Archive for the ‘Child & Family Debates’ Category
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Women see the other side
Dec 27 2011
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program allows those in prison who never dreamed of going beyond high school to achieve that seeming impossibility. It is rehabilitative, character-changing and confidence-building. It has been shown to reduce crime and violence. It also engages regular college students in a world they may only have encountered through TV or film and deepens their understanding of social problems. It pushes them to work for changes in their communities to reduce crime and recidivism. Inside-Out is a program that should be emulated in prisons across the country.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, poverty, women
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Harper government misguided in its tough-on-crime approach
Dec. 12, 2011
Canada is heading to that awful place that the United States has just inhabited for 20 years – a place of longer and longer prison sentences, of a futile “war on drugs,” of mandatory minimum sentences for nearly everything (including six months for growing as few as five marijuana plants) that remove judges’ discretion. The financial and social costs in the U.S. were incalculable, and just as the U.S. is coming to its senses, Canada is losing its own.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology
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Caledon Submission… on National Finance [Tax Credits]
Dec. 12, 2011
We were pleased to see recognition of caregiver needs in Bill C-13. But we do not support the design of the new measure, which will deny assistance to lower-income families and provide tax assistance to non-poor families, including the well-off. Similarly, the Children’s Arts Tax Credit, while important acknowledgement of the value of arts and cultural activities, will do nothing for lower-income families but will help the rest, including the relatively well-off. We also raise general concerns regarding tax expenditures as a means of financing social needs.
Tags: budget, ideology, poverty, standard of living, tax
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Ontario closer than ever to legalization of marijuana
Apr 18, 2011
… the Ontario Superior Court struck down two key parts of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that prohibit the possession and production of pot. The court declared the rules that govern medical marijuana access and the prohibitions laid out in sections 4 and 7 of the Act “constitutionally invalid and of no force and effect” on Monday, effectively paving the way for legalization.
Tags: crime prevention, Health, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 2 Comments »
The best defence against bullying
Nov. 18, 2011
… research shows that when students spoke up, or jumped in physically, half of the incidents ended abruptly. Telling an adult is the ideal response – the more students who come forward, the more likely school officials will react. But in the higher grades… teenagers need specific skills: how to rally their friends to face down the bully or reach out to the victim… victims of bullying reported that bystanders were the most helpful when they comforted them after the fact, helped them get away from the situation, or gave them advice. What makes the difference may be numbers…
Tags: mental Health, youth
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 5 Comments »
Mandatory reading on mandatory minimum sentences
Nov. 15, 2011
In Canada, the federal prison population rose by 1,000 to 14,500, in just 18 months, partly as a result of new mandatory minimums, a federal report found in August. At an average cost of $110,000 a year per inmate, the benefits would be questionable at any time – all the more so when economies nearly everywhere are at risk… the Canadian government… seems intent on following the failed U.S. model, even as that country beats a retreat.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology
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CASW Asking for Balance on Crime and Punishment Legislation
November 7, 2011
“Social workers are respecfully appealing to Prime Minister Harper to lift the 100 day self-imposed timetable for passing C-10, retract the bill, and to reintroduce its component parts next session so that each can be debated on their own merits”… “Victims justly require protection, support and justice; let us honour them by not creating a system that, as an unintended consequence, creates more victims that it supports.”
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, participation
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Tough-on-crime bill toughest on taxpayers
Nov. 4, 2011
Even if Canada never reaches the startling levels of U.S. incarceration (with less than 5% of the global population, it is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners), for every new prisoner created by the Harper government’s toughon-crime bill, and for every year the new laws add to a prisoner’s sentence, there will be impacts to not just the cost of prisons and courts, but even more lingering strains on provincial health and social program budgets.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, standard of living, tax
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There is no crime epidemic
Nov. 04, 2011
A recent thorough study of homicides by Tina Hotton Mahony of Statistics Canada lays all the facts before Canadians. It’s too bad – indeed, it’s a tragedy – that these sorts of facts have no influence on the Harper government’s expensive and counterproductive, politically motivated “tough on crime” agenda… this is the government that abolished the long-form census, the method every statistician here and abroad said would produce the most accurate facts. In that file, as in criminal justice and others, it’s a government that either looks simple facts in the face and denies them, or willfully disregards them.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, featured, ideology
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Harper’s crime bill needs cost-effective prevention
Oct. 24, 2011
Parliament should add a Crime Reduction Board to the government’s omnibus crime bill… Public Safety Canada provides a website with examples of effective precrime prevention programs that have stopped crime before citizens became victims, but these are not yet being used from coast to coast… If the federal government matched every additional dollar for prisons with another dollar for prevention and victim rights, Canada would become one of the safest countries in the world – and cost-effectively!
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, standard of living, youth
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