Canadian Youth Criminal Justice
...The youth justice system reflects the fact that young people lack the maturity of adults. However, it also promotes accountability, responsibility, and consequences for all youth crimes while being different from the adult system. “The levels of accountability are consistent with youth but are reduced with age and level of maturity” 1. Young people are to be held accountable through punishments that are fair and in proportion to the seriousness of the offence, much like the code of Hammurabi. The YCJA also sets out clear objectives to encourage the use of extrajudicial measures. Experience in Canada has shown that methods outside the court process can provide effective responses to less serious youth crime. One of the key objectives of the Youth Criminal Justice Act is to increase the use of the “non-court” approach to less serious offences by youth. These extrajudicial measures help provide meaningful consequences (i.e. making the young person repair the harm done to the victim.) This increases the use of non-court arrangements and allows the courts to focus on more serious cases. Most cases can be dealt with outside the court process (See figure 1), since most cases in youth court are non-violent. (See table 1) After the level of accountability has been decided, the approaches of consequences are stated reinforce respect for societal values. This is intended to help long-term solutions to youth crime. “One of the main principles of the Youth Criminal Justice Act is to encourage the repair of harm done, respecting genders, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic differences.” 2 This should ensure achievement for a young person after being released for custody. Most of criminal behaviour results from the offender’s lack of being socialized into accepting the values of society. The most important objective of the youth justice system is to protect the public, and this is best achieved through crime prevention, by making meaningful consequences for all youth crime and rehabilitating youth so they c...