July 6 juillet 8:30 – 12:15
(extended session)
Room NCDH–101
Chair: Rose
Gabrielle Birba , Department of Justice Canada
Canada’s House of Commons has recently passed new youth justice legislation, the Youth Criminal Justice Act. After passage in the Senate, the new legislation is expected to come into force in 2002. It will replace the Young Offenders Act, which has been in place for seventeen years.
A significant reform contained in the new legislation is a distinct sentencing code that includes a statement of the purpose of youth sentencing and a set of specific principles to guide the determination of an appropriate sentence. A fundamental issue in the development of the new sentencing provisions has been how should youth justice legislation take account of the social welfare and mental health needs of the young person while ensuring that the sentence is fair and reflects restraint in the use of the criminal law.
The paper explains the new youth sentencing provisions and how they address specific problems that exist under the current legislation. These problems include: sentences being imposed on young people that are more severe than would otherwise be warranted in order to address their social welfare needs; the over-use of custody; and the significant number of first offenders found guilty of minor offences who are sentenced to custody.
The paper also includes a discussion of a new mental health
treatment sentence for young people who commit serious violent offences and are
suffering from a mental or psychological disorder or an emotional disturbance.
In the course of the deliberations concerning the recently enacted Youth Criminal Justice Act, some critics suggested that it should be permissible to place a youth in custody even if the offense the youth committed did not justify the use of this sanction. Custodial facilities were often said to provide the kind of environment that could be beneficial for youths in distress. In other words, the suggestion was made that under certain circumstances it should be permissible to incarcerate youths for their own good. A related argument is that the judge can sometimes "protect society" and help the young person by imposing a custody sentence for rehabilitative purposes even when the offense itself could not justify a custodial sentence. Our paper argues that these closely related views are misguided, even when they are based on the best of intentions and on the wish to provide the best possible care for youths in need of help. These views exemplify a tendency to misconstrue punishment as a benevolent measure to make the infliction of harm upon a youth more palatable to the sentencer's self-awareness.
Though there are no “ silver bullets” in the form of interventions that work for all serious and violent young offenders, there is still enough available evidence about serious and violent behavior that policy makers can develop and evaluate appropriate programming. This paper will suggest that any intervention for violent youth must have clarity regarding which youth such programming would hope to target. It will suggest that effective interventions must be multimodal to address multiple problems and that aftercare should be an integral part of any coordinated strategy. It will argue that the development of any therapeutic sentence for violent youth should work in tandem with larger, long-term efforts that are reliable in their ability to reduce the number of young people who are likely to commit any type of crime.
A retrospective case study of a group of 76 homicide
offenders (convicted of First or Second Degree Murder, Voluntary or Involuntary
Manslaughter; aged 14 to 17 years at the time of the offense, and aged 18 to 25
years at the time of release from incarceration). The analysis yields
information as to background history, antecedent risk factors for criminal
behavior, ethnicity of offender, characteristics of the victims, nature of the
crime, type of psychopathology, psychiatric diagnosis, response to treatment and
risk factors for re-offending following release.
The United States has witnessed various high-profile killing
sprees carried out by juveniles in or around school yards over the past several
years. As a result of these events, parents are growing more fearful of troubled
adolescents and are less willing to dismiss offhanded, threatening remarks.
When, for example, Wisconsin teenager Daniel Shipley told his father that he
would imitate teenager Kip Kinkel, who had murdered his parents and classmates,
if Mr. Shipley did not let him sleep in on a Saturday morning, the Shipleys had
their son arrested in an effort to obtain court-ordered psychiatric
hospitalization. In this talk, I will discuss the legal alternatives available
to the Shipleys and others like them who seek mental health intervention for
their children. While I will address both the civil and the criminal law, my
focus will be on civil commitment, specifically the propriety of broadening
parental authority to commit children “voluntarily” to state hospitals, the
place, if any, of incorrigibility proceedings, and the role that outpatient
commitment may play in this process.
Laws ascribing criminal responsibility to children in
Australia are largely based on the child’s age and their knowledge of the
wrongness of their criminal act. This discussion questions the ethics of
imputing criminal responsibility to young children. In questioning Australian
legal positions, two factors are considered: difference and time. Law tries to
essentialise children by assuming that all children of a certain age have
similar understandings of right and wrong, and have similar capacities to
control their actions (although this capacity is not investigated). However,
depending on social, familial and personal characteristics, an individual child
may have ‘different’ understandings of right and wrong, and may have
different capacities of self-control. Given these variables, and given that
young children have not had much time to overcome what might be described as a
less than ideal environment in which to grow up, under what circumstances is it
ethically justifiable to hold them (and them alone) criminally responsible, and
to sentence young criminal offenders to custodial sentences? Are there
alternatives that are more justifiable when these differences are considered,
that also produce greater benefits for the individual, for the family and for
society?
There is
an obvious interest in juvenile sex offenders in Belgium. However, to our
knowledge, this population has never been systematically assessed using static
variables. The present study included 34 juvenile male sex offenders who were
referred as outpatients by the juvenile justice authorities to the “Unité de
Psychopathologie Légale” (UPPL). The static variables were extracted from the
registration file which cover the domains of (a) sociodemography; (b) sexual
behavior; (c) psychopathology; and (d) emotional development. The 34 subjects
were assigned to different groups according to (a) intra- (N= 19) versus
extra-family relation (N= 15) between victim and agressor and (b) female (N=15)
v. male (N=14) sex of the victim. The statistical analysis included either
continuous (means comparisons) or discrete variables (frequency comparisons).
The results are discussed with reference to the data described in the
international literature.
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