By Allan Castle, Hayli Millar, Yvon Dandurand, Vivienne Chin, Shawn Bayes, Megan Capp, Richard Fowler, Jessica Jahn and Barbara Pickering.
What happens to children whose parents are incarcerated, remanded, or otherwise subject to the criminal justice system? Too often, the answer is: pain and distress due to separation from a parent, stigmatization, poor performance in school, social withdrawal, impoverishment, diminished life chances, health problems, and increased likelihood of the child themselves being incarcerated in adulthood. That these harms to children are unintended ‘collateral’ effects of justice decisions is immaterial. The effects are similar to those of many other more direct, adverse experiences a child may encounter. The adult criminal justice system in Canada is of course not alone in creating harmful outcomes for children, today or historically. For more than 150 years, the residential school system h caused devastating intergenerational harm to generations of Indigenous families. Provincial child welfare systems continue to be a focus of reform and devolution due to the harmful effects of past and current practices. In identifying the harms caused by institutions and systems, we must point out that harm to children is not only systemic in origin. Parental abuse or neglect driven by substance use, trauma or mental illness is common, even though many of those individual behaviours may in turn have systemic origins. Whether the harms experienced by children have systemic or individual causes, we now understand that many different actors and sectors must collaborate to protect children, as systemic and individual harms routinely overlap and multiply the damage done. For example, the trauma and loss of belonging associated with being removed from parental care due to parental incarceration may be expressed by self-harm or behavioral acting out at school. The disruption of parental incarceration can impede the delivery of routine health care, such as vaccinations. Child homelessness brings greater exposure toexploitation. Considering these overlaps, it is insufficient to act in isolation. Child advocates, Indigenous Nations and communities, non-profit services, child welfare and health authorities, educators and other systems – including the adult criminal justice system – all have a role to play in collaborating to protect children, prevent their stigmatization, and support their healthy development. The subject of this paper – the substantial impact of adult criminal justice system decisions on the dependent children of those coming before the system – has to date received little consideration by the system itself, whether in terms of research, case law, legislation, or legal principles. Moreover, there is no consensus within the system itself as to the degree of responsibility the system itself should bear in mitigating these harms. One recent superior court decision suggested that while lamentable, such child impact should be understood as an unavoidable consequence of serious criminality.
