Another viewpoint.

• Author: Mildon, Marsha

In the late sixties, while working as a Juvenile Probation Officer, I attended a seminar on the draft of a Bill, called the Young Offenders Act (YOA), which was meant to remedy the problems with the Juvenile Delinquents Act (JDA) under which we worked at the time. The JDA worked in the sense that troubled youngsters (my youngest probationer was seven years old) received supervision and other assistance such as court-ordered psychiatric treatment through the benign paternalism of the Juvenile Court. It worked badly, however, in the sense, that young people could be found to be delinquent, and even sent to closed custody training schools, for behaviour such as playing hooky, running away from home, or coming home late on dates. These dispositions fell under the non-Criminal Code offence of being found "beyond the control of the parents".

The new Young Offenders Act (finally passed in 1983) gave minors specific legal rights so they were not criminalized for non-criminal behaviour. It was also meant to make older youth who committed Criminal Code offences more accountable for their actions.

The plan was that children from ages 7-11 would be treated through a comprehensive array of child welfare services run by the provinces. This, it was believed, would keep many of them from ever entering the youth criminal justice system. Perhaps it would have, but--with perhaps the exception of Quebec--most provinces developed insufficient services.

Now we are faced with another attempt at changing legislation in order to deal with youth crime. Given the importance of this new Act--it will be the framework within which many troubled youth first come into contact with notions of law, justice, crime, and punishment--LawNow has taken the unusual step of using our entire feature section to examine one federal Act.

We will begin with an article by Marian Bryant that highlights the major differences between the new YCJA and the YOA. This will be followed by an article that begins by outlining the history of Canadian criminal legislation dealing with youth, then examines the new Act, particularly some of the sentencing provisions, in the light of that history and wonders if anything will really change. The next article examines sentencing provisions and arrives at a rather different and interesting conclusion. For a change of pace, we then present two articles that deal with very specific issues from the new Act: bail hearings and conferencing. Finally, we finish...