Bulletin: Promoting Responsible Behaviour and Accountability for Youth

Effective intervention should have the right mix of supervision and support.

Specifically:

• What level of supervision is needed to keep communities safe and to help prevent offenders from reoffending?
• What kind of support is needed so an offender can live a peaceful, productive life once they return to the community after custody?

Attendance centres, and navigation and referrals, can help provide such intervention.

More Attendance Centres In 2007, the Halifax Youth Attendance Centre opened. The centre provides supervision and structured programming tailored to meet the individual needs of young offenders. Professionals, including probation officers, youth workers, teachers, an employment counsellor, social worker, and psychologist, work together, under the direction of an on-site deputy superintendent from the Nova Scotia Youth Facility. These professionals work closely with family members and build partnerships with community agencies, as defined in the individual's case management plan.

Programs include education, employment, and life-skills programs; counselling; and support for addictions, anger management, and other emotional and mental health issues.

Following an evaluation, government will fine-tune its programming and approach and offer programming in more communities, as the youth bail supervision program is expanded.

Help with Navigation and Referral Nova Scotians want to have confidence that, when an offender is released from custody, he or she is ready and able to live peacefully within our communities. Yet, young people just out of custody often do not have the maturity, patience, family support, or social skills to support the right decisions.

Government will work with the John Howard Society to develop a community-based navigation and referral service. This service will link the individual with job search assistance, housing, training, and addictions and mental health support. Efforts will also be made to develop new community-based services such as circles of support. This will help strengthen the community’s ability to support safety and crime prevention efforts. We will test this approach in a pilot project in the Halifax Regional Municipality.

Investment:

• More Attendance Centres $1,306,000
• Navigation and Referral $55,000 Sites:
• More Attendance Centres Cape Breton Regional Municipality, Annapolis Valley
• Navigation and Referral Halifax Regional Municipality Strategy Link: Intervention, see pages 40–41, 45–46, Time to Fight Crime Together

The complete crime prevention strategy is available online at www.gov.ns.ca .