It is therefore imperative, in my opinion, that every facet of the juvenile justice system collaborate to resist the pitfalls and mistakes of allowing the riskiest and most negative influences of either the juvenile or adult systems to prevail. I believe that resisting the use of currently touted actuarial risk assessment instruments is central to this struggle. Instead, we should build upon the successes of processes that build upon young people's skills and capacities and focus on documenting their successes, develop services and supports with and for them, and promote peer and self-directed initiatives as a priority. The new Act provides us with new opportunities to encourage and strive for success— mindful of, but not hampered by the risk of failure.

Identification of the Issues

Most of the research literature regarding women prisoners concludes that they are over-classified when tools designed for men are applied to them (Federally Sentenced Women Program [FSWP], Literature Review, CSC, 1994). This is similarly the case when such tools are applied to young people, especially young women. Most youth are assessed as high risk in order to enable the juvenile justice system to place them in controlled environments for their own protection, ease of correctional management, public protection, and, sometimes, for treatment purposes. With the exception of public protection, it is respectfully submitted that the other rationale for detaining youth, pre-trial or post-conviction, contravene their rights under the provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Most provincial assessment and classification schemes adopt or adapt the models developed and utilized by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). The CSC system is based upon determinations of risk based upon assessments by their staff of each prisoner's probability of escape, level of risk to the safety of the public if s/he were to escape, and the degree of supervision and control s/he requires in the penitentiary setting. The tools treat all "offences" as homogenous categories which are not contextualized by or correlated with individual prisoners' personal histories and circumstances, situations leading up to their alleged involvement in their offence(s), their participation or non-involvement in institutional violence, or behavioural difficulties in prison.

A significant portion of the risk assessment process includes considerations of what are referred to as "static" factors that include historical and other immutable characteristics of a person's life. For instance, "social history" is one such factor that is taken into account by systems when they assess risks and assign security classification levels. As a result, the essence of this part of the assessment process is an examination of the individual's experiential background and degree of disadvantage prior to incarceration. Because so much of the research on the instruments used is performed exclusively within the justice system, it should come as no surprise that such "research" tends to be used to "validate" or otherwise credit such instruments as successful and reliable predictors of violent offending and recidivism. The researchers then basically convert the needs yielded by histories of disadvantage and discrimination and convert them into risk factors.