correct accommodations for this segment of the population.
The second point is that we have to be cautious when we say visible minority youth; interventions should be more specific to a certain segment of visible minority youth. For example, we cannot put them all in one box. Asian youth are not the same as Black youth. For some youth, like those from the Asian culture, there are studies that say they have a tendency to internalize a problem. Some other youth from other cultures have the opposite response. They externalize their problem more, so there is no one solution for all ethnic youth.
The other interesting finding from research is related to the ethnic background of professional helpers. Ethnic background is not a determining factor. In other words, if you care about visible minority youth, their families will come to seek help. It goes back to the agency and staff members, and whether they actually have that kind of diversity and culturally appropriate training to be able to provide services to youths and their families.
The other point I want to emphasize is the family factor. We see that youth have a strong connection with family, regardless of the level of their criminal involvement, so that all intervention strategies should include the family and significant others.
The last point I want to emphasize is the support system. We need to increase and strengthen their support system, both with formal and informal systems, especially with the family, their friends and the school systems. Most of them lack that kind of appropriate support system. Without these support systems, it's more likely for them to be involved reoffending because they don't have a skill or job opportunity at all.
The Chair: Thank you very much, professor. Thanks to all four of you for your presentations. We will now go to questioning.
Senator Ataullahjan: Thank you for being here.
We touched on social conditions and visible minorities. When we talk about social conditions, are we talking about levels of income, education and family life? What role does each of these factors play in youths engaging in criminal activities? Also the studies and research show there is a link between substance abuse and criminal behaviour. Do you see that link? What is being done provincially with regard to the rehabilitation of young people? What is the role of the provinces, if any?
Mr. Bala: Well, I am prepared to jump in and start; I'm sure others will want to respond as well since it was a general question.
To go to the third point, by and large, responsibility for youth justice, not only for the administration but also for service provision and prevention, is a provincial responsibility like health and education. In this regard it's different from the adult sphere where the adult correctional system is a federal responsibility. It's a provincial responsibility for youth.
Having said that, I think the federal government has a very important role in providing leadership, education and sharing of knowledge. I'm concerned that we've seen some funding cuts in the crime prevention area that are concerning. If anything, we need more federal funding for demonstration projects and research in this area.
As to the questions you asked about the relationship between social conditions, drug and alcohol abuse and crime, there is no doubt that all of these factors are correlated and sometimes there is a causal link. A lot depends on whether you are thinking about this on a societal level, or a systemic level, or an individual level. If you look at any individual youth and ask why the person is offending or reoffending, or reoffending and not responding to various kinds of interventions, it will be a complex interaction of factors. Some kids have drug and alcohol problems that are not offending, but we know those who are offending are more likely to have drug and alcohol problems. The fact that they have those substance abuse issues that are not appropriately addressed will contribute to offending and/or reoffending. Similarly with issues like single parenting, residing in high crime neighbourhoods, having learning disabilities, fetal alcohol and neurological issues — those are all related to offending behaviour.
More generally, and I think Professor Kwok made this point, for individual youth there needs to be assessment of his or her problems — context, family, school, community issues — in order to respond to them in appropriate ways. Different youth have different needs and problems and require different responses.
I think that the comments Professor Kwok made about the importance of involving families and parents — especially single parents — schools and issues about education and reintegration to the community are incredibly important. We need those integrated, sophisticated responses to youth crime.
It's not only a question of responding to youth crime, it's also a question of the economic effects. If we can intervene with young people and get them employed and get them to become productive, tax-paying citizens, we'll be a lot further ahead than if we find that they're involved continuously in the criminal justice system and then socially dependent.
Mr. Kwok: I also want to jump in to say something. Yes there is a correlation between substance abuse and crime, but we have to be more careful because substance abuse is a symptom from our perspective. We refer more to the underlying problem; that is, the problems faced by the family. When we address the problem of substance abuse, we can approach it not as a criminal problem but from a health perspective.
That underlying problem may indicate a family problem, or a housing problem, or an employment problem. We have to be careful in this case.
Going back to how you address the whole problem, it is very complex. It should be an integrated approach. We cannot single out a certain symptom such as substance abuse. We have to handle it in a more comprehensive manner, on a multilevel intervention approach with the family, the community and how to engage young people back to the community.
Senator Meredith: Thank you all again for your presentations.
Ms. Rhodes, I want to thank you for your commitment to youth. Youth have been my passion for the last 12 years as I've become involved in the Toronto area in stopping youth violence and speaking out about youth violence in our city. Again, I'm taking this to the next level as a Canadian senator and looking at the problem right across our country, in Surrey, B.C; North Preston, Nova Scotia; and right here in both Ottawa and Montreal. It is important to recognize the challenges that our young people are facing.
First, I want to thank all four of you for recognizing the systemic issues that exist within the system. The panel before did not acknowledge that and that's troubling because I believe if there is a problem, we need to address it before we can find those solutions to it and we know there is a systemic issue.
In your dealings with young people and trying to advocate on their behalf, what have you put forward in terms of policy papers, changes and recommendations?
Ms. Pomerant, you've been doing this for 25 years, and I'm sure you're tired of talking and telling people this needs to be changed. I'm curious about your opinion as well on this.
Ms. Rhodes, could you start out and talk about what you've done to say here is an issue around housing, health, education, economics in terms of employment for these individuals who lack these opportunities? Based on the OCI report, we have a higher percentage of visible minorities and Blacks within the criminal justice system. I'm curious about your position on the fact that there is a systemic problem.
Ms. Rhodes: There is a systemic problem. Part of what is frustrating as a lawyer is I'm dealing with it essentially on a client-by-client basis. I deal with one client and then I deal with the next client. However, I can tell you about the initiatives that I have seen work very well and about some of what I've been involved in.
There is a specialized youth court in Toronto at 311 Jarvis, where they have set up specialized courts. There's a court specifically for dealing with young people with mental health and drug addiction issues; another court set up dealing specifically with Aboriginal youth. These are specialized courts where different workers within the community can come together to try to address the issues surrounding these youth. Once they are involved in the criminal system, to have a court that is set up to specifically address their needs has been very effective because through the court process we can get them involved in a mental health program and a drug addiction program, because those issues often go hand in hand. There are a lot of young people who are self-medicating. Having the drug treatment and the mental health courts together so that all the issues can be addressed has been very effective. In most cases, once the court is able — and hopefully I can help to get the youth involved with appropriate supports in the community — to either withdraw the charges or divert them, the supports are already in place and that youth has the support that is needed.
Once you are in the criminal system you are dealing with guilty/not guilty and not dealing with criminal problems. We need to look at getting specialized courts and addressing the young person's needs.
Ms. Pomerant: I think we change things one youth at a time. We change things by supporting many of the organizations that you fund, for example, the Second Chance Foundation in Toronto, which goes in and deals with high-risk youth. We've attended many of their graduations. It's inspiring what can be done when you put the proper supports in place.
We don't have a lot of time to write papers, but we keep coming out and advocating for more resources for those youth because no jobs, no support, no counselling, no structure does not equal crime prevention; it equals decimated souls, hopelessness and gang affiliation.
That's what we keep doing. We need more resources for these youth.
Ms. Rhodes: Ms. Pomerant touched on this briefly: Every Wednesday evening I volunteer in a church basement at Regent Park with an organization called Pathways to Education which does receive federal funding. I thank you for that. It's an excellent program and it tutors young people in the racialized community.
I can tell you that when I'm not helping them with their math homework, I'm spending a lot of time helping them with their résumés. Even last week I was helping a young person write his application for a scholarship. That's what these young people need — the hope and opportunity to know there is a way out.
It's been one of the more rewarding programs I've been involved in.
Senator Seidman: Thank you very much.
Professor Bala, we heard from the Director General of the Crime Prevention Directorate of Public Safety Canada in earlier testimony about the importance of evidence-based research. You yourself made the point that we need evidence-based research in order to demonstrate that programs designed in this field actually work.
If I use the health field as a paradigm, because that's the field I personally know best, I know there's an investment made in longer term studies to evaluate programs of particular interventions, and they're all in partnership: public, private sectors, and academia of course plays a huge role. Given the importance of evidence-based research, could you tell me how this paradigm might apply to the youth justice field?
Mr. Bala: I think that the health model, the control group study, which we can't completely replicate in the youth justice system, but we can try things in one neighbourhood with one project and add a comparison community. I think it's absolutely essential and needs to be done on a long-term basis.
We have started to do some of that work. For example, there's the Better Beginnings project, operated in a number of places in Ontario, which is following up young people for over a decade with early intervention and finding the successes of early intervention.
Having said that, we need to do a lot more. I think the federal government has a role here and, with all respect, I think — from the earlier presentations — it's not enough to follow young people through the course of the program. We have to follow up after they've been through that program to see the long-term consequences of that program. Some programs unfortunately seem to work only for a short period of time and don't have that long-term follow-up.
The other thing we have to recognize — and this was pointed out —, is we need to have replication. Sometimes programs seem to work, and it's not necessarily because of what they're doing but because they've managed to attract or be established by someone who was charismatic or has good skills with young people. But it's not what they are doing; it's who they are. We have to try to replicate those programs before we can put them in in other places.
I think there's a great deal more to do in terms of the research, the follow-up and the dissemination of results. The federal government has a really important role to play there. It's certainly starting to play that, but it needs to do a lot more.
Senator Hubley: I'll ask Emma Rhodes this. You've chronologically given us the order of when things tend to happen, and the result is we're looking at charges. You did mention failing to comply, then being held overnight, strip-searched, et cetera, and eventually staying in custody. What is custody? Where is that? Is that a youth centre?
In the youth court system are you experiencing the backlogs that maybe the other justice system is experiencing from time to time?
I would like to add that you're doing marvellous work in your areas. Do you feel that is being replicated across the country?
Ms. Rhodes: Dealing first with custody, there are two types of custodial facilities for young people. The first is open custody, which is essentially a group home facility. There are no cells; they're living in a home within the community. Then there's secure custody, which is the youth version of a jail.
In the Toronto area, I can tell you that for young men, that is at the Roy McMurtry Youth Centre, which is in Brampton. This poses a problem because if their families live in Toronto, how can they come and visit them? If they don't have access to a car and they're put in custody, they often lose that tie to their parent. What they are left with is the anti-social peer group they're meeting in custody. It can have a very detrimental effect.
With the backlog, one of the purposes of the YCJA is that the impact or the finding, or whatever the sentence may be for a young person, is supposed to happen pretty close to the offence because it's supposed to reflect how the youth brain works. A year is forever for them. There is a need to have consequences to an action happen pretty close to the offence date. Things happen quickly, but it's still six to eight to nine months. For the teenage brain, that still is far away.
I would like to see a shorter time period. When we say six, seven or eight months, it doesn't seem like a long time, but for the youth brain to try to connect their action to the consequence, it creates problems. In eighth months they've moved on, and we know that with teenagers in our own lives, eight months is forever.
In terms of across the country, I can only tell you that I practise in Toronto, so that's my experience.
Senator Hubley: Are our youth held in remand from time to time? Are they ever remanded?
Ms. Rhodes: Yes.
Senator Hubley: Are they then held in any sort of a different condition?
Ms. Rhodes: That is up to how they're classified by Correctional Service Canada, so it would go back to open or secure custody.
Senator Eggleton: I want to focus on what the federal government is doing and should be doing. On the last panel we heard from Justice Canada about their Youth Justice Fund and Youth Justice Services Funding Program. Public Safety Canada told us about the National Crime Prevention Strategy.
I would like some commentary on how effective these programs are. Are they meeting valuable needs? Is the funding adequate for them? If not, is it something where we need to double or triple the funding? I would like to get some idea of how far off the mark this funding is for these programs.
Also, in terms of what the programs don't cover, two or three areas that you think need to be priorities for the federal government in its programming project, whether it's prevention or dealing with youth in the system.
Particularly moving to visible minorities, these programs are for at-risk youth, whether visible minorities or not, but since the subject we are dealing with is trying to deal with an overrepresentation of visible minorities, what further needs to be done in terms of meeting their needs? That's a big question, perhaps, but we are at the federal level and I would like to know what more we need to do.
Mr. Bala: I think there are a number of issues raised in these questions, and certainly one of them that relates back is the question of the federal role. The federal role is primarily, I think, for carefully funding demonstration projects that can be replicated across the country. That means finding the projects, funding them and evaluating them in a long-term way. I'm concerned that we're not spending nearly enough on crime prevention. I think that, in the long term, it's a social investment.
One study in Ontario, the Better Beginnings, Better Futures Project, and some studies from the United States clearly demonstrate that early investment in both children at risk and adolescents has a long-term economic payoff provided they're the right kind of programs. Some programming is not very effective, so we need the follow-up component and then dissemination of information.
Another issue was touched upon that is very important: the large number of child welfare youth who are in group homes administered by the provinces that may then become involved in the justice system. Ms. Rhodes was in some ways referring to issues about children and youth in group homes being overly charged and then represented in the youth justice system. That's another area, certainly, where we need to pay significant attention; and to this point we have not done enough.
There was mention of Toronto's drug court, mental health court and Aboriginal court. Those are all very important. Another area where we need to do some work is on the so-called "crossover youth."
A great deal more can be done. I would respectfully suggest the federal government may have had more of a leadership role in the past than it has right now in some of these areas.
Ms. Pomerant: The funding is not adequate as a lot isn't covered. Many of the programs are not, shall we say, culturally sensitive. Until we deal with the systemic issues, the problems will continue to persist.
When I practised in Alberta, and the numbers are significantly down now in terms of incarceration rates, I believe that 90 per cent of the 250 youth were Aboriginals. Now, there are 80 youth in the Edmonton Young Offender Centre and 97 per cent of them, as of this morning's statistics, are Aboriginal. There weren't any culturally sensitive programs and there wasn't anything for them to come out to. I understand that that's still the case. When I spoke to my former youth worker this morning, he said that he couldn't talk long because he had to get some fresh water to the reserve and he was dealing with two 11-year-old mothers.
There could be a lot more funding and funding in terms of preventive measures, education, counselling, putting community supports in place for single mothers, and putting advocates in place for single-parent families, many of whom are first generation, don't speak the language and can't advocate at the schools to get their children back in school. Once we have lost them in the educational system, it is my personal view that they are lost to us. We need more funding in those areas. Who is responsible for that in terms of federal-provincial and how it is divvied up? I heard some of the answers from the last panel, but it doesn't assist the youth. They need those things.
Mr. Kwok: I want to chime in on two things. In terms of the federal government's role, there are two things they can do. The first one is leadership for funding. They don't know much about visible minority youth and criminal behaviour. We need more good research to understand about this population and what programs are more effective for this segment of the population. Most of them are from welfare systems. How can we do more preventive work before they go to the criminal justice system? We need more of that in this area in order to determine a tailor-made program for them.
A second area is implementation. We need to emphasize that when we handle criminal behaviour, which happens in a local community, each community has its unique problems. There's no cookie-cutter approach. You have to handle it community by community. In that sense, the federal role should have good cooperation and collaboration with provincial governments as well as municipal governments about how to handle crime and the problem of local gangs in communities. The communities have strengths and limitations. One community is not the same as another.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Senator Meredith: Going back to your studies on alienation and visible minority youth, Black youth and the different cultures that we have in Canada, can you elaborate for me on that in terms of what work we need to do so our young people feel validated that they're part of Canadian society? How can we take away the sense of hopelessness from these youth through these programs mentioned by the first panel, the intervention, and so forth? How do we get to the point where we feel that our young people are contributors rather than detractors from society?
Mr. Kwok: The first thing is more long term.
The Chair: Mr. Kwok, may I ask that you wait? We will have Senator Ataullahjan's question as well and then you can answer both.
Senator Ataullahjan: Do you think that prevention is the only approach to take towards crime? Does the government also have to be tough on crime?
Mr. Kwok: There are two questions. The first one addresses the alienation. For the long term, we have to address systemic discrimination against youth. We need to have some kind of hope and opportunity. When I say "hope and opportunity," youth need role models in school and in employment. They have to look up to something they can identify with. The best way to do that is to provide them with role models. Like I said before, we're going to recommend for all organizations, school systems, and others that they undergo diversity auditing. They are going to accommodate the needs of these populations.
Of course, we could accommodate them in terms of their learning. For example, some cultures place more emphasis on education. Even though their children are involved in crime, they try their best with all their resources to get them back to normal school. That means getting them back to mainstream society. We have to provide that kind of accommodation for them to get back to society.
Going back to the second question about the process, we need more money for prevention. According to research, when we study the criminal pathway, it is more effective to target people before they commit a crime instead of when they are involved in the criminal system, when it is less effective. We need to put more money, research and programs toward how to prevent them from coming into contact with the criminal system. Once involved in the system, we have to go to other research literature and other programs to help them, which is more expensive and more difficult to help them get out of the system.
Mr. Bala: I think that on the question of prevention, particularly for children — in Ontario we have the Better Beginnings program — we have seen that investing, starting early in pre-schools and in programming for school-aged children has a long-term social payoff in terms of greater engagement in the education system, lower teen pregnancy, and lower offending; so true prevention is very important.
Secondly, what we have been talking about largely today is intervention. Once a young person committed offences, how do we respond? I think part of that is accountability. There is a role for the police and a role for the courts, but the question was raised about getting tough with youth crime.
We have had a major national undertaking, almost an experiment, in which we have seen significant decreases in the number of young people in courts, significant decreases in the number of young people in custody, more community-based intervention, and it had actually led or been coincident with a reduction in youth crime.
An approach of sending more young people into custody is not effective. We can see that both on a national and an international level. These kinds of interventions actually deal with young people's problems. It was pointed out that one of the limitations of custody is young people are removed from their homes, schools, communities and sent somewhere else.
It may be that while they're in custody, they are well-behaved, but the issue is this: Can we reintegrate them in the community so they will be effective, productive citizens? Once we move them from the community, reintegrating them is much more difficult.
When it was asked what kinds of programs we have that are effective, the most effective ones generally speaking are community and family oriented. Some of them will involve aspects of culture and recreation.
That doesn't mean there's not a role for accountability. In appropriate cases there can be community service; there can and should be restitution to victims; there can and should be probation. But changing young people is the critical thing. Locking up a young person is relatively easy to do. It is expensive, but it is often not the most effective response.
The Chair: I want to thank all of you for your presentations today. You have given us a lot to think about.
Professor Bala, your last sentence is going to be what we will be thinking of. It will certainly be important in our reflections.
I thank you for making yourselves available on such short notice.
Our next witness is Catherine Latimer from the John Howard Society of Canada. Catherine is often present at our committee and other committees in the Senate. We very much welcome you.
Catherine Latimer, Executive Director, John Howard Society of Canada: It is a great pleasure to be here.
The John Howard Society of Canada is a community-based charity whose mission is to support effective, just and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime. The society has more than 60 front-line offices across the country, many with programs and services to support the safe reintegration of offenders into our communities and to prevent crime. We provide services to individuals in need, regardless of their race, religion, age, sexual orientation, criminal record, et cetera.
The services we provide depend on the needs of our clients in the communities served. In some cases, such as the Northwest Territories, our clients are mostly First Nations individuals; and in urban centres, our clients reflect many different races. We provide services for youth to prevent crime and for those who have been in conflict with the law.
Thank you for the kind invitation to speak to you about the youth justice system and visible minorities. There is no question that certain groups are overrepresented in the youth justice system — First Nations; Blacks; males; former wards of the state; the poor; those with mental health challenges, cognitive impairments and brain injuries; victims of violence, et cetera. I understand this committee is interested in the challenge of the overrepresentation in the youth justice system of visible minority youth.
I had imagined that previous witnesses would have provided you with a lot of data, but having listened to some of the previous witnesses, I think that's probably not the case. I was simply going to refer you to some statistics that were contained in The Star article that came out on March 1, 2013: "Unequal justice: Aboriginal and black inmates disproportionately fill Ontario jails." That article indicates that Aboriginal boys 12 to 17 are five times more represented in the Ontario youth facilities; that there are four times more Black males age 12 to 17 in youth Ontario facilities; and there are 10 times more Aboriginal girls in Ontario youth facilities. Young Black females, interestingly enough, were not overrepresented in Ontario youth facilities.
I think it is important to get a handle on the statistics so that you know what you are looking at. That may be a bit of a start for the Ontario issues, but I think you will find quite a different story in some of the other provinces.
All of us wish there were an easy answer to this, but history, poverty and marginalization have left a legacy of hardship and challenges for many of these youth. The higher numbers in youth custody is a symptom of much broader social and economic problems, and it would be a mistake to think that the answers lie in changes to the youth justice system alone.
If we are able to make a difference in the lives of individual youths, we need to examine three clear categories of change, or phenomena. One is social and economic policy.
Inequality needs to be addressed. If groups get mired in poverty and see no way of getting out and contributing constructively to society, negative social outcomes, including violence and crime, follow. Whatever may have led certain groups, communities or families within Canada to be trapped in poverty, pathways need to be built so they can have hope that this can and will be overcome.
What you find — and I think some of the information that you have received — is that it's pretty clear that the children of newly arrived Canadians are actually under-represented in the youth justice system, and it is only when there's been an opportunity for people to get stuck at low levels and not see an opportunity to advance that you start to see this generational trap where people get caught in crime.
The second big area is crime prevention. There can be no doubt that there are communities in Canada where our youth are at risk. I must confess that before being the Executive Director of the John Howard Society of Canada, I was Director General of Youth Justice Policy for the federal Department of Justice, so perhaps I know a bit more about this area than I really should.
One of the areas that we were concerned about when we were bringing in the Youth Justice Act — which was intended really to address the needs of young people in their communities rather than through the justice system — was the capacity of some Aboriginal communities to discharge that. We were worried that we would have a negative consequence of actually the proportions of Aboriginal youth going up if we didn't provide some support for Aboriginal communities and support their ability to deal with youth in their communities.
What we did was to try to figure out the numbers. We did a one-day snapshot of Aboriginal youth in custody. We went to all the provinces and asked them to do a head count of the number of youth who were First Nations, who were in their communities on a particular day. What communities did they come from? Where were they when they committed the offence that led to custody? What community were they proposing to return to after their custodial sentence?
We got very interesting data about the proportion of First Nations people in the youth justice system, and essentially the gateway of young people coming into the youth justice system in bigger numbers. While it might not have been a surprise to some, it was through western urban centres, and the real gateway for youth coming into custody at that time was Winnipeg.
So we introduced a cities project in Winnipeg where we worked with an Aboriginal elder who had a background in corrections and a police officer who did a lot of work in the front end. They worked with all of their contacts in their communities. The actual number of First Nations people coming into the youth justice corrections system reduced significantly by building the capacity and putting the capacity in where you knew the problems lay. I just provide that as a positive example.
What is very interesting also is to actually talk to some of these kids or young people who are in communities that are at high risk. If you haven't done so, you may be surprised. One of the things that struck me was that the first thing that they ask for is that they need a place to be safe. These kids feel in danger in some of those communities. We assume that the danger is coming from them, but they perceive themselves at being at risk of violence. It is important to try to address those kinds of things.
It is key to try to figure out what your problem is, what community you are in, and what are the unique problems facing the individuals in those communities. How do you put the support structures in place that will stand the best chance of meeting those kids' needs, giving them hope that they can survive and overcome the challenges that they're facing and the negative influences that they're feeling from their particular community?
Crime prevention is key, but it has to be more than just spending money on programs. This is a February 26, 2014, article entitled, "After Decades of Spending, Minority Youth Still Overrepresented in System," where the United States had reviewed their crime prevention programs. It gives a good idea of where those resources should be spent in order to actually have good outcomes. That is also key.
We need to learn from what works. We need to test out different stuff and we need to learn from what works.
The third category that we need to look at is opportunities and challenges within the youth justice system itself.
One of the significant problems — and I think people have raised it — is that we need to be wary about negative stereotyping by those in the justice system. More people come out of poverty not committing offences than do. It is easy to make stereotypes, particularly if they're race-based, and it can lead to what the last set of witnesses was talking about, the likelihood that youth from these marginalized communities will be stopped more by police and will be hounded more.
We also need to ensure that the risk/need tools and other diagnostic program devices are impartial.
You will often find that they will have something in there that assesses potential risk — which can really be telling in terms of how the justice system deals with them — that is not weighted properly for certain cultures or certain cultural risks. So you really need to look at those risk-need assessment tools.
I'll give you an example. This is not necessarily related to them, but I deal with a lot of adult inmates. They were doing a risk-need assessment, and an example of a standard question is: How much time do you spend with your family? Of course, if you're incarcerated, the amount of time you're spending with your family is reduced. You end up with very low scores on these risk-need assessments because a youth may be away of their family in a boarding school or whatever. That needs to be addressed.
It is important to treat all young people as individuals and base tailored alternatives and community-based sentences or rehabilitation plans on that particular individual. For many visible minority youths, culturally relevant options will resonate well with them, whether this is drumming, sweat lodges, learning rap music or whatever it happens to be. Others will want more main line rehabilitation and reintegration tools like housing, job opportunities and education. Some will want both.
It's very important to look at the individual, to listen to the individual's needs and try and figure out how best to line that up so that they're available for the young person who has been involved in the justice system.
Trauma-based practices are something that we haven't looked at but are growing and might be particularly relevant for some who live in high-risk neighbourhoods. A lot of young people who have been exposed to a lot of violence — and some of those young people coming from high-risk neighbourhoods will have seen their friends shot and killed, and some of them will have been exposed to violence within their families — there is a lot of trauma that goes with that. There has been a considerable amount of success by tailoring responses that address some of the trauma that young people may have experienced in their communities.
I think that's an opportunity that we should be looking at in the future.
In conclusion, we as a society face the challenge of the overrepresentation of certain groups in our justice system. Today we are looking at the overrepresentation of visible minority youth, but to be effective and fair in our response, we need to tackle underlying social and economic problems that affect them and their communities and that are correlated with higher crime rates. The youth criminal justice system should be used with restraint, and there should be no discrimination in the youth justice system.
The Youth Criminal Justice Act allows for culturally relevant practices at the front end, at alternatives, at custody and at reintegration. These should be encouraged for youths who want them. There are lots of untapped opportunities we could be looking at.
Thank you.
Senator Eggleton: Thank you for that presentation. That's excellent.
I quite agree with you that we need to look at the underlying social and economic issues here: poverty, inequality, housing, job opportunities, education, et cetera. But I would like to focus for a moment on the programs that are operating; these are some of the questions I asked the last panel. The Department of Justice in the first panel talked about the Youth Justice Fund and the Youth Justice Services Funding Program. Public Safety Canada talked about the National Crime Prevention Strategy.
Are there aspects of these programs that stand out for you as being quite worthwhile and successful? What do you think they should be covering that they are not? Talk about the adequacy of funding for the programs that the federal government through these two departments could be funding; that's quite aside from the underlying social and economic issues.
Also, what do we do about the data problem? How do you think we can get a handle on that?
These programs primarily operate for at-risk youth, yes, but we are focusing at this point on visible minorities. Still, I think in either case, we need to get a handle on the data about youth to better justify their program needs.
Ms. Latimer: I'll start with the data. It would be quite reasonable to ask the Department of Justice to collect the data you need to see. I can tell you from having done the one-day snapshot that there will be some costs to them in terms of paying for the time for the provincial data collectors to actually collect the data. But it was basically processed within the Department of Justice once the data had arrived. There are many fewer young people in custody now, so I think you could get answers to that fairly quickly.
A number of programs are working well. The challenge is to ensure there is some sort of evaluation of those particular programs. The Youth Justice Fund was supposed to be looking at innovative programs. Some of them should have worked and some should not have. A lot were funded and a lot turned out to work surprisingly well.
For example, one I thought would not be useful — by that I mean in terms of demonstrating where we ought not to go in the future — was in connection with providing drama skills for young people who were at risk of being involved in gangs. That actually turned out to be successful. I'm not entirely sure why, except that it might give them an opportunity to step outside the socialized role and think about how they could act in a different way.
It's important to try to assess these programs and share the results about what is and is not working.
As a community-based organization, we try and share information among John Howard Societies across the country about the type of programs that are working well so they can be duplicated or so patterns of success can be followed up on in certain areas of the community. But where John Howard has had some success is in supporting some of the higher-risk young people in terms of providing them with housing and support, and supporting their reintegration back into the communities. There are a lot of successful things that can be done.
If you ask young people — which I always think is important when developing programs for them — a kid in custody would say, "If there was one adult who cared about me en route, who I felt I could go to and seek guidance from, it would have made a big difference in my life." So I'm keen on mentoring and peer support programs. Young people who have walked the same path as young people who are struggling now and made it successfully out the other side have something to share with struggling youths that resonates with them; it gives them hope.
The John Howard Society would say that to help with the correction of young people or anybody who is in conflict with the law, you need a standard set of supports; you need education, housing, something that addresses the psychological problems the person may be facing, and you need to address any kind of addiction or substance abuse issues. Basically, you need a gamut of supports around a particular person in order to help them back into society. That's equally true with young people.
Senator Eggleton: What about the crime prevention program; does it need more money?
Ms. Latimer: It would benefit from an enormous infusion of resources.
There is a very good adviser — I think to the Washington State government — who actually does a cost-benefit analysis of programs, including crime prevention programs as well as intervention programs, who says that for X amount of taxpayers' dollars, Y is the cost saving in the long run. It's pretty clear that for the investments they are making in crime prevention programs, they're saving a lot in terms of future policing, corrections and justice costs.
Senator Eggleton: Do we have a Canadian study on that?
Ms. Latimer: No, but it would be worthwhile to emulate that.
The closest I have seen is in connection with homelessness; you see it in a connection between crime and homelessness. They looked at providing social housing and the savings provided in terms of emergency room calls and the calls on the justice system. There are huge savings by providing housing.
These broader costing models are things that should certainly be pursued.
Senator Meredith: Thank you so much for your presentation, and thank you for being on both sides of the spectrum here. You speak to us from a well-informed position.
You mention trauma-based practices. In Greater Toronto, where I hail from, several incidents have taken place that I attended to, and visible-minority communities tend to not gain that same sense of support when it comes to homicides that take place in these townhouse complexes, churches, malls. There does not seem to be that sense of reaction in terms of those communities. Can you elaborate for me on what needs to be done to help these young people when they are in this traumatic situation?
Ms. Latimer: I think you mentioned — was it the "Year of the Gun" or the "Summer of the Gun"?
Senator Meredith: In 2005, yes.
Ms. Latimer: At that time, there were three levels of government participating in a response to those tragedies. I felt that that had shown great promise in terms of helping to mobilize support for those particular communities and empowering some of the leaders in those communities to speak out and address some of those concerns. Now, it takes an infusion of resources to be able to do that as well.
In terms of trauma-based practices, I was thinking about a young person that I met from the Jane-Finch area. I think his name is Devon Jones. I don't know if you know him, but he works with the school board in some of communities where there are a lot of gang problems. He was talking about how traumatized the students were when gun violence affected one of their students.
I don't see how there could not be trauma associated with that. The last thing you want is for them to get inured to violence. You want them to have a safe place for dealing with that particular trauma and for putting measures in place that continue to make them feel safe and help them overcome that.
If people feel the only way to feel safe is to have gangs at their backs, it promotes the wrong response. We need to think about what motivates young people to join gangs. I think it is that feeling of being personally at risk. There is a lot to be said for trying to address some of those underlying problems, and I think they are fairly unique. It's not that other communities don't have that, but you wouldn't necessarily have that in some other Canadian communities.
Senator Meredith: Talk to me again about the work you do with Correctional Service Canada in terms of individuals coming out of the system. What do you do with them while they're in the system? I'm curious as to what programs are in place.
You talk about the lack of resources and the fact there is a cost benefit to intervention as opposed to incarceration. We know it's probably five times higher. My stats might be off, but we know it costs more to keep someone incarcerated than outside of the system.
Ms. Latimer: Absolutely.
Senator Meredith: Talk to me about the programs that help the individual. I believe in truly rehabilitating individuals with life skills and education while they are there. Those individuals who have gone through, we've heard from previous panels of them missing education. What has been done internally to really touch the lives of those individuals?
Ms. Latimer: Again, I would say not enough is being done internally. That's probably not the answer you want to hear.
What has happened is the number of offenders — youth corrections is going down, adult corrections is going up. It's not necessarily based on increasing numbers who've committed crimes but basically longer sentences. The whole tough-on-crime stuff means that there are fewer resources inside the federal penitentiaries to provide the services, support and reintegration. They call it fulfilling their corrections plan, which is supposed to give them the social skills, the psychological and physical well-being to actually go out and make a contribution in their communities.
They should be going out on parole in a graduated response where they are supported and supervised as they are making the difficult transition back into their communities, often back into the same communities where they had problems before.
Young people, I think, need a different skill set. I do think education is probably more important for them, because a lot of times their education has been disrupted and they are still at a point where they can catch up.
For me, dealing with some of the underlying issues, high numbers of young people end up in the custody system who have cognitive impairments, ADHD, FASD, brain injuries and mental health problems. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed so that you can find a good strategy for a particular individual. You really need to look at the individual's issues and what their challenges are.
For young people, strength-based approaches tend to work better. You can give them a whole list of things they ought not to do and a whole list of things that they ought to do, but you need to work with the things they are actually good at doing and build on their strengths. They need to feel a sense of self-worth and a sense that they can overcome their immediate problems and contribute in the future.
Senator Ataullahjan: What types of crimes do you find that young men and women are most involved with, and what are the rates of being charged as opposed to being dealt with by other formal means? What role do parents play? How important is the parental role?
Ms. Latimer: You raise some very good questions. I could probably dig up the statistics for you on how many. There has been some excellent front-end policing statistical work done on the youth justice system by Peter Carrington of the University of Waterloo, and he may be able to give you that police discretion and how they are using that at the front end.
In terms of the types of crimes young people are being charged with, I think the panel before you was absolutely correct in highlighting the number of administration-of-justice breaches. One of the most likely responses to ending up in custody is an administration-of-justice breach. These high-end, serious violent offences will get you a custody sentence, as will administration-of-justice breaches, so not being able to comply with conditions that are being imposed on bail and on probation.
There are stories, and you would have to verify this, but some of the conditions are actually setting some young people up to fail. For example, some of the First Nations families, they will release the kid on the condition that they can't be in a house where there is alcohol, but their parents will be alcoholics. So the only place they have to live is essentially a violation of one of their condition, and they will be breached and find themselves back in. We need to look at that very seriously. Generally, young people are in there for administration-of-justice breaches and property crimes. The heart and soul of youth justice crime is property crime.
Senator Ataullahjan: The role of parental supervision: We talk about the role of society, provincial responsibility and federal responsibility, but what about family responsibility?
Ms. Latimer: Family is a huge protective factor for young people who are in conflict with the law. For example, impoverished single mothers work very hard. They often will carry two to three jobs, which means they are not always available to provide support for their children when they come home from school. You can get problems like that, because people are stretched in order to just make ends meet and so are not available to their young people.
In other cases, one of the systemic issues you will find in some dysfunctional communities is generational substance abuse, so the families are not able to really provide the guidance and support to the young people in the same way.
An organization that may not be discharging its parental role in quite the same way are wards of the state. A large number of young people who find themselves foster kids or taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system are not getting the kind of family and parental support that you would find. Generally, you would find an overrepresentation of kids who are in conflict with the law, who have not the kind of familial supports that we would like, for a variety of reasons.
The Chair: It's good that you were working on both sides, with justice and now the job you are doing.
I was very disappointed with the Justice and the correctional Public Safety presentation because they just bragged about what programs they are doing, but it's a very complex problem. They are looking after youth after they have got into trouble; there are prevention issues; but for me what was very disappointing was that they didn't talk about the systemic discrimination that exists. We all know, and I can't think of the abbreviation that's always used, but a young Black youth is stopped while driving just because he's driving a fancy car. Prominent people's children have been stopped like that. It can be on any street in the country; it doesn't have to be in certain streets. I would like you to address that.
There definitely is a bias in our system. There is systemic discrimination. Earlier on, the two lawyers spoke about how a young person can be arrested and the substantial charge or the charge that they were originally charged with may not even proceed, but they have gone through the system and may lose a year in school. Can you address the issue of systemic discrimination?
Ms. Latimer: Certainly. The UN documents with respect to children's rights say that there should be no discrimination in the youth justice system. Nobody wants to see any kind of negative stereotyping or prejudgment or systemic discrimination in a justice system. That's why the model of justice is wearing a blindfold. They are supposed to be impartial, objective and based on the facts.
It is challenging and it's hard to know how to eradicate this. You would need to know whether or not there is profiling going on, which is another very sensitive issue. The challenge is that a lot of the young people who are being hounded are coming from neighbourhoods where there is a considerable amount of crime. That provides a bit of an opportunity for the police to think that this is an area where they are doing their jobs and being fairly aggressive. But they need to have reasonable grounds, and the colour of one's skin or their ethnic background is not enough to trigger a reasonable ground to stop someone.
I find it extremely challenging. Other things are more subtle in terms of having a negative effect on those who lack resources and are impoverished, and I think the defence counsel here raised it. That has to do with the number of young people who do not meet bail or find themselves in remand because their families cannot find a surety or cannot find the resources. This causes real problems. They are more likely to plead guilty; they are more likely to be found guilty.
While we've had a lot of success in terms of reducing the numbers of young people in sentence custody, a lot of us who have studied the numbers are not happy with the reductions in remand. That continues to be a problem. I bet you anything that if you looked at who is being held in remand you will see a lot of First Nations kids and a lot of Black kids being detained on remand.
The Chair: Before we work on a study, we get briefing notes on what the lay of the land is. Over the weekend when I was reading this it was bothering me, and I will read it to you very quickly:
Blacks are more likely to be taken for processing to the station, to be held overnight, to be held in pre-trial custody —
— and conditions.
Racial bias in the justice system has been recognized in a number of cases.
It discusses the disproportionate, overrepresentation of Blacks in pretrial detention.
. . . it seems to be rooted — to a large extent — in the type of information upon which the Crown and the Justice of the Peace rely when reviewing the case in bail court. Above and beyond legally relevant factors, these scholars found that the more negative the police moral assessment of an accused person, the more likely that this individual would be held in custody.
It's not me speaking; it's the study.
Given that the police tend to provide more negative character assessments of Black accused than accused from other racial/ethnic groups, this factor would appear to explain (at least in part) the higher proportion of Blacks . . . being detained.
There are many, many studies of this nature. My concern is that if we don't name it, we can't deal with it. Earlier, the first two witnesses, who represent our justice system and public safety system, couldn't even talk about it; so if you don't name it, how are we going to deal with it?
Ms. Latimer: There is no question that the factors that go into informing discretion by decision-makers in the system — they should be held accountable for what they are looking at and why they have made decisions in the way that they have made them. Collecting information about why they have made decisions, which you can sort of target by the nature of the results, I think would go some distance to helping correct some of it. But it's very difficult to get at this; it's challenging.
Senator Meredith: Thank you, Ms. Latimer. I thoroughly enjoyed your perspective on this issue.
We heard from Professor Kwok with respect to alienation and hopelessness. You mentioned young people being set up to fail, which further stigmatizes them.
If your organization were to put forth the top three recommendations with respect to the chair's question regarding the systemic barriers that exist for visible minority, especially youth, what would they be?
Sorry to put you on the spot. If you can answer it, answer it, but if you can't, put it in writing to us. We've done so many reports and talked about this issue, and it continues.
OCI has come out with a report saying that Black inmates are one and a half times more likely to be held in isolation, knowing they are not going to offend again, knowing that they have fewer needs and so forth. These statistics are alarming. We need to begin to change.
Has your organization put forth any sort of recommendation, seeing that you have such a well-balanced view on all of this from both sides? You have been on the inside, and you are now on the outside helping those who are trying to get back to some sense of normalcy. I don't believe in just talking about something. I believe in acting on it and actually putting things in place that can be implemented or can be brought to the departments making these decisions.
It's a deep issue; however, I think we need to start somewhere. Do you have a list of your top three, five or seven recommendations? I don't want to extend the list, but I certainly would welcome them.
Ms. Latimer: I am of the strong view that if you can keep kids out of the justice system, you should. The justice system has a very negative association for young people. It affects their self-esteem and all kinds of things.
My first recommendation would be effective, tailored, program-sustained crime prevention that is really targeting at-risk communities or at-risk youth. People don't like to talk about youth being at risk, but if you work in those communities, you know the ones.
Senator Meredith: They are in crisis. There is a percentage in crisis.
Ms. Latimer: Yes. These kids are crying out and they need help. If you can get them mentors, support that will help them understand their strengths and help them find a way to act on their strengths, see that they can get a job, whatever their goal is, you can help them advance toward their goal. I would say that's key, and that has to do with individual kids. You have to count your wins one kid at a time, but you've got to start somewhere and you've got to try and deliver. I would start in those communities. I would start in certain communities. I would also really go after the kids who are wards of the state.
The important thing is the one who becomes the chronic problem for the justice system in the long run is not your tough kid; it's your lonely kid. Surely we can do better as a society in going after those kids who are lonely, marginalized and alienated. You will find many of them going through the child welfare system, and I would put in all kinds of supports for them. Prevention is the key.
The second thing I think you need to do is work with the front end of the justice system by working on some of those preconceived ideas, by getting them to exercise discretion, by demonstrating program alternatives and by referring kids away from the justice system and towards a program that builds on their strengths. That will actually do a lot more in the long run than charging them and bringing them into the justice system.
After the "Year of the Gun" in Toronto, we had people from the affected communities, such as police officers, the kids themselves and so on. My program manager put it all together and worked very hard at integrating them all. Police sat on one side and the kids sat on the other side. My goodness, the common ground was just about zero.
After a full day of discussions, people began to see things a little bit differently. The police did not understand those youth, and the youth did not understand where the police were coming from. The hostility and lack of trust was so thick you could cut it with a knife. There needs to be a lot of work at the front end with police. Their job is to try and make people in those communities feel safe, including the kids. Not all of them are going to end up in gangs. Many of them are just scared, and I think the police need to work on that as well. So I think community involvement with the police and working at the front end is critical.
I think the justice system has lots of untapped possibilities for having more culturally relevant approaches for those who do get into the youth justice system. Boy, I would really like to keep them out of custody, if you can.
Senator Seidman: Actually, this leads quite nicely into my question in the sense that you talked a lot about prevention, and now you have talked a bit about the police and the youth and how they behaved in this day-long session they had together. The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police has, in fact, launched a 2014 Crime Prevention Campaign. They are featuring an informational crime prevention booklet that's going to be used by police services across Ontario to promote local crime prevention initiatives. My question to you is: How do you see the role of police in youth crime prevention?
Ms. Latimer: It is interesting you mention that. When we first started at youth justice, we started giving out an award to police officers for the activities that reflected the spirit of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. We had many police officers do great stuff, like really good stuff. Police don't mind having a game of ball hockey with kids. They like it, in particular the police officers who are on the beat and working in these communities.
To the extent that it can be encouraged, certainly the Mounties have that as a key objective of theirs, and it is great to hear that the chiefs of police are encouraging crime prevention activities as well.
There are huge differences among communities in terms of how people view the police. In my neighbourhood, we were always told if you get lost, you had better go find a police officer. We were instructed that these guys were to serve and protect and they're going to help you if you're in trouble. In other communities, you don't have that sense, and the hostility and antagonism is too great.
I think it is very encouraging. The chiefs of police have been pretty good in terms of encouraging their youth officers in particular to work with young people.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentations. This concludes our witnesses for today.
We still have some matters to deal with in camera, but we have to deal with the budget in public. There is a budget in front of you. We are still getting many requests for the cyberbullying report, and we are asking for your permission for courier charges of $200 and printing of $7,000. As you know, we only print as and when the request is made, not before that, and we are getting so many requests that we thought we would ask for this amount. Obviously we will not use it if we are not required to. Are there any questions on this budget?
Senator Eggleton: So moved.
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Thank you. Now we will go in camera.
(The committee continued in camera.)