Safe Streets and Communities Act concerns youth workers
By Elizabeth Walters
EDMONTON – The MP for Edmonton Centre says the new Safe Streets and Communities Act will do exactly as the name suggests, but advocates for troubled youth are concerned the Act may have a negative effect and will only result in the illusion of safety.
The federal legislation will increase minimum time spent in prison for a plethora of offences. The Act will also remove conditional sentencing, including house arrest, for serious crimes, and make it harder for offenders to be pardoned in the future.
Edmonton Centre MP Laurie Hawn supports the Act that his Conservative government has put forward.
“Statistically, a habitual offender will commit 15 crimes in a year,” he said. “If that guy’s spending an extra year behind bars, there’s 15 crimes that aren’t being committed. Now you can’t quantify what hasn’t been done, but you can quantify statistically the number of crimes that are committed by a habitual offender. You can put a number on the cost of a prison. You can’t put a number on something that didn’t happen, so it becomes a bit of a circular argument.”
The legislation aims to make young offenders more accountable for their actions, Hawn said.
“You can’t just thumb your nose at the system because you happen to be under 18.” Hawn said, but adds, “If youth get involved in that, it’s not, ‘Lock them up and throw away the key,’ it’s ‘Make them accountable for their actions,’ and at the same time try to educate them, so they don’t become repeat offenders.”
The Act aims to keep youth safe and keep them from getting involved in crime by targeting those who would target them. “We’re trying to go after the drug traffickers, not the people that are growing six plants in their house for their own use,” Hawn said.
Professionals in the field argue that the tough-on-crime approach will have little to no positive effect and will leave taxpayers with an even bigger bill.
“What tough-on-crime acts and policies really end up doing is providing a false sense of security for people, they actually don’t do anything to make communities safer,” said Chris Hay, executive director of the provincial office of the John Howard Society.
“We are going to increase our corrections and policing budget by billions of dollars, and I question where we’re going to get the money to do that,” Hay said “I worry that we’re heading down a California road, and we’re going to bankrupt Canada at some point, because of the justice policies. Once things are implemented, they are bloody hard to get out of.”
Hay called the act a “knee-jerk, Band-aid solution” to crime.
“The federal level is not looking critically or even at all at all of the research or even the professionals in the field,” he said. “They’re not making informed decisions.”
The John Howard Society supports “second-chance” programs such as the Extrajudicial Sanctions Program in Elmwood, which trains volunteers who meet with youth who are in trouble with the law.
“We provide a valuable service in the community,” said board member Joanne Dixon.
The west end location near Elmwood Park works “to provide a community-based alternative to the traditional youth justice system,” she said. “In many ways, we like to call it a second-chance program.”
For young offenders, “it’s an alternative to going through the court system and being saddled with a criminal record for the rest of your life,” Dixon said.
“We want them to leave our program feeling successful. We’re not going to set them up for failure. We want these kids to get back into society and just get on the right track.”
Youth who are referred to the program discuss how their crime has had a negative impact, and a consequence is chosen.
Consequences may include “community service, or an essay, an apology letter, we might ask them to donate a couple loads of sandwiches to the youth emergency shelter, it’s whatever seems appropriate with the type of crime and the youth in question.”
Incarceration costs Alberta $85,000 per inmate annually, so keeping young people out of correctional facilities makes economic sense, advocates say.
The federal Conservatives plan to pass the bill within 100 sitting days, but the opposition will attempt to fight the bill.
“When it leaves the House and gets to committee for discussion, they will be basically filibustering,” Hawn said. ”They will be trying to talk about this for as long as they possibly can, but again, as we have a majority government in committees there will be some limits to how much they can do that.
The Act will likely be passed later this year.