This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.
Young Offenders Act
I find it very disturbing when I turn on the radio in the morning and listen to the top stories and five of them are committed by youths and consist of random beatings against innocent people. What the hell is going on with our children and where are th
Leave a comment
The YOA does not exist anymore. It was repealed and revised in 2002 and replaced with the Youth Criminal Justice Act – YCJA. It’s not that the YCJA doesn’t work, the problem is that the funding needed to enforce the act has been slashed by the Tories. It wasn’t all that adequately funded by the LIBS either, but at least there was some funding. Now we see detention and rehab centers like the one in Waterville that have worked in the past to rehabilitate youth in crisis operating at half capacity due to funding cuts. That isn’t the only center suffering under budget cuts to social programs. Judges have their hands tied. They have no place to put young, repeat offenders – even the violent ones. A Halifax criminologist says money saved from keeping more kids out of jail should be used to adequately supervise court-imposed conditions, such as curfews.”We have a situation now where a lot of our youth corrections facilities are sitting empty or half empty, but there hasn’t been sufficient resources transferred back to the community to take care of the kids in the community,” said Stephen Schneider, a Saint Mary’s University sociology and criminology department associate professor.The CONS were very effective at luring people to the idea of cutting social services and letting people fend for themselves. We’re seeing the results of that move now. So actually, IF you voted Tory in the last election, you voted to cut social services that were in place to protect everyone. Voting is not a piss-in-the-wind I like his face or accent better than the next guy. There are serious consequences for voting uninformed or mal-informed. The kids are swarming, violence is escalating and there’s no immediate solution at hand. Well the fact of the matter is when you corner rats they’re going for the throat. Many of these kids come from disadvantaged homes (not all) and see their families’ budgets being cut to the bone where parents cannot even make ends meet with 2 jobs each. Yep, something stinks in NS and Canada as a whole and it has Tory written all over it.
I’d also like to point out that these situations escalate in stages. We’ve gone from the smattering of instances 4 or 5 years ago to the commonplace that is happening now. Very soon the level of violence will be pushed to a more severe level and that’s when citizen groups begin to form. Private security will be usurped by “public watch” with paves the way for vigilante groups that will take it upon themselves, with the best intentions at first, to curb the violence.Halifax is about to turn into a battlegrounds and no one is doing a god damn thing about it. What do you think is going to happen not that the university crowd is back in town. These same groups that attacking people in town are going to go after someone, who in turn is coming back with their friends and it just goes up from there. I almost wish I had a d/t apt just so I could watch the show.