Overrepresentation of young people under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA)
Young people from ethnocultural communities are overrepresented under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YJCA). Practitioners at the Director of Youth Protection (DYP), as well as various youth criminal justice system actors, are faced with an increasingly diverse ethnocultural clientele, which entails sensitivity to the issues of migration, ethnocultural identities and differential life trajectories experienced by this clientele. There also exists a need to fully understand the experience and specific reality of this population, which accounts for most young offenders placed in closed custody units. Based on the perceptions and experiences of young migrants, their parents and actors from the DYP and youth justice system (n= 46), this contribution focuses on how custodial sentences are experienced by young offenders from immigrant backgrounds in Quebec, specifically in the Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal [CCSMTL]. To better understand their migration and integration process in Quebec, Berry’s acculturation model, as well as its acculturative strategies in the host country, were used. Unlike in previous research on the acculturation process in relation to delinquency, our results do not confirm that assimilation in the host country (rejection of the culture of origin) is the strategy adopted by young migrant offenders. Young people instead mostly appear to be integrated into Quebec, adapting as much to the culture of origin as to the host culture. It is rather the “acculturation gap hypothesis” between different family members that appears to impact young migrant offenders. The results of this field research also makes possible the identification of vulnerability or delinquency risk factors specific to young people from immigrant backgrounds, factors which should be considered during a culturally adapted intervention with both them and their families.