While the economy no doubt will continue to take centre stage in the public’s mind, the problem of crime, particularly among young people, remains a source of great concern for Canadians. Gang violence, robbery and murder seem to make daily appearances on the front pages of our newspapers. Crime, of course, affects the entire economy.
The 10th anniversary of the Taber, Alberta school shooting and the repetition on television of the Columbine school massacre reinforce the widespread alarm about youth crime.
Federal Conservatives have a tough-on-crime approach, reflecting the general belief that young people who commit crimes do not receive sentences proportionate to those acts, and that there must be a degree of responsibility on the part of the offender, which more often than not is missing.
However, Quebec is one place where authorities have taken a different tack. According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, that province’s emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation has been remarkably successful. Quebec consistently has the lowest crime rate in Canada. According to the most recent data, for every 100,000 young people aged 12 to 17, 1,610 were involved with crime. That total is just over half of Ontario’s number of 2,846 youngsters.
Quebeckers mainly do not like automatic sentences for youth crime. There each person is judged individually, and then there is put in place a rehabilitation program that may include drug treatment, anger management, job training and school classes – regardless of whether the individual is in custody or serving a sentence in the community. As much as possible, minor offences are handled outside of the court system.
Many years ago, the Université de Montréal had even developed programs in “psycho-education.” Jean Trepanier, a criminologist there, stated, “With good programs, what we can hope for is the delinquent activity will diminish and disappear earlier.”
There are now in Quebec extra-judicial measures for young people who appear before the courts. That has led to fewer and shorter sentences. Greater flexibility has permitted youth workers to establish effective rehabilitation programs, but it is apparent that so-called custodial sentences must be sufficiently long to effect an overhaul of a youth’s conduct.
In Quebec, two-thirds of guilty youth cases were placed on probation, and nearly half of the teenagers were sentenced to community service, about twice the national average.
Irwin Waller, a criminologist with the University of Ottawa, wrote in The Globe and Mail, “Quebec’s strong social safety net and ‘sophisticated’ youth protection system have also contributed to lower crime rates.” Quebec also has worked on prevention, and as a result, Montreal has the lowest count of youth gang members per capita of any major city in Canada.
Hence, if we really are interested in reducing the crime rate among youth, we should replace retribution with rehabilitation programs that have worked so well in Quebec.