Youth Criminal Justice Policy in Canada A Critical Introduction
In the past ten years, much has changed in terms of youth justice policies in Canada as well as in the way Canadian society has evolved. Canada has a new Act governing youth crime, and there are indications that the Act will be revised again to make it "t
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Shahid Alvi
Youth Criminal Justice Policy in Canada A Critical Introduction
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Prof. Shahid Alvi Faculty of Social Science and Humanities University of Ontario Institute of Technology 55 Bond Street East Oshawa, Ontario L1G OA5 Canada e-mail: [email protected]
ISSN 2192-8533 ISBN 978-1-4419-0272-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0273-3
e-ISSN 2192-8541 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-0273-3
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938641 The Author(s) 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Cover design: eStudio Calamar, Berlin/Figueres Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Dedicated To PJC, E and M
Introduction
Although this short book is generally aimed at students of youth crime, I want to broaden the conversation to include youth who may not be guests of the criminal justice system, but who are nevertheless part of a drift towards punitiveness and social exclusion in Canada. There are many reasons that Canadian social policy has drifted in this direction. This book describes that drift, its consequences, and where we might go from here. In Chap. 1, I examine the criminalization of youth in early Canada up to the present day. I provide a historical discussion of youth in Canada, paying attention to the widely accepted idea that concepts such as youth, teenagers, pre-teens, and children are social constructions reflecting broader social and cultural values and conditions. As with concepts like gender and ‘‘race,’’ social constructionist theorists have long pointed to the ways in which such seemingly objective social phenomena are in fact manifestations of what Berger and Luckmann (1967) call ‘‘nomos building’’—the process by which people try to impose ‘‘meaningful order on experience’’ which in turn is crucial to the larger project of making official versions of reality come to be taken for granted. Yet such processes are themselves subject to situations in which the ‘‘taken for granted’’ becomes problematic and new versions of reality are constructed in response. In this chapter, then, I attempt to paint a picture of the changing concept of youth and childhood, and how these shifting definitions in turn have been reflected in social and youth justice policy. In Chap. 2, my ob
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