The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Who Loses When Youth Detention Centres Close?

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

With many provincial youth detention centres being closed, what happens to the young offenders behind their walls? And where will the money saved from their closure go? Jessica Evans is an assistant professor of criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University, and she joins us to explain.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When the province closes youth detention centers, what happens to the young offenders behind their walls? And where will the money saved from their closure go? Joining us now to discuss Jessica Evans, Assistant Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University, and we thank you for making the trip up here to join us today. Thank you so much for having me. Here at TVO, not at all. Now, there used to be a lot more youth detention centers in the province until about three years ago and then something happened. Tell us what.

Yeah, so in 2021, in March of 2021, the Ontario government made a decision to close down 26 youth detention centers. 25 of these were operated by community-based organizations. One of them was operated by the province. Now, these closures happened because these detention centers were in low use. So they had a lot of quote unquote beds free in these institutions. Now the issue with the closures was that they happened behind closed door planning. So what that meant was that the staff at the centers, they received by and large less than

24 hours notice that these closures were happening. Was that fast? Yes, very fast. So it was two years planning this, but all folks that were kind of working in these centres were kept in the dark. And so they were given less than 24 hours to plan for the transfer of these youth. And the youth themselves received sometimes just an hour's notice. They were woken up, they were transferred in shackles and handcuffs to new institutions. And there were a lot of issues with how that transfer was handled.

So for example, ten of the centers that were closed were in Northern Ontario, where a lot of indigenous youth are. So these transfers meant transferring youth away from their communities and their homes and their families, which obviously impedes the ability of families to visit their youths in detention when they're being transferred to the South. Did you think it was necessary to transfer youth in shackles in the way that they did? Of course not.

No, that is a traumatizing event. And these were youth that, you know, were not necessarily flagged for major security concerns or anything. And so this was a really traumatizing event for youth in this position. In another case, there was a trans youth that was transferred to an institution that did not conform to their gender identity. Again, just really messy planning around this because it was kind of launched on folks

within 24 hours notice. So we saw a lot of disruption amongst youth through these closures. Is that protocol, though? No, typically not. No, normally people would be kind of kept in the loop about how these closures are happening, so that staff can appropriately prepare the youth.

One of the kind of core principles under the Youth Criminal Justice Act is something that's called relationship custody. And this is the idea that youth in detention need to be able to build trusting relationships with the folks that they're working with on a day-to-day basis. They need to believe that the folks that they're working with have their best interests at

heart. And so the way that these closures happen really disrupted a lot of those bonds of trust that could have been fomenting. And usually there is a lot of effort made to avoid that disruption in the first place. How old, I guess I should say, how young to how old are all of these young people? Yeah, so we're generally talking about youth between the ages of 12 years and 17 years of age. So what does it do, do you think, long term to a 12-year-old who experiences this? Yeah, I mean, I think it undermines trust in the system in a lot of really substantive ways.

I think it undermines the ability to trust in larger community as well. So a lot of the focus in these youth detention centers are working on things like mental health issues, you know, trust with authority, trust amongst the community, and youth have to have a buy-in to the community, right? If they're going to go back into community and behave in ways that are, you know, appropriate to our current kind of norms and laws, they have to believe that they're buying into something that has their interests at heart. And so seeing this happen, and we have to remember a lot of these youth are people that have themselves been victimized, and so this is just compounding the traumas experienced and really undermining trust in community, in systems of authority, and so on and so

forth. Well, okay, I know there are going to be people watching this and listening to this right now who are saying to themselves, you know, if they weren't such a bunch of badasses, they wouldn't be there in the first place, and therefore, you know, quesara, sara. What's the response to that? Yeah, so the response to that is that I think this relies on this assumption that we're dealing with exceptionally deviant youth, youth that have exceptional behavioral problems and so on and so forth, when in reality these are youth

that are dealing with exceptionally adverse circumstances in community. The vast majority of these youth are coming from situations of abuse, of trauma, of poverty, and these are all of the kinds of conditions that set folks up for greater involvement with the criminal legal system. And so, you know, if we were doing more to address these things in community, we might not see youth having these engagements in the first place. We reached out to the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, because we wanted to know what they thought about all this. And here is, here's part of the statement they sent us. And Sheldon, if you would, you bring this graphic up

and I'll read along for those listening on podcast. Our priority they say is the safety, well-being and support of youth in conflict with the law. We are increasing funding for the youth justice sector by $11.6 million this year to address increased operational costs at agencies that support youth in the justice system. This year we have invested more than $11 million in the youth outreach worker program. We are also investing more than $14 million in the youth opportunities fund,

which supports 39 community led projects to help youth overcome social and economic barriers. Okay, your initial reaction to that is what? So I think these are positive moves, right? These are moves in the right direction. I think, you know, one of the issues is that there are community-based organizations that have been doing this work for a really long time but have not seen any real increase in their operational budgets.

I was just kind of perusing through some of the annual reports of these organizations before we came here. And most organizations organizations, their revenue is just meeting their expenditures. If not, they're dipping a little bit into a deficit. Sometimes you see a little bit of revenue above expenditures. But we're dealing with organizations that are really walking a tightrope in terms of finances.

And so if funds are going to be increasing for these organizations, this is really wonderful news. I think it would be important for this money to be going into the organizations that know how to do this work, not creating new kind of responses to this. And so so long as we're seeing that funding going into these organizations, I think that is a move in the right direction. I think addressing issues that perhaps seem a little bit far away from crime and justice would also go a long way.

So again, addressing kind of economic challenges amongst families, addressing insecure housing, addressing food security, all of these kinds of things are really positive developments. And so this is the kind of stuff that I would like to see happening. And just to be clear, the infractions that the young people would have had to commit

to be in these facilities in the first place would be everything along a continuum of what to what. Yeah. So, I mean, at the very kind of far end, you have youth engaging in violent crime. But, you know, at the lower end of things, you have property offenses. You know, you have perhaps vandalism in repeated kind of offenses. So there's a wide range of engagements with criminalized activity that youth are kind of engaging with to end up in these spaces.

And the places that were shut down a few years ago because they were underutilized or whatever, what's happened to all of those facilities now? Yeah, so some of those facilities, rather, have been earmarked to be transitioned into adult correctional facilities. So for example, the Cecil Frazier Institution that is going to be shut down in Sudbury, it has not been shut down yet,

but it's going to be shut down, that's going to be transitioned into a women's adult correctional facility. I don't know the full story about where all of those 26, or what all of those 26 facilities are doing right now, but some certainly have been transitioned into other aspects of the correctional system. And then, you know, what we saw with the youth

that were in those spaces is that they've been transferred to other correctional facilities or detention facilities. And those facilities themselves are now dealing with overcrowding issues. So the one in Sudbury that's slated for closure soon, where will the young people who are there be transferred to most likely? Yeah, so there's discussion about this and I haven't been able to see anything certain but my understanding is that there are two different areas that they'd be transferred to and one would be a Brampton facility. The other, I believe I

have this somewhere, but Brampton I think is kind of the largest facility. That's, now look, I'm not an A-plus student in geography, but last I looked, Sudbury to Brampton is a long way. It is quite a long way. So if you're a kid from Sudbury, is it possible you could move a 15-year-old kid from Sudbury to Brampton? Yeah, so I mean those are large moves, right? And those are going to, you know, when folks are reintegrating into community as well,

this means that they don't have those supports, those community supports when they're released. Or that the families have to bear the burden, the financial burden of coming to these new spaces so that they can receive their youth when they are transitioned out of secure custodial facilities. Typically, how often are you allowed to, if you've got a youth in a detention facility like this, how often are you allowed to visit if you've got a youth in a detention facility like this, how often are you allowed to visit if you're a family, friend, whatever? So a lot of that varies from institution to institution and it has to do with staffing issues. So do we have enough staff to facilitate

the visitation? And what we're seeing in a lot of institutions is that staffing is one of the kind of pressing issues with the remaining facilities. So when the detention centers were closed in March 2021, the youth were transferred to still operational facilities. And so you saw, you know, increases of, you know, sometimes up to 15 beds in these institutions. But we didn't see a similar increase in funding or staffing. A lot of these institutions are operating at a base level of funding that hasn't changed in 17 years and staffing wasn't increased when

these shifts happened. And so that impacts all of the services that youth have access to in these institutions as well. Educational services, there's issues with appropriately kind of working out case management systems for the youth. Visitations would be impacted by this. Access to community would be impacted by this. So whether in an open or a secure detention facility, youth are usually given opportunities to go into community as part of their kind of rehabilitation process, but those opportunities start to dwindle when we see staffing shortages. So there's a whole host of kind of services that are intended to be part of

the rehabilitative process that are limited when we're dealing with crunches on staff. Well you mentioned education. Let's pick up on that. Obviously they get an education when they're in one of these facilities, but how does it work? What do they get? Yeah, so the problem with education is that there is no kind of centralized system for managing education. So basically the provincial school boards, or rather school boards within the province, are not under any obligation or mandate to provide education for youth in detention.

Now they're required to provide education for all youth, but they're not required to move into those facilities, right? And so because youth are in a different facility, that requirement is kind of rendered null. And so what we have is local school boards engaging in voluntary memorandum of understanding with specific detention centers, and they work out, so the specific detention center and the specific school board then work out the curriculum the hours of contact time and so on and so forth amongst themselves. I do a little comparison here if you're going to quote-unquote a regular school I don't know 830 to 330 something like that how

often are the teachers in these facilities? So the minimum standard I believe is five hours of contact time per day some some facilities you're seeing close to that, but reports have been done that suggest that as few as two hours a day is what some facilities are receiving, and some, sometimes none. So it really is, it's dependent on the specific institution and the MOU that it has with a specific school board. And again, because this is voluntary, those school boards can also come out of those agreements if they wish to do so.

If it's none, what are they doing all day? That's a really good question. And again, the answer is oftentimes not a lot. So youth don't have a lot of access to things like physical activity, education. If it's not being provided in those kind of quantities, they're not getting access to that. And so they're perhaps spending a lot of time in kind of just languishing.

Let me do a couple other sort of how many and how long questions here. In a typical youth facility like this, how many young people would there be in each one? Yeah, so it really ranges. Sometimes we have centers that are kind of in the 20 to 30 range, but we also have kind of what are referred to as almost super max institutions, like the Roy McMurties Center for Youth that has 192 beds. So it ranges quite significantly. And what is the typical length of stay? The typical length of stay? The typical length of stay, once again, varies quite significantly.

Sometimes you're dealing with a few weeks or months. Sometimes you're dealing with multiple years. Again, it really has to do with the nature of the offense, with the ways in which youth are assessed for risk. So generally speaking, youth, when they enter into the system, undergo a risk needs assessment report. And this will kind of assess the youth based on their risk in terms of potentially further

harm in the public, their risk within the institution. But again, risk is also dealt with as an indicator of need. And so based on the kind of quantity and quality of needs that have been identified as criminogenic risk factors, the length of stay may vary as well. It sounds like you've laid out a whole menu of things here that you think need to be improved. How focused or not is the current government of Ontario on improving these things? So I think, you know, there are some positive movements being made. So for example, the government announced over $40 million that is committing to pediatric

mental health, especially trying to reach those that are kind of hard to reach. So youth in poverty, youth in family transition, and those kinds of things. So that's definitely a positive step in the right direction. I think much more could be done to divert youth from engagement with the system in the first place and this can happen through a number of different kind of ways. So one is investing in community resources that get youth before they even cause harm in the first place. So this goes back to this idea of addressing you know the nutritional needs, the educational needs,

the mental health needs, the socializing needs. It's upstream versus downstream solutions, right? Absolutely. You want to get them before they're in trouble. Absolutely. You know, I was just looking over the numbers and within the TDSB, for example, the per pupil funding in 2018 was about $233 per pupil. This year it's $133. So we've seen a significant decline in per pupil funding in education.

And of course, a lot of the youth that end up in the system also have, you know, divergent or diverse, rather, educational needs. So increasing funding so that teachers can appropriately address the learning needs of youth would be one thing that would be really important here. The other thing is that youth have the opportunity, and under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, there is a requirement to, in all all possible cases divert youth from detention. This is supposed to be a last order and certainly we are seeing kind of admissions into detention declining but one of the points of contact is with

police and police can either decide to charge youth or divert them into restorative and transformative justice streams. You prefer the latter I presume. Absolutely, absolutely and there is there's research that shows that recidivism is significantly reduced when the first point of contact is the last point of contact right so when contact with police is where contact with the justice system ends we see a lot more kind of beneficial outcomes here. However, you know, we're dealing with human beings that are making these decisions, right, individual police officers.

And oftentimes, research has shown that racial bias, kind of bias around poverty and these kinds of things often determine who gets decided or who's going to get diverted into restorative justice versus who is seen as more of a risk that needs to be diverted into detention facilities. And so more training and resources around the use of restorative justice I think would be a really positive move. Jessica, for my last question, can you handle a wacky question?

I can try. Okay, well I see you're fulfilling your Second Amendment rights here, the right to bear arms, and we've had a lot of professors on this program but none with a tattoo as amazing as that. Okay, you've got to take us through that. What's going on on that left arm of yours? So this is an ode to my favorite movie, Alien. Oh, for goodness sakes, look at that.

So that's Ripley at the top? That's Ripley at the top, and we've got like the cat Jonesy here. We've got some face huggers and some aliens. That is truly an amazing piece of art. I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd, and so this was something that I was excited to do. I'll bet that hurt like crazy to have that put on.

It hurt quite a bit. Well, that's amazing, and so was your presentation here today. Thank you very much for having us in. Thank you so much. Jessica Evans, Toronto Metropolitan University.