A group of boys play basketball at the St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center Tuesday, July 19, 2011. The juvenile rehabilitation program houses from 50 to 100 youth between the ages of 9 and 17.
(Photo by Whitney Curtis for the Globe and Mail)
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
If Canada follows through on plans to crack down on miscreant youth, it’ll be one of the few jurisdictions in the world heading in that direction.
And the tough-on-crime approach in the face of contrary evidence is bemusing international observers.
Judges, criminologists and policy-makers in the United States, Britain and Australia – countries whose systems, for the most part, closely resemble Canada’s – can’t figure out why this country is planning to shift toward a jail-intensive approach. Everyone else seems to be doing the opposite, not for ideological reasons, but because evidence shows it works.
“It’s somewhat ironic, actually,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, which studies jail policy across the United States.
“After nearly four decades of the so-called ‘get tough’ movement in the U.S., which has meant sending more people to prisons [and] keeping them there for longer periods of time, there’s beginning to be a shift away from that.”
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