Follow Alberta’s lead on youth jail: NDP MLA
Plans to close young offenders’ facility in Calgary cancelled by new government
The new Alberta government has cancelled plans to close a youth jail in Calgary for the same reasons people have opposed shuttering the Victoria Youth Custody Centre.
NDP Premier Rachel Notley, in one of her first major announcements, said her party fundamentally disagrees with the idea of moving young offenders from Calgary and southern Alberta to a facility in Edmonton.
“In our view, it was simply wrong to close this facility and so we won’t do it,” she said. “Our goal is help young offenders learn from the trouble they’ve got themselves into. Separating them from their families works directly against this goal.”
NDP MLA Carole James, who represents Victoria-Beacon Hill, said Friday that the B.C. government should follow Notley’s lead and reverse the closure of the Victoria jail.
“It’s nice to see one province recognize that youth need to be supported,” she said. “It’s time for B.C. now to recognize that. They’ve still got the opportunity here to re-open that centre.”
Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen TurpelLafond also recommended reopening the Victoria jail this week, citing concerns about conditions at the facility and with shuttling youth to and from the Lower Mainland.
In Alberta, the then-Conservative government announced in March that it planned to shut most of the Calgary jail and ship about 75 youth to Edmonton. The Tories said the facility was underused and that moving youth 300 kilometres north would save about $3 million.
The same arguments were used by the B.C. government to justify shutting the Victoria Youth Custody Centre last year. The Ministry of Children and Family Development said it could no longer afford to keep the jail open to house an average of 15 youth a night, and expected to save about $4.5 million a year by shipping them to the Burnaby Youth Custody Centre.
Capital region police agencies, however, balked at using their lockups to hold youth for short periods before they could be transferred off the Island. So the ministry has been forced to keep the jail open with a skeleton staff supervising an average of fewer than one youth a night.
In both Calgary and Victoria, the decision to close the jails sparked a backlash by lawyers, criminologists, staff, youth advocates and local politicians, who complained about the short-sightedness of moving vulnerable youth away from families and support networks.
James said ongoing problems at the facility make it clear that closing the Victoria jail “wasn’t a smart decision in the first place.”
“These are youth who have a good opportunity for rehabilitation, a good chance to connect with education and school, and save the system and save the community challenges later on in life,” she said. “Yet, here we are, saying, for $3 million, ‘We’re going to send the kids away. We’re going to take them out of their support network. We’re going to put them in a larger facility that already has challenges.’ “It just doesn’t make sense.” Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux, however, has shown no signs of wavering. She said this week that youth are being well cared for during their short stays at the Victoria jail.
She also said she had no major concerns about an incident at Victoria International Airport last week in which a young offender and a corrections officers suffered minor injuries during a prisoner exchange.
James, however, said the closure is already having a negative impact on families. She recently spoke to one mother, who works shifts and has been unable to visit her son regularly in Burnaby.
“It’s not that you can go any time,” James said. “You have to match up with their visiting times. And when she’s working a 3-to-11 shift, it pretty much takes [that] away. She can’t afford to fly. She’d have to take the ferry and she can’t make it work.”