National Associations Active in Criminal Justice Round Table on Youth Justice Renewal 9 February 2000 Summary of discussion

---

Introduction

The Youth Justice Renewal Initiative stresses the importance of developing partnerships to deal effectively with offending youth and youth at-risk in their communities. The Round Table with the National Associations Active in Criminal Justice, held February 9, 2000, was the sixth in a series of round table discussions being held over the course of the fall 1999 and winter 2000. The aim of the round tables is to provide a forum for experts in the fields of education, social services, arts and recreation, child advocacy, mental health and criminal justice explore their role in preventing youth crime, dealing with youth who have committed offences and facilitating the reintegration and rehabilitation of young offenders.

Note: The following summary reflects the views expressed by participants at the Round Table, and will be considered by the Department of Justice in the implementation of the Youth Justice Renewal Initiative.

Were present at the discussion: see list attached

1. The Role of the National Associations Active in Criminal Justice (NAACJ) in Developing Community Partnerships for Crime Prevention.

Many of the Associations Active in Criminal Justice are developing more and broader partnerships to increase and enhance their capacity to respond to needs in the various communities. A number of these partnership projects were detailed at the round table discussion, including:

The Network : Interaction for Conflict Resolution, working out of Waterloo in a partnership arrangement with Corrections, is developing an inventory of restorative justice programs throughout Canada, outlining service providers in restorative justice for people who want to access the services or volunteer with a restorative justice organization or initiative.

The Canadian Training Institute has made a presentation to a Joint Task Force in the Toronto area that is chaired by the Toronto Police and involving the Ministries of Parks and Recreation, Transportation, Education, etc. to look at youth problems. The Institute is also looking at creating a community forum in one neighborhood by bringing together local store owners, parents, teachers, students themselves etc. The idea is to look at organizational approaches and organizational-type changes as opposed to individual activities for crime prevention. Peer mediation issues are also being examined to try and avoid the immediate criminalization of conduct problems.

The Canadian Association of School Principals tried to gather the activities going on in the schools in violence prevention, conflict resolution but gave up under the sheer number of disparate activities.. Some of that information was gathered by the Network (from Waterloo) as part of their restorative justice inventory..

Since peer mediation and peer helping models have been so successful in schools, the Network is trying to transport it to youth on the street, in the community, in shelters and, outside of schools. Youth peers can get so much farther than adults can in talking to other youth about anger and conflict.

The municipal government in Boston decided to work with the police and probation officers to enforce curfews for probation orders for juveniles. By doing that, they almost eliminated the homicide rate in Boston among young people. They also found that most of the kids on probation were from single parent families, and mostly from single mothers. The mothers began to view the police and probation people as surrogate parents to help them in the raising of the child. The curfew enforcement project became something totally different in the long run. The police then used their clout to get money from organizations like IBM to set up work centres and job training centres for these kids. What the probation people couldn't have done on their own got done in partnership.

Recently, crime prevention programs seem to have been hi-jacked by the police. Anyone trying to get funding has to enter into a partnership with the police, or at least show that they are working with them and have their support. Already that puts the activity on a different level. The National Crime Prevention Centre should allow for some openness in who gets to do crime prevention as well as about the distribution and the types of projects involved.

Sometimes, crime prevention initiatives can just be criminalizing initiatives. Taking kids at risk and putting them in non-criminal-justice-related programming (e.g. Boy Scouts) is positive. But when kids that have not offended are put in programs designated as rehabilitative (for ex-incarcerates), we do these kids a real disservice. For example, with respect to arts and recreation programming, both from the standpoint of early intervention and crime prevention, we need to be cautious in how these programs are delivered. When these kinds of recreational, quasi-artistic services are presented without a context, without structure, they are in fact counterproductive. They can be conducive to delinquency by providing a context for pre-delinquents to get together with other pre-delinquents; then, lacking structure or direction, you actually do see increased delinquent behaviour. On the other hand, when appropriate modeling, context, direction and coordination are provided, they are supportive and encouraging and provide that modeling for pro-social behaviour. Then you get the converse in terms of effects. One very good example of that is the annual canoe trip of the Saskatoon Police with the local youth. In the design of crime prevention initiatives, it's important to be very careful about how that kind of opportunity is provided.

Bullying is defined as a whole school problem because while only 15% of kids are either victims or bullies in schools, 85% of the kids are bystanders and are observing bullying behaviour, including teachers.. Bullying is not a criminal activity, but kids who are bullies in school may end up doing criminal activity later on.

There is an enormous anonymity in the local community for a large percentage of the student population because kids don't live in the neighbourhoods of their high schools. When the kids misbehave, no one outside the school knows who they are and there is no community impact. When you do try to deal with the kids who are already under supervision or on probation, you have problems connecting them with the schools. Generally speaking, if you can even get the probation officer to talk to the school principal, this is usually a situation when the school would be just as happy if you could find an alternative to returning the kid to the school.

In Toronto, the St. Leonard's House is running an after-school program in which volunteers are used as tutors for kids at risk of not succeeding in school. Keeping children in school helps to eliminate some of the other problems that occur when kids drop out. St. Leonard's also uses some very good students as peer helpers for the kids that have more difficulty in school. This program is significant because it is school-oriented, but not school-based. It is getting to those kids who are having trouble coping in the regular school. Because we know that failure to thrive in school is such an indicator of future conflict, it seems logical to create safe places and learning places away from the school environment but that allow that success to happen. That's why it is such an excellent model.

In Edmonton, the Aboriginal Friendship Centres have been at the centre of very progressive community programs, such as the following :

About 25 years ago, the Friendship Centre formed the Sacred Circle Program to address issues of awareness and acceptance of Aboriginal children in regular schools. It has now become a big part of education in Edmonton, working with the two school boards, the schools administrators, the teachers, the children and the curriculum, as well as with the city and the province to address some of these questions. There are Native liaison people that work with the teachers, the police, health officials, or any area that children need to rely on, not only on crime prevention but also on the delivery of programs in areas of culture, language and identity.

The Friendship Centre also helped create an Aboriginal Advisory with the Edmonton city police to bring awareness to the police and lawyers on the differences in dealing with Aboriginal people, especially kids. A Native Festival project inside the police station also brought awareness to the kids about dealing with the police as people that they could turn to if they were in difficulty.

The Friendship Centre also helped in promoting peer support and counselling with the school boards, primarily in the junior and high schools, to encourage students to stay in school and to provide recreational and cultural activities for them to do after school and on weekends. Working in liaison with the different schools, the peer helper project enabled some kids become part of a Youth Council for youth events that go on throughout the city.

The Friendship Centre has been the key deliverer of the Urban Multi-Purpose Youth Strategy, in partnership with other organizations. More and more youths are looking towards becoming a part of that to provide stability for a future away from crime, as well as keeping them away from gangs.

Edmonton was one of the first areas to implement the Youth Justice Committee and the Friendship Centre was an important partner in that, along with Native Counselling Services, the court system and the police. The Centre provided a place for the hearings, and encouraged community members to come and support these kids.

Finally there is a new initiative in the works, to address the situation of child prostitution called the Guardian Angel Program which is trying to link young girls who have nowhere to go with somebody who might be a role model for them. The ‘Guardian Angels' would just be ordinary people who might talk with the girls and maybe eventually help them find another way of making a living instead of going back on the street.

There's a major problem group out there that's impacting our penal systems and it's children of offenders. In Calgary there is a school with 240 children, all under twelve; 60% of those children are children of offenders.. When they looked at statistics from CSC, they found that 59.7% of adult incarcerates are children of adult offenders. Somehow these kids have to be reached. This is a group that we should really work at finding because the likelihood is that 6 out of 10 are going to end up in the system. At Chaudière House, quite a few young offenders are children of offenders. There are statistics that show that young offenders are over 50% children of offenders. We need to find a way to address that target group, because that's the feeding ground apparently for a majority of future offenders.

One of the recent changes or shifts in some of the jurisdictions in the realm of corrections, is the turning around of the probation departments and operating them on the basis of what they're calling "place-based probation". This defines community as significant places (not quite, but almost 'neighbourhoods') in which the probation people become responsible for coordinating and finding collaborative relationships within those identified places, to include schools, churches, malls, whatever. This allows for better use of community mapping of the assets, resources and deficits of a particular community. At the individual level, it uses the strength-based assessment of the children in their care as opposed to deficits. They look at the assets and then play to the strengths of the child. One of the interesting things of this kind of approach is that with this 'place-based' notion, it begins to suggest targets of tertiary intervention that we might not have. This data is there; it's just that there's nobody coordinating anything. Justice might want to follow up on some of the literature that's starting to come out on some of this "place-based notion."

Finally, one participant wanted to know the five essential characteristics of crime prevention programs and activities to help in building proposals, designing programs, knowing where to target arguments. etc.

2. Helping the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Young People into the Community

So much of what is important really happens locally. It may be that the best way for organizations to work in partnership with Justice is to strengthen internally who they represent, and make things happen.

The need for front end conferencing is pretty clear when Crown Attorneys tour a Half way House and indicate that they weren't aware that the kids in open custody are allowed to have passes to go to school! Those are our traditional partners, so getting together to conference is a good place to start.

From an open custody perspective, right now there is a lot of frustration with involving parents. There is no real protocol for involving parents, nor any good ways to get them there and get them involved in their child's life and in his plan. Under the old YOA, parents had the choice to be or not to be involved. Generally, they tended to drop the person in the state's lap and let us deal with them. That's not the best approach. We need some better ways to involve parents.

The WrapAround Program offers a lot of promise. It seems to be an organized type of approach identifying the youth's strengths and pulling together a wraparound group around the youth to encourage development in the area of his strengths. After a number of months, hopefully the staff facilitator can remove himself from that group and continue with another youth. The original WrapAround then continues on its own momentum and gradually meets more and more of the youth's needs.

There is a need for broad development or training in community mobilization strategies. We have to learn how to pull people together from very disparate organizations to get them to talk about the particular problems and difficulties in their areas, so that they might begin to provide solutions. One of the major difficulties is that so many of the communities that present the most problematic kids seem relatively unorganized. Part of the problem is identifying a place where you can get a foothold to start. The other thing is to find an inroad into the cultural ethnic community groups that might be best suited to work with these kids if you are looking at Chinese, Black, Vietnamese, whatever, as well as the Aboriginal communities that are in the urban areas. It's getting hard to reach these kids. Those are the groups we'll have to think of mobilizing in some areas.

We have to be responsive to those communities that are identifying themselves as needing intervention. With professional help, neighbours can come up with intervention models for first time young offenders in a diversionary way. The impetus comes from the community. With diverse cultural communities there is not the comfort level for speaking with the police. Those cultural communities are speaking to their own leaders, and we aren't connected to the leaders to know what they have to say. That would be a step that we should be trying to make.

One way to encourage partnerships is to create systems of funding that require partnerships. The Trillium Fund is an example of that and requires that groups develop collectives of at least five agencies. It has encouraged people to create these collectives that sometimes work, sometimes don't, but that definitely get people together. One association is involved in three of them, and acknowledges that they might not be if it weren't incumbent on the lead organization to make sure they're bringing in other people. It does encourage people to be involved in more than one initiative and gives a broader view.

Sometimes when doing direct service for young people, programs evolve to be something else. One such project in Alberta began as a victim/offender reconciliation program and ended up acting as a brokering body to link kids into existing resources and to pressure existing resources to take the kids. In that context, at that time, the project was working well. It was linked into the Asian community, linked into street kids' issues, to child welfare, to the Salvation Army, to group homes, to a sex offender treatment program, so essentially began a brokering program for these resources for kids. Young people were involved in it as well, helping mediate between the service providers and the kids who had been in the programs. There were whole layers that basically developed from this. That brokering piece was an important one.

There are barriers to admission for some kids for everything from school to welfare and everything in between. It was suggested that it might be interesting to have some kind of a charter that says that for all federally-funded programs, all citizens will have certain admission rights as a way to ensure that children are not being discriminated against by virtue of the fact that they have a conviction or a sentence. But, the issue comes down very much to the local level. If mental health services and social services can receive some level of satisfaction that criminal justice needs are being met otherwise, that they don't have to deal with the whole constellation of needs of the kids, and if feel that they are more part of the team in addressing the concerns, they may, over time, become less willing to cut the kid off totally. But unless there is work done to build a sense of community around it, an idea like having a Children's Commissioner will only be another way of detailing all the flaws.

There were also comments about having a charter to work with some of the other habitual bodies, such as the Children's Aid Society. If there were some sort of a semi-coercive way to get them and other partners involved, like a charter, one of the benefits is that a lot more resources would open up for that kid. But again, there is no protocol for getting them involved, or for accessing and putting the resources together.

With respect to multiple needs youth in particular, the special needs group, it's always been a long-standing problem. There is a revolving door, and not just with school and justice but with children's mental health and corrections passing the buck. There are three kinds of organizational responses:

1. It's not within the mandate
2. Don't have the resources
3. Youth is not receptive to the kind of intervention our service offers.

Then the youth goes back and forth, particularly if there is a mental health issue that is compounded by the age factor. The youth goes through a transition from children's mental health to adult mental health and the lack of continuity even during that transition is a problem. One possible solution, which has become more and more popular with adult mentally disordered offenders with multiple special needs is the concept of integrated case management system, with a designated case manager as someone who does the advocacy and the brokerage for services, but is not based in one particular organization, level of government or ministry. It's not a corrections person, not a mental health person, and not an educator. It's someone with a degree of autonomy and independence from each of those vested interests (or lack of interest) to do that kind of brokerage. In addition to something at a high level charter concept, what is needed is something at the grassroots level. This may be worth looking into for children and youth with multiple needs.

In using community-based approaches for rehabilitation and reintegration, people have found that, on a certain level, communities work very well together, and sometimes, being remote is helpful. But when problems are really, then the alternative is to get the person out of the community. The strength of the community model has its limits in terms of the variety and elasticity of its resources and its capacity to absorb numbers of ex-offenders.

Another difficulty about that kind of community arrangement is that the lead time can't be underestimated. It's huge. The education, the bringing up to an understanding, the environment creating the willingness, and then watching it falter and flub its way through, because these are relatively new concepts for us in this country. The evolution of the relationship between the traditional system, the authoritarian system, the Aboriginal system or the system in whatever remote community it may be, is a hit and miss affair. It's a good concept, it's a good legislative principle and would be great for youth. But it requires almost 10 years before there are successes to report rather than just some sort of pilot trends. Getting acceptance for that kind of long-range planning is difficult, but worth it if it is set up as a very long-range project so that no false expectations being created.

It's been very interesting in this last year to see the particular interest that's come out of the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council in terms of the relationship of government with the voluntary sector. There are 177,000 organizations in Canada. Generally, they tend to be on the socially progressive side, and reach into every corner of every community.. The voluntary sector has the capacity to communicate internally, train internally, and develop internally. They can actually promote values and attitudes and ideas.

There is definitely political interest in this. The first meetings of the voluntary sector tables saw fourteen Cabinet ministers show up.. But it became apparent that these people all have rich experience in the voluntary sector. Every one of them has been on the boards of directors of all sorts of organizations. They network in their own communities with the voluntary sector all the time. The bureaucracy has more of a problem with the voluntary sector than the politicians per se because that is where the relationships get tied up in contractual dealings.. Now that the government is beginning to engage the community through the organizations, we need to look at what can be done in terms of public policy to take advantage of this mechanism, particularly with the ones that are naturally aligned with the kinds of objectives the government would like to achieve.

One of the things coming out of these discussions is the recognition that in order to mobilize people, the voluntary sector has to have structure, some capacity to communicate, to train and to develop. If healthy cities and healthy communities are an objective, it seems that one way to capture this would be to move closer to the municipalities and the voluntary sector to deliver some of those programs.

The notion of treating the whole child should not rest solely on the shoulders of the youth justice system.. Often, as soon as the youth commits an offence, people expect the youth justice system to treat the whole kid. That can be a problem if people see youth justice as the primary vehicle for the delivery of the entire child. It has to be a team effort with the same objectives, but different roles and responsibilities and ways of doing that.

It was suggested that in order that schools not abandon their obligation to educate youth, there could be some kind of voucher system for kids, so that when the timing is right they can finish their education. Schools couldn't use the excuse of kids being in the justice system as a way of simply dumping this responsibility as a resource saving concept. They can't escape because this young person will be in the justice system for a short period of time, or escape the fact that the youth needs mental health intervention, or he needs schooling or some other kind of help. That way the decision to relieve yourself of the young person is divorced from the resource issue.

There followed a discussion on the Zero Tolerance policy that has been adopted by school boards across the province, even quite progressive school boards. Teachers have bought into this, principals have bought into it and are quick to use it. They call it zero tolerance, but one participant noted that it's only zero tolerance when they want it to be. If you examine the practice of zero tolerance, you'll find that it's often a front for the opportunity to nail the kids that are so irritating that teachers can't teach. But if there is a perception that the kid is attached to some degree of power or authority (well-to-do and/or influential families), or even if the child is bright but acting out, then the accommodation, or willingness to accommodate, comes out. But for the kid who's been disenfranchised in many ways, including economic and social conditions, his chances of being accommodated are small.

Schools really have three choices when a child misbehaves. The first choice is usually to expel the child. That is the easiest, quickest choice. The second is keeping him in the classroom and the third one is special programs, the most expensive option. You might be able to get kids into special programs if they had really serious problems that they can't cope with. If there is a choice between special programs or accommodating the kids in the classroom, schools will usually try to accommodate them in the classroom unless there is no possibility of their keeping up with the class. Then they will refer the child to specialists.

All the organizations have different age cut-off points in terms of their responsibilities for treating children. The way the school system wants to treat a 17 year old is up to them, because from 16 on they are not required to keep them in school. It is really counterproductive to have an Act that says that we have responsibility for conduct behaviours for all kids under 18, but you can't force the school system to do anything with them if they are over 16. Inconsistency in the age range compounds the problem at the upper end of the system, and probably at the lower end. It may not be easy to get around that problem, but the issue is there.

Canadians, when they know the whole story, will often choose to endorse a lot of the things that we want to do. There are values of compassion, empathy and fairness that people still have but do not always put forward. There was interesting research in Louisiana and Maryland where the public, the police, the policy bureaucrats and the politicians were polled to determine what their attitudes were on a certain Bill. What they found was that, with the exception of the police, which were in a category by themselves, there was no difference between the public, the policy-makers and the politicians. There was about a 70% concurrence rate. But the bureaucrats and the politicians thought the public were opposed and they killed the Bill. Their perception of public opinion was distorted, but the very nature of being in a position to hear complaints distorts the perception. In Canada, time and time again, study after study shows that when Canadians talk about what the criminal justice system should achieve, they want rehabilitation. It's always at the top.

The NAACJ meets only twice a year. You end up with an association that barely meets. There is a notion that there is an infrastructure, but there isn't one. In this room today, there are the heads of several national associations, but limited staff impede the possibility of concerted planning. And there are huge gaps between the associations and the field. We have a policy environment that has not recognized the importance of a healthy voluntary sector as a way to sustain itself and that fact has not being recognized in social policy. There are very few strings you can pull. That's the problem, even when there is a tremendous potential, when there is motivation, when there are no ideological resistance to the ideas, even then, following through is difficult.

In the States, there are media response teams that look at the way the media portrays conflict and violence and try to get the media to look at things in a way that doesn't escalate conflict. In a situation where the media creates a gang for example, they try to find out the rest of the story. Often the one same voice is consistently being interviewed every time schools are mentioned in the media for violence.

We need to have a better understanding of how things actually happen in the media. Access to victims and victims' families immediately after a tragedy in order to steer them in a certain direction is not an accident. Instantaneous web sites are not a coincidence. Taking vulnerable people who are in the midst of a crisis and manipulating them to go down a certain track from which they can't retreat even if they want to is not an accident. What are the ethical ramifications of that? The media does play a big role in keeping that kind of story rolling. We should be able to use the electronic media to organize and present relevant information. At some events in the world today, you can bring disparate groups together electronically. Technology is being used by some groups, and we have to be smarter about getting our messages out.

Finally, there was a suggestion that there is perhaps a need for a sort of an alternate to the Fraser Institute, a sort of think tank in criminal justice. It would have to be something that could be seen as being independent but credible, that has a research capacity and a publishing capacity.

3. Specific responses and next steps

• Information coordination is really important.
• More strategic ways to respond to the public through the media.
• More effective ways of dealing with the public without relying on the media.
• Make sure kids aren't lost, dumped from agency to agency..
• Support for various groups : information, research and training. Those three work together because each component contributes to the other. All organizations will benefit from a research base, general information and a training component.
• Get to the really local level. Orchestrate things to generate a kind of bottom-up local-level activity that may start with a single case : a teacher with an interest in this, a coach with an interest in that, a probation officer who happens to do art or something; then little clusters will develop. Do whatever you can to get to that level from your vantage point.
• We come from all different spaces, different angles, different measures, different perspectives , but we all have one thing in common : the need to make it work, to benefit youth and communities. We all have things that we can offer but you people at the top can make it happen a lot quicker. You mustn't be there as more levels of staircases we have to climb; come down and meet us with ongoing information.
• The greatest challenge we have to face first is making this Act and all it represents better known, better understood amongst our own organization first. That is one of the more supportive ways that we can be a part of what we are here about.
• Keep this partnership informed about things that are happening to yourselves; by keeping us informed, maybe we can know or be aware of what we could respond to more directly, and in that way you would be keeping the organizations better informed. We can't change Canada, but we can maybe impact better the people that we touch.
• Provide us with more support material that could be distributed.
• At some time, we could have a different kind of meeting. Today we talked ideas, but we could get together using a training approach, with the next steps clearly identified in terms of what you really want to see get out there. By a training concept of a day, we could all go back with a more uniform approach.
• It's encouraging to hear you will be meeting with the media and finding better ways to understand their particular bent on reporting. But the voices of authority in this country remain those of the police and the governments. It's a strategy we are after, a way of reaching out to those police, and those authorities in municipal and provincial politics that have a well-rounded grip on the issues and are willing to communicate openly on those issues to build a common agenda.
• There is a broad literature on what works in corrections. There is also a literature in what works in media relations. Find out what kind of message works to get the public more receptive to the kind of issues we are talking about here.
• We haven't even come close to optimizing what we can do among traditional partners. Your traditional partners (like the CSC) who offer various kinds of core funding to agencies, and have contracts with us, might be persuaded to include in those contracts a clause that required the agencies to do public education. Some resourcing would need to be attached, because again it's time, people, money. The agencies would be happy to do that. It wouldn't have to be national forums, but more local stuff. That might be useful.

Looking at that whole larger media issue and looking at what could be done more locally in small ways would help. It's more in getting the word out of what we do, and why it's good, and how it protects.

We need to confront the sustainability issue on the crime prevention front. Sustainability in this whole area is going to be a major issue.

Coordination is one thing, but related to that is a governance issue. How can you hold people accountable for what should happen to youth in terms of the Act and beyond the Act? Who actually holds the provincial authorities accountable if they don't deliver on some of the things you want them to deliver? Coordination yes but governance is another tricky part in how we are structured.

Clearing house – On two fronts. We need information and we need research. Both are important.

We need to figure out how we can advance an advocacy function without it being problematic for a lot of the organizations who deliver services under contract for the very government they may want to advocate something about. We have to start thinking about how we can create an advocacy function at the national and provincial level as opposed to an advocate function at the local level, where you stand alongside somebody. Beyond the Child Advocates, if our particular agency sees children not getting service or treatment, do we become advocates in that sense?

Training and development – this is going to be a big challenge however this Act ends up because in a sense you need to turn the whole system around, in its thinking, its attitudes as well as its technical side as well as on the spirit of the Act. The whole issue of counterculture in some of the organizations is going to be difficult in terms of the training and development plan for both inside and outside the criminal justice system; these are going to be very crucial elements to have thought through.

Mobilization issue – What can be done about mobilizing communities groups other people around the general issue of youth and maybe around the specific issue of youth in trouble.

Report by Jeanne N. Ruest
February 13, 2000