Evaluating the Youth Criminal Justice Act after five years: a qualified success.

The context for Canadian youth justice reform

The Young Offenders Act (YOA), which came into force in 1984, was a highly controversial statute. While conservative politicians criticized the law for being "soft on youth crime," there were also concerns that, under the YOA, use of courts and custody had risen, and by the early years of the millennium, Canada had one of the lowest rates of youth diversion and one of the highest rates of youth custody in the world (Canada, Department of Justice 2002; Doob and Sprott 2004). Successive federal governments responded to these criticisms by enacting amendments to the YOA in 1986, 1992, and 1995 and finally by having a Parliamentary Committee undertake a review of the act in 1998. In 2002, the then Liberal government enacted a completely new statute to replace the YOA, the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), which came into force in 2003. The most prominent objectives of the YCJA were to address the two major concerns about the YOA: to reduce the use of courts and custody for the majority of adolescent offenders and to improve the effectiveness of responses to the relatively small number of young offenders convicted of serious crimes of violence (Canada, Department of Justice 2002).

In many ways, the YCJA represents an astute political compromise. The legislation attempts to address continuing public anxiety about a relatively small number of highly publicized cases involving the most violent youth offenders, while also responding to the growing concerns of juvenile justice professionals, advocates for youth, and academic critics about the large numbers of youth being processed through the courts and placed in custody, often for non-violent offences. At the time that the YCJA was introduced, a prominently publicized aspect of the act was the provisions intended "to respond more firmly and effectively to the small number of the most serious, violent young offenders" in order to respond to the "disturbing decline in public confidence in the youth justice system" in Canada (Justice Minister Anne McLellan, as cited in Canada, Department of Justice 1999). The provisions of the YCJA that facilitate the imposition of adult sentences for the most serious offenders address these concerns. The preamble to the YCJA itself makes clear that the act is also intended to address Canada's "over-reliance on incarceration" for young offenders.

Scope of article

This article reviews the first five years of implementation of the YCJA, with a particular focus on issues related to diversion from court and the use of custody. (2) The article examines salient provisions of the act, especially those relating to diversion and sentencing, and discusses recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions interpreting the YCJA during its first five years in effect. (3) The Supreme Court has affirmed the position that custody is to be used as a last resort for adolescent offenders and thereby contributed to the reduction in the use of custody. The Court has also emphasized that youth are to be treated differently from adults and has ruled unconstitutional certain provisions of the YCJA that created a presumption that youths found guilty of the most serious offences would receive adult sentences, thus limiting the effect of provisions of the act directed at serious violent offenders. Our paper presents statistical data from the first five years that the YCJA was in effect, including data on youth justice caseloads at several stages in the system, culminating in ra...

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