Boot 'em into camps
We must stop coddling young thugs
October 27, 2006
Boy, Canada's youth crime laws are
working well, aren't they?
The pointy-headed, social worker
gurus who have hijacked our criminal justice system have been
telling us for years how coddling young criminals, keeping them out
of custody and rehabilitating them in the community is the only
answer to kiddy crime.
You can't incarcerate 12-year-olds
and expect them to return to the community and be grounded,
responsible members of society, the social worker types say. No,
you've got to keep them in the community where they can continue to
develop their ties with gangs, drugs and dysfunctional family
members.
Yeah, that's working well.
Canada decided some years ago that
keeping young criminals in custody was wrong and that parole orders
were the preferred choice for dealing with kid criminals, even
violent repeat offenders.
And where has that brought us?
How about the three young girls --
one aged 12 and two aged 14 -- and a 15-year-old boy who allegedly
attacked and killed a Winnipeg woman like a pack of wild dogs.
Kids who were out at 2:45 a.m. last
weekend, evidently with no parental supervision.
The kids allegedly beat the woman
repeatedly, kicking and punching her, leaving her for dead at her
Spence Street home, only to succumb to her injuries in hospital.
It was brutal, unthinkable and
exceptionally violent for a group of young kids who should have been
tucked away in their bedrooms, resting up for Sunday morning hockey
and ringette practice.
It was, in a word, evil.
It's not an isolated incident,
either. Cops say they're seeing an increase in violence from young
kids, especially from young girls who are falling deeper into the
world of violent crime.
We can come up with all the reasons
in the world why these kids are doing this -- screwed up parents,
bad neighbourhoods, domestic abuse, boredom, etc. And they all have
validity.
But you can't tell me these kids
don't know if they're caught doing something really bad that very
little will happen to them.
After a while, it becomes street
knowledge that if you're under 18 and you commit a serious crime,
you're going to face few, if any, consequences for your actions.
It's human nature, and these kids aren't stupid.
Especially kids who have already
been through the system.
That's what the Youth Criminal
Justice Act, and how it's applied in the courts, has brought us.
It's a social experiment that has
failed miserably.
There's only one answer for kids
who commit serious crimes -- we need some form of military-style
boot camp.
You have to take these kids --
whether it's chronic car thieves, arsonists or murderers -- out of
the community for public safety purposes.
And you have to put them in a
controlled, disciplined environment where there is structure,
sobriety and education.
In many cases, these kids have
little or no parenting in their lives. And if you want to turn their
lives around, you have to try to fill that gap.
The only way to do that is to
remove them from the destructive environments they're living in and
give them discipline, life skills and hope.
There's no other way.
These ridiculous parole sentences
where kids go back to their communities and hang out with the same
destructive people who got them into a life of crime in the first
place don't work.
They do nothing to help
rehabilitate kids and they send a message out to the public that if
you're a kid and you commit serious crimes, virtually nothing will
happen to you.
It's time for boot camps. |
