Youth justice and the 'new street urchins' in Canada

Over the last ten years, the number of street youth in Canadian cities has increased significantly. Concerns have been raised about how best to manage this group, many of whom are homeless, drug-addicted, HIV-infected, and/or involved in the sex trade. It has fallen to provincial governments to respond with new legislation and policy to regulate these "new street urchins," and the provincial statutes are similar, in many respects, to legislation linked with child-saving reforms at the beginning of the 2oth Century (notably, elements of the Juvenile Delinquents Act). Ironically, this old legislation was introduced to deal with a comparable group of troublesome, urban, "street urchins." The work of Cohen (1 985) and especially his notions of patterns of social control are used to explain the unintended consequences of reforms that began in the 1960s, and that have resulted in the new provincial youth control legislation.