Kids in Lock Up
The idea of incarcerating children has become an election year football in Canada as the country’s Tory justice minister tries to convince voters that the cutoff age for jailing juveniles should be lowered to age 10. For much of the last century, Canada’s age of “criminal responsibility" was far lower--- seven years old---until it was raised to 12 in the 1970’s. Even with the bar set at 12, Canada had one of the highest rates of juvenile incarceration in the world, higher than the US---until in 2001, when the country’s Youth Criminal Justice act was voted into law, kids with minor offenses were given community service instead of incarceration, and the youth incarceration rate dropped 40 percent. DARCY HENTON for the Edmonton Sun