There’s one thing that can make a taxpayer go nuts, and that’s observing their government using the same incompetent tactics and getting the same failing outcomes over and over again.

Unfortunately, this has been the leading pattern when it comes to our approach to incarcerating youth with mental illnesses in Canada, and the loss doesn’t just affect the youth and their caregivers, but also the taxpayers.

The needs for the juvenile system to swing in a different direction couldn’t sound more appealing. As Christopher Mallett and Craig Boitel wrote in a recent study, outcomes for youth that attended residential treatment centres had significantly lowered recidivism rates along with “increased family involvement, shorter length of stays, and involvement with aftercare programming.”

Canada operates juvenile detention centres that are not only costly but are also absent in dependable standards, and carry a lack of evidence-based programs that would help integrate youth back into the community, thus producing negative outcomes for the individual and for the safety of others.

Despite the investment that taxpayers are making toward these detention centres, Canada’s recidivism rate is high.

Approximately 40 per cent of all youth released from a detention centre end up reoffending, as opposed to a low 15 per cent of youth that go through a rehabilitative approach. Ultimately, the justice system makes matters worse.

There are hardly any evidence-based advantages of keeping these youths locked up, and end up costing taxpayers upward of $120,000 a year per individual — several times more than probation/community outreach would.

Therefore, the justice system should thoroughly assess the risks and benefits connected to pathologizing youth that go in. Dangerous behaviour, aggressiveness, lack of weighing out risks are symptoms of mental illness along with adolescence.

It is exactly because of such differences between adult and children that we have established two separate justice systems.

As a country, we can do better when it comes to prosecuting and imprisoning youth. While change will be difficult, implementing the same unsuccessful system of dealing with these youth is just reckless — to the public’s safety along with the taxpayer’s money.

We urge Canada to repair the Youth Criminal Justice Act and to support these young offenders in achieving their potential in leading constructive, law abiding lives.

We have to choose between treating a youth’s symptom or the cause of that symptom.

We live in a society that glorifies incarceration rather than prevention; the actions we take to fix that inequity mirror our priorities as a society.

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