New Brunswick youth advocate takes province to task over shackling of young offenders

New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate took the province to task on Monday, saying that handcuffs and shackles have no place on the wrists or legs of most young offenders in the province.

“Stop it, just stop it,” said Norman Bossé.

The chiding came at the release of Bossé’s ninth annual state of the child report in Fredericton, N.B.

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According to the report, the number of youth sentenced to the juvenile detention centre in Miramichi, N.B., in the last year had dropped by more than half compared to 2016.

Bossé says that is an encouraging sign as his goal is to keep as many youth out of jail as possible. But he says problems still persist.

“The default position is that everybody gets shackled and everybody gets handcuffs and leg irons. That is not right,” said Bossé.

Candice Pollack, chair of the N.B. Champion for Child Rights, also rejected the practice.

“Why are we still doing it all it does is it contributes to increasing mental health issues that probably landed a lot of those people in prison in the first place?” she said.

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Bossé said while the number of youth being sent to solitary confinement has decreased since the Ashley Smith inquest, that practice should be stopped altogether.

“We are still incarcerating youth who have not been convicted of any offence with those who have been and that is not a practice that we encourage”

Instead, he says young offenders and those accused of non-violent crimes should be housed in “forensic” foster homes close to their families. He says the New Brunswick Youth Centre in Miramichi, which can house 100 youth, is too costly when right now only about 11 youth are being held at the facility.

A total of five major recommendations were made in the state of the child report today.

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Green party leader David Coon says the problem is there is no way of ensuring those recommendations will be followed.

“His recommendations just go on a shelf when they are tabled in the legislative assembly because unlike the auditor general that reports to a committee on public accounts there is not committee charged with making sure that his recommendations get implemented,” said Coon.

That he says needs to change for the betterment of the province’s youth.