Archive for the ‘Child & Family Debates’ Category
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Child development not linked to length of parental leave, government argues
Sunday, January 30th, 2011
Jan. 28, 2011
…the question of whether longer parental leaves have tangible advantages for children is the subject of great debate among sociologists and economists… Part of the reason for the lack of consensus is that teasing out the effects of parental time off on children’s well-being involves evaluating a host of interconnected variables, including infant health, the quality of child care, parenting styles, work force opportunities, income, gender equality and families’ support systems.
Tags: child care, ideology, participation, rights, standard of living, women
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Wanted: a government with the will to tackle child poverty
Saturday, January 29th, 2011
Jan. 28, 2011
Ms. Turpel-Lafond described the frustration of front-line social workers who have few tools at their disposal to improve the conditions of the families they visit, especially in aboriginal communities. The best hope they can offer for families living in wretched housing environments, for instance, is to put them on a waiting list for better accommodations, which can be 10 years long… Well, the idea isn’t to have a professional friend. A service is not visiting people. A service is taking an active role and taking preventative measures to improve the child’s situation.”
Tags: child care, Health, ideology, Indigenous, poverty, standard of living
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Ignatieff pitches $1-billion family care plan
Saturday, January 29th, 2011
January 28, 2011
a much more fruitful alternative to the “fighter jets, jails and corporate tax cuts” proffered by the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper…. Ignatieff wants to defray the costs of home care with a new, six-month family care employment-insurance benefit-vs. sixweeksof parental leave now available to some -in addition to a new family care benefit of up to $1,350 a year, tax-free. That $1 billion “is a gesture,” he said, to support family caregivers… an aging population -and the current piecemeal, fragmented system…
Tags: budget, disabilities, Health, ideology, poverty, standard of living, women
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Better way to fight crime
Friday, January 28th, 2011
January 27, 2011
Statistics Canada data show a downward trend in the crime rate, including crimes committed with guns, over the past two decades. So what have we done right over the past two decades? That’s what we need to discover and use as a guide. Crime breeding environments exist where there is social injustice, particularly poverty. By getting tough on social injustice we can change environments where crime is accepted. We can see small positive changes have been happening over the last 20 years. More social justice is a better route to less crime and a safer Canada than more policing and more prison cells.
Tags: budget, corrections, featured, ideology, poverty, standard of living
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Prison mental health
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
January 26, 2011
The Canadian Psychiatric Association (To Heal and Protect – Jan. 22) agrees with the warnings of Canada’s Correctional Investigator that the scarcity of treatment for mentally ill inmates is a growing crisis and that getting tough on crime by locking up more Canadians as proposed by the federal government will aggravate the problem. What is needed, are services for inmates and policies that favour early detection and treatment, preventing our citizens with mental illness from filling our prisons.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, disabilities, mental Health
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Prisons grapple with increase in mentally ill female inmates
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Jan. 27, 2011
Across the country, prisons are grappling with the problem of a sharp increase in mentally impaired inmates. But the issue is particularly acute with women. Female offenders are twice as likely as their male counterparts to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition when they’re admitted to prison, according to a recent report by the federal Correctional Investigator. Moreover, the number of women admitted to penitentiaries with mental problems doubled from 1997 to 2009… but the needs of the mentally ill are playing a small role in federal expansion plans.
Tags: corrections, mental Health, women
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The war on drugs is lost
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
Jan 23 2011
The illicit drug trade will continue as long as there is demand for drugs. Instead of sticking to failed policies, that do not reduce the profitability of the drug trade — and thus its power — we must redirect our efforts to the harm caused by drugs to people and societies, and to reducing consumption… But… Drugs are harmful to health. They undermine users’ decision-making capacity… Cutting consumption as much as possible must, therefore, be the main goal. But this requires treating drug users not as criminals to be incarcerated, but as patients to be cared for.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, Health, ideology, mental Health
Posted in Child & Family Debates, Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
To heal and protect: mental illness and the justice system
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Jan. 21, 2011
Behind bars, effective treatment is rarely more than a promise while reality is a severe shortage of psychiatric professionals and a patient population so diverse it can explode if different kinds of inmate mix. The cost to society is immense… untreated prisoners often are released only to get into trouble all over again. Recent figures indicate that nearly 35 per cent of the 13,300 inmates in federal penitentiaries have a mental impairment requiring treatment – triple the estimated total as recently as 2004, and far higher than the incidence of mental illness in the general population.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, mental Health, youth
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Expanding prisons: Getting it right on crime
Monday, January 17th, 2011
Jan 16 2011
Building more jails is a waste of money. We need a fundamental rethink on how to rehabilitate prisoners — not just punish them. Locking up more and more people doesn’t make the public safer. Typical rhetoric from the liberal “soft on crime” crowd? Think again. Newt Gingrich, one of the foremost paladins of the U.S. conservative movement… he best-known leader of Right on Crime, a new conservative group that is blowing the whistle on the idea that more prisons, more prisoners and more money poured into punishment is the way to keep people safe.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, standard of living
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Why the Tories will win the prison expansion political battle
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
January 12, 2011
Our crime rate is trending down. It’s the politics of fear, say the opposition parties… the Tories will win this battle, anyway. So long as our criminal justice system keeps giving average voters a reason to want to see the system “fixed,” the party promising to do that will get the votes… Rehabilitation is great, redemption is dandy, but when Canadians get the sense that criminals are getting off lightly, and that that problem can be made to go away by spending a mere few billion dollars, they will vote for that.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology
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