Volume 2, Issue 1, January 1995


TODAY'S YOUTH JUDGED DISPOSABLE

Society, driven by its fears, falls back on traditional sanctions when it comes to deal with youth crime. Rightly abhorring the offence, many citizens leap to the conclusion that more of a penalty will automatically give more protection.

The Young Offenders Act has become a lightening rod for public discontent; this despite we are sending more young people to jail than ever before.

The Church Council on Justice and Corrections after twenty years of analysis concludes that punishment to crime is the wrong response. The best available research and knowledge can no longer sustain a justification for punishment as a principle of law institutionalized by the State. There are sound philosophical and eminently practical reasons to support this conclusion.

Fundamentally, does anyone really believe that hurting people who hurt people is an effective way to demonstrate that hurting people is wrong? People who re-offend the most are often the ones punished the most. If in fact adult criminals are not dissuaded by this punitive message, all the more so for youth whose adolescent development and life conditions mean they don't think about risk, in anything.

Paddy Hardman, a youth court judge in Cambridge and Kitchener, speaking from the vantage point of her judge's seat in Young Offender and Family Court states: "Incarcerating young people is like shooting somebody full of cancer to get rid of the cancer. . . . Criminal court is the last place in the world a social problem should be".

Hardman points out that "these kids are our kids". They haven't been beamed here from outer space. They're in our communities.

To advocates of alternatives to custody, Hardman refers to her "real world" of few judical options because of scarce, viable community-based programs.

Her prescription? Kids in family crisis need meaningful foster care, safe neighbourhood houses, integrated youth services, more treatment spaces, shorter delays in the response time by justice and social services, improved funding for mental health services, contingency plans after a kid is suspended from school, and an end to jurisdictional battles about who pays what among different levels of government and within the same government's different ministries.

This is a time the voice and action of the churches and their memberships is badly needed. Who better than faith communities with their gospel values to ask ethical questions, to dare to turn perceptions on their head, especially when young offenders are judged disposable, when the real needs of victims are ignored, when our communities violated by crime hunger for reparation and reconciliation, and when false "us/them worlds" are being constructed.

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Address: The Church Council on Justice and Corrections, 507 Bank St. - 2nd Floor, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 1Z5

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.