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Mike Harris's children? Yes. And Paul Martin's
Jan. 8, 2006.
LESLIE SCRIVENER
TORONTO STAR

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Across the city last week, people were arguing about "Harris's children" —
violent teens who grew up in the decade of former premier Mike Harris's
conservative government, an era marked by radical cuts to social services
in Ontario.

Some community leaders, like Winston LaRose of the Jane-Finch Concerned
Citizens Organization, lay the blame for increased crime and violence among
young people, especially young black men, squarely at Harris's feet. The
evidence? Harris's government cut welfare rates 21 per cent, slashed
funding for after-school programs and recreation centres, introduced a
policy of zero tolerance in schools and laid off school counsellors.

Through the week, however, some Star readers complained it's unfair to
blame Harris, and that it is nonsense to say cuts to social programs are
responsible for increased crime.

The correlation between social programs and crime is what interests
University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob. When asked, he quickly
found examples of research linking social programs to reduced crime.

"When people ask me as a criminologist about cuts to social programs during
the Harris years, I say a visitor from Mars would think we in Ontario liked
crime a whole bunch because the policies were the reverse of what everybody
would do to reverse crime."

The university's Centre of Criminology summarized a number of studies on
the link between social programs and crime in a 2001 issue of its
publication, Criminological Highlights.

One of the highlights was a 2001 study in the Canadian Journal of
Criminology led by Martin Daly, a psychology professor at McMaster
University, that shows a relationship between income inequality and
homicide rates. Income inequality, Daly says, is a better predictor of
homicide than other measures, such as level of income on its own.

"When economic inequality drops, homicide rates decline," summarized
Criminological Highlights. "Given that economic inequality is partially
under the control of social policies (e.g. employment insurance, social
assistance), these results suggest that government social (and economic
transfer) policies may be important tools in addressing levels of violence
in our society."

Income inequality is rising in Canada, Statistics Canada reported last
year.

The gap is even larger in the U.S., which has a higher murder rate than
Canada. "It's no great bloody mystery," says Daly, speaking from Hamilton.
"It's income inequality.


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`It's no great bloody mystery. It's income inequality'

Martin Daly

McMaster University

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"(Kids) see that some people are succeeding and they're not. They say they
don't have education or the wherewithal to expect success. The perception
of who's successful are drug dealers, gangsters who are flashing money and
have girlfriends and a car."

Perhaps the strongest evidence of a correlation between strong social
programs and reduced crime is a 15-year-long study in a semi-rural
community in New York that looked at the long-term effects of consistent
and frequent home visits by public health nurses during pregnancy, and in
the first two years after a baby's birth. Four hundred women were enrolled,
and 315 children were revisited when they were 15.

The study, led by David Olds from the University of Colorado and reported
in 1998 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that the
teenage children of women who received regular nurse visits at home had
fewer arrests, convictions, and violations of parole, and fewer drug and
alcohol problems.

In the Toronto area, home visits by public health nurses were routine,
though varied in their practice, before city amalgamation. Services were
reduced through the early '90s until 1997, when the Harris government
introduced a program called Healthy Babies, Healthy Children. All new
mothers now receive a phone call and offer of a nurse's home visit.

"But at the same time, there were significant cuts to support kids at the
school-age level, who need strong after-school programs, and that was a
serious problem," says Liz Janzen, healthy living director for Toronto
Public Health. "What we're seeing now — how does that relate?"

There is a strong relationship between health promotion and crime
prevention, says Dennis Raphael without hesitation. He's an associate
professor of health policy and management at York University who has
studied poverty and health for decades.

He says the risk factors for disease are virtually identical to the risk
factors for the incidence of crime; those factors include poverty,
inadequate housing, abuse, and school failure.

"The depth of poverty has increased over the last 10 years, United Way
reports have shown," he says. "Poverty combined with income inequality,
combined with racism. ... People can barely get by, though their parents
are working. Throw in intolerance, they pick up gansta rap, you literally
force them into adopting an alternative identity, because they are living
under severe material deprivation."

None of this excuses people handling guns, says Michael Mendelson, a senior
scholar for the Caledon Institute on Social Policy.

"The (violent teen criminals) have to be found accountable," he says, "but
they are also human beings acting as a result of the forces they are
subject to."

When it comes to politicians, Marvyn Novick of Ryerson University says if
Harris is to blame, then so is Prime Minister Paul Martin. As Jean
Chrétien's finance minister, he cut the Canada Assistance Plan, under which
Ottawa once paid the provinces 50 per cent of social assistance.

"It's unfair to call them Mr. Harris's children," says Novick. "I'm not a
fan, but they're also Mr. Martin's children."