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Article: It's all in the denominator: trends in the processing of girls in Canada's youth courts.
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Canadian Criminal Justice Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In attempts to understand youth crime in Canada, many scholars have examined trends in police charging and youth court processing of young offenders throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There appears to be general agreement that the rate at which young people are charged has increased under the Young Offenders Act (Carrington 1999). Further examination of the data, however, suggests that this increase is due more to a change in the exercise of police discretion--less diversion--than to a change in actual offending rates (see Carrington 1999, for a full review).
Analyses of youth court processing reveal that over the years there has been provincial variation in the rate ...