Here’s how youth custody works for local girls, since the female wing of the Victoria Youth Custody Centre was closed. It’s a good indication of how the system will work for all offenders, once the centre is closed entirely.
The outline is from representative for children and youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, delivered to a committee of MLAs on Wednesday.
“Let’s say you have a 13-14-year-old girl who’s in custody, and she’s been sent to Burnaby. [The youth custody services centre there handles Island females and will soon handle all local juvenile offenders.] She will wake up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. A panel van will pick her up with a sheriff. In that panel van might also be adults, not just other children.
“She’ll be driven around the Lower Mainland, possibly to pick up other individuals or drop off individuals. She’ll eventually make it to the ferry. They’ll take a ferry over several hours later. Along the way, she’ll be locked in a panel van.
“They will then make it to a police cell somewhere here or possibly the cells in the courthouse, where they will spend several hours in the cells waiting for their matter to come forward. It could be 2:30 p.m. when the court finally gets to that part of the list.
“They will have been fed fast food that day. They will have been transported and been interacting with uniformed people in a variety of holding environments and criminal environments. They will finally get a chance to appear in court, where, I can assure you from looking at these cases and working with these children, they will be so disempowered that they really will not have a voice to say anything to anyone.”
The idea of getting picked up in the pre-dawn and driven around for hours before participating in court proceedings to determine their liberty is simply inappropriate, she said, particularly if the offender is an aboriginal youth who’s likely suffered significant dislocation and probably also been the victim of criminal behaviour. And there’s likely no parent around to complain that their child was being carted around in a van for hours with adult offenders with serious violent cases before the courts.
“I put these points out because the reality of how the youth justice system works … We’re all very insulated from it.”
The description was a prelude to her registering “my strongest objections” to the decision to shut the centre down. “Because we don’t want to spend the money to have a custody centre, we’re going to make them travel for hours and hours and hours.”
She applauded Victoria police’s intention to defy the government’s replacement plan of housing children in the police cells. “They know well that there are serious liability issues with placing young girls and boys in a police cell beside adult populations.”
Turpel-Lafond said if another service — say, knee surgeries — was being centralized in one location, there would be a hue and cry about abandoning patient-centred care. “But when it comes to children and the youth justice system, what about child-centred supports?”
Children and Family Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux announced the shutdown last week as a done deal. But there’s a swell of opposition to the idea and it’s coming from some powerful places. Turpel-Lafond and provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall have written a public letter condemning the idea. Local police departments are shaking their heads at what’s expected of them.
Others in the judicial system are fuming, and various local governments are considering resolutions opposing the closure. It would be an uphill fight to change what Turpel-Lafond called a wrong-headed, flawed, unworkable and completely inappropriate decision. But the fight’s not over.
Just So You Know: The representative reminded MLAs of another peremptory closure in 2008. The mom-baby program in a women’s jail was shut down to save money. A charter challenge was filed and the government lost on all counts late last year. Now it has to scramble to put the program back together again. That case could have implications for the Victoria centre.
