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OPEN FORUM Questions and Discussion Question: I am Owen Davey, I am with the RCMP and I would like to ask my colleague whether she has a really confident base upon which to make the assessment that community interest is limited to taxi drivers. I can say to you confidently, from my own experience, particularly recent experience over the last 15 months through meetings with elected officials, with local service district officials up and down the province, that is not the case. There is an insatiable interest and appetite to be involved. My experience has been that the structure, the content, the organizational philosophy, the culture of the organization, delivering public service whether it be in policing or corrections, that if there is a limitation to willingness, ability and capacity for communities to be involved, and to show extra ordinary good judgement, and that the diving lines are between serious and not serious. That has been my experience, and I am not confident that your outlook with respect to the communities, particularly in this province is an accurate one. I would be very, very cautious in making the assessment that you have. Reply: GAYLE MACDONALD: Well, my talk was designed to provoke and we can agree to disagree Owen, as we do often. I think that what I am getting at basically with my flippant remark about taxi drivers, I am very concerned with the ability of communities to carry programs. I am very concerned with the ability of the "volunteers" out there to be responsible for yet one more aspect of the State. I mean let's not forget that this is a part of the State shuffling off some of its responsibility that we so called "elected" them to do; its part of that social welfare platform disappearing in the same way. I agree with you, there are a lot of people in the community that are very concerned about crime, that are enthusiastic - with some of them I would question that enthusiasm and wonder what motivates it sometimes. I teach criminology, so I know the interest in this area is phenomenal. But I am not sure the interest comes from the same place all the time. But getting back to what I am saying, my concern is that unless we do this structurally well, unless this responsibility is truly shared, these programs are not going to work. LESLIE REID: I would just like to add something, I understand sort of both sides. I think that the community really wants to take on this responsibility. You hear it saying "I want to be there to make the decisions", but I also know that as the Executive Director that it takes a phenomenal amount of time to make sure that everyone has the information, and the understanding, the parameters, the guidelines, the checks and balances to try and get it to where they are able to make "the decision", which is all they really want to do; to say whether this person gets this, this or this. Sometimes it is so overwhelming that the structure kind of inflows or crumbles beneath us. So it is a very valid statement for the caution of setting up an appropriate structure. CHARLES FERRIS: Just to reinforce the comment that I made in respect to the sentencing circle, my colleague who was involved with this first application said that it is incredibly time consuming. She really has some questions about how the success of that type of program can go; for the first time it is very exciting and so on, but once it goes to a more general application what kind of structures are going to have to be provided to make it work? It seems to require a lot of resources, a lot of volunteers from First Nations communities but also from legal aid and the Crown, which are not experiencing great resources these days. MARY BETH BEATON: I think from everything that has been said, that it is an excellent question. I think it is a question that has to be posed, and a question that will only eventually be answered. There is a lot of enthusiasm, there is a tremendous interest in the administration of justice, but what will happen in terms of the commitment of the community down the road to the maintenance of these programs, how will they be set up and is there a skill level, are there people out there who are knowledgeable enough to administer in the community context, can they sustain it and how, I think is a very legitimate question but I don't know what the answer is. Comment: I am Tim Holden, I am with the New Brunswick Community College Protective Services and I also represent the Miramichi Community Corrections Council. There are few comments that I would like to make relative to what I have heard here this morning. It is very interesting to hear the differences and the cautions discussed today. I go back quite a few years in relation to this because I have also been involved with diversion as far back as the 70's when I instituted and developed a program in a place called Labrador City in Newfoundland. It was the first one that was really offered in Newfoundland and the policy and procedure that was established at that time was accepted and utilized by the whole province. When I get into it, I have some concerns as well when it comes to the volunteerism that occurs within the community, because we had lots of volunteers when we started but by the time we had been there for two and a half years we had changed over about four times. People do get burnt out and it is a program that needs to be really well developed; there are people in it who become mediators within the system that this is the way that this one decides to go, and I see it being as another form of diversion. Some questions are: how many times does a person commit an offence before we decide that they have to go to jail at some stage of the game? There are a lot of lines that need to be drafted here, and drafted with caution; so if we do sort of bring up the ire of the public then it is not going to work because those are the people you want to work on the volunteer side of it and to be working within the community. Looking back at some of the comments, and one of them being to find out the causes for prevention, a lot of us out in the field know them as well. You take a person from a home that has been broken or there are a lot of problems and living at a low level, if you put them through a corrections program and then put them back in that home, it will have been a waste of time. We have seen this over and over again. I am also involved with the alternatives measures program in the Miramichi, and in that program I think there are a lot of good points, but we have to be careful as to how its going to evolve and going to be run. That program has worked extremely well over the nine years that I have been involved with it. I do the instruction or the training side of the program, and we haven't had one re-offender out of that program. With that type of success, I can see the viability of diversion programs, and I agree that diversion with adults is a needed concept within our communities. I can see people for minor offenses and other things like this going through diversion programs, but once we cross that line and get into violent situations that's when the public is going to start to get their ire up, and their going to get mad, and the next thing you know you have a major problem in another way. Why the diversion programs didn't work in the 70's? It just didn't have the politics, the politics were not there behind it to support it. I think the politics are behind this to support it but I am a little leery of the motivation. The motivation I think is dollars and cents - maybe that is a good thing: and if it is a good thing then that is great because I can see the need for some of the programs that are coming out. That is just some of the comments that I wanted to make. Thank you.
GAYLE MACDONALD: I want to thank you for your comments because I think that they reflect a range of concerns of a lot of people here. I want to share with you an antidote. When I was working in Halifax I was working with a little group of kids called "Mini Museum", and we collected antique bottles on the north side of Halifax which is historically a very rich part of Halifax, but economically very poor. The Solicitor General got word of this in Nova Scotia, when Dan Stoke had money to hand out for programs like this. They called and said,"I think you are doing crime prevention" and I said "no, no we are just doing some community work with these kids to keep them off the street, keep them occupied, give them something to do, think about and have fun together". They replied that this was crime prevention, and we will give you thirty thousand dollars if you call it crime prevention, and it will give you a project for the summer. We took the money, we called it a crime prevention project and we had these kids involved in all kinds of things for an entire summer. Your comment about broken homes, we had fourteen or fifteen children ranging from the age of 9 to 13. We took them on outings regularly, we had permission forms to be signed, and there was only one family that consistently signed this form. We were taking these kids 20 or 40 kilometres away, took them for a three day camping trip in the winter and not one parent even asked if we were qualified to do that, which really scared us. The other comment I wanted to make is that the comment I made about volunteers was not about credentialism. I think there are a lot of qualified housewives out there who could have a lot to say to us about criminal justice, what it means and what it means for their children to be safe on the streets. It wasn't about credentialism, it was about "burn out" that I was referring to, and training and support. Volunteers are often given a lot of good training but not a lot of support, and then expected to make heavy duty decisions with not necessarily the backing. And I hope that you are right about the politics being behind it, and I think you are right that that is why diversion programs in the 70's did not work - I think that they did work but that the results were not incorporated back into the criminal justice system for exactly the reason you mentioned.
Reply: LESLIE REID: I just want to add a little bit to that. When we define community corrections we are always talking about "those criminals" or "those young offenders". The John Howard Society in Fredericton is doing mediation programs in daycare, and that too is community corrections. We are going in and talking to four and five year olds about "yeay" days and "blah" days, but by doing that we are teaching them the respect and right and responsibilities that they have as individuals and as a group. What happened was that the little five year olds went home and told mom and dad, and mom and dad's were phoning so that they can get together a group to teach mediation to the parents of the children at the day care - that is community corrections as well. I think that by teaching to the young people as well that they kind of are the rock in the middle of the pond, and it can certainly grow to affect all. Comment: Back in 1960 I first became involved with community corrections. You can look at my age now and you will see that I was a teenager at that time. I became a ward of the Province, and I was a ward through the Children's Aid Society and placed in an institution. Having said that, I think it is about time that corrections started moving into the area of community corrections. Again if you look at it from my view point back in the 60's when I became a ward of the Province, I wasn't placed there because of break and enter, I was placed there by the Children's Aid Society because there was no place then. Now that it has broken down, you have to identify and classify, I use the word classify because later on I did work in corrections, I did work for the National Parole Service, I did have to classify offenders for minimum, medium, and maximum securities based on the crime, the sentence, on the institutions that were available. The pendulum always swings, now I am not an academic even though I do have three university degrees. The bottom line is that the best degree is the experience of life. The Miller Report, the first time I laid eyes on it is yesterday afternoon, and the fellow that gave me this is the youngest kid that is still looking for compensation. You haven't in New Brunswick cleaned up your act in some areas. A kid, who is now 44 years old, has still not been compensated for his pain. That whole process you have not healed. You have to look at the whole healing process. Community corrections in New Brunswick should and will work, you are only twenty five years young. Community corrections is the way to go. When I look back 35 years ago when I became a ward, the first guy that spoke to me in his office said "you are going to be here for five years or more, we have got you till you are 21". While I was able to be released at 18, I served two and a half years at Kingsclear and DIH. A lot of my experiences in those institutions may seem very barbaric to you; most of you are bureaucratic types or academic types. Well I have a desk, I have a computer in my office, I have a couple of degrees, but I never forgot where the pain and the hurt came from. I asked my friend from Saint John to come with me to this conference, I said to him that "you might have a few words for these people to listen to. You are still the victim, you haven't got closure yet". Twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand - you may wonder what the heck is this guy talking about. The pendulum swings. In the old days jails were institutional corrections, and that will never go. Today, community corrections - alternative programs, that is the way to go. That would have saved me then. I am lucky; very fortunate; very, very fortunate. I had something inside me that said "I ain't going that way to Dorchester". You have got to break down corrections between youth and adults - you have got to nip it in the bud. I was lucky, but there are lots of others out there. It is a good direction that St. Thomas is moving in; although I don't know the professors that are now here teaching criminology. When I was attending St. Thomas there was a professor here who wanted me to attend the Centre of Criminology. After I tried to open the discussion and investigation of Kingsclear I changed my mind and went into education. I ended up in special education working with "kids at risk" - that is the new terminology now, the new buzz word. I am well trained in that, I was a kid at risk. All the people in this room are making a few mistakes: that institution was not necessarily wrong - the only reason you are closing it is because of the stigma. Over the last couple of days in New Brunswick I have spoken to people in corrections, and you are heading in some wrong direction. History is repeating itself here, and if I come back in 20 years and say I told you so, you are hearing it again. There is a movement to put youth correctional institutions side by side adult ones in this province right now. It is a bad role model approach. It is the same bad role model approach used when Kingsclear was put beside the reformatory, and the guards or custodians at the time would make a freudian slip and say "you are not getting out of here, and as soon as you are getting out of here we are throwing you over the fence into the reformatory". Or the inmates would look at their brothers across the road and say "that's where I want to go". Do not put both systems together. It is better to separate the two. If you are going in that direction, you are going in the wrong direction, and I will come back twenty years from now and I'll tell your grandchildren I told you so. Thank you very much.
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© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University |
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