Young Offenders And Youth justice a century after the fact

A century has passed since the Canadian government created a justice system for youth
separate from the adult criminal justice system. When I began writing the first edition
of this book in 1996, youth crime and juvenile justice were major public issues; many
thought that the juvenile justice system was not working to control youth crime, and the
federal government was announcing a Strategy for Reform to address these issues. The first
edition of the book, Young Offenders and Juvenile Justice: A Century after the Fact, was organized
around the concerns expressed about youth crime and justice in public forums that
were part of the Minister of Justice’s attempts to reform the justice system. The concerns
at that time were whether youth crime was on the increase, whether young offenders
received merely “a slap on the wrist” for their offenses under the Young Offenders Act,
and whether youth were more violent than in the past.