RECIPE FOR CRIME

The same day that Premier Jim Prentice promised the budget would strike a balance that would protect the vulnerable and front-line services, a group of highly vulnerable children — young offenders — became the first casualties of that line of spin.

The province announced that up to 85 children living in the Calgary Young Offender Centre will be moved to a facility in Edmonton — 300 kilometres from their parents, siblings, friends and lawyers, the very people they need around them at this crisis time in their lives. While the move is intended to ensure that there is one full facility, rather than two partly empty ones, it appears to have been decided upon strictly on a cost-benefit basis and not on a human one.

As the experts have been quick to point out, it will only lead to an increase in youth crime. Deprived of their support systems and families, these kids will be alone, isolated, and, given their intense need for peer acceptance, far more vulnerable to becoming further criminalized, as other young offenders will be the only people they see on a regular basis.

The move makes it hard for low-income families to travel to Edmonton to visit their children, and the young offenders will be more likely to keep in touch with their lawyers only by electronic means. As Shannon Prithipaul, president of the Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association, said: “These are people we’re talking about, they’re children that we’re talking about. They’re not just cattle they can move from one place to another.”

Minister of Justice and Solicitor General Jonathan Denis said in a statement that “consolidating services available to young offenders will continue to help them get their lives on track and return to our communities.”

They should be staying in their communities. That’s the best way to help them get their lives on track.

The government’s plan to move them to Edmonton is positively Dickensian.

Alberta Union of Provincial Employees’ vice-president Erez Raz stated what is obvious to everyone, except Denis: “If you’re in Edmonton, you might not see your family member for months on end. That doesn’t help someone be reintegrated into society.”

Reintegration and rehabilitation are key for juvenile offenders who are not, after all, going to spend their lives in prison.

They are going to be released in fairly short order, and everything that can be done to get them back on the straight and narrow must be done. One of those things is to keep them close to their families.

The government clearly needs to rethink this one.