Lots of drunken violence, little chance of treatment

SARA MINOGUE

In March, 2005, RCMP in Taloyoak found 20-year-old Mark Lyall drunk, with his pants around his knees, in the snow. When an RCMP officer tried to coax him into a warm, safe place, Lyall punched him twice in the face.

When Lyall was convicted of assault on January 26, Judge Robert Kilpatrick spoke to him at length about the need to quit drinking and look after his family, and the gravity of attacking a police officer — before delivering a suspended sentence, with probation for one year.

“I don’t want you leaving here today with the wrong impression,” Kilpatrick told Lyall. “This court takes offences involving police officers very seriously. In many cases, individuals who attack police officers go to jail. It’s that serious. But you are struggling with issues beyond your control.”

During the two-day court session, Nunavut’s travelling court attempted to deal with 90 cases — or 10 per cent of the hamlet’s 900 residents. Alcohol is a factor in about three quarters of these, said Taloyoak RCMP Cpl. John Baranyi, the cop who had been punched in the face.

Baranyi said that the “huge” number of files is mainly due to a backlog of cases from 2005, a busy year for booze and drugs in the community, and because of the few court days held each year in the growing community (this year Taloyoak will see four two-day court circuits in the community, up from three in previous years).

But he also believes that treatment could prevent many of the problems from happening.

“There is no counselor at all,” Baranyi said, “and that is a concern for most people in the community.”

The situation is the same in most Kitikmeot communities, where residents high on drugs or drunk are frequently the cause of violent offences.

Taloyoak is lucky to have a mental health worker, but like neighboring Kugluktuk, Gjoa Haven and Kugaaruk, the community has no addictions counselor, and no wellness centre to help prevent domestic violence. Instead, the hamlet has an empty office for a wellness worker, and a budget of $50,000 to hire someone, but that’s not enough money to bring in someone with the required expertise.

“A professional is what’s needed,” said senior administrative officer Scotty Edgerton. That’s because few people in the community have the skills or training to start up a wellness centre, collect funding and help their friends and neighbors with trauma, anger management, and booze and drug addictions.

“If you’re out drinking and carousing around and have some problems caused by booze or drugs, are you gonna go tell your auntie about it? It’s something that people feel a little uneasy about,” Edgerton said.

And if it’s too expensive to bring in a professional from outside, Edgerton said, local people need a high level of training in order to meet professional standards of confidentiality.

Taloyoak’s struggle is repeated in all of the Kitikmeot’s small hamlets, which are either short of money, or short of qualified, enthusiastic people who can make things happen with the limited funding they get.

Gjoa Haven has been without a wellness coordinator since last October, when the hamlet ran out of money to pay for one; their full-time mental health worker recently retired to Victoria, B.C.

In Kugluktuk, two staff members struggle to run an Awareness Centre. And while the new Tahuiktit Centre aims to offer adult learning workshops, there is at present no social worker or mental health worker in the community.

The situation in Kugaaruk is only slightly more positive. There, the department of health and social services has a social worker and a mental health worker.

A community crisis shelter was recently closed when the group that ran it disbanded, but the hamlet still manages to run its own wellness centre, offering prenatal workshops, youth and elders get-togethers, a ladies’ teatime, and a recently-created justice committee. The hamlet also runs a breakfast program at the school.

And recently, Kugaaruk got $25,000 for a drug and alcohol worker, “because we’ve been fighting for years trying to get funding,” said SAO Elwood Johnson.

The next step is to find somebody for the job, and start training them, either with the local social worker or, Johnson hopes, with Alice Isnor of the Cambridge Bay wellness centre, which Johnson has used as a model for Kugaaruk’s wellness centre that has been up and running for the past three years.

Johnson attributes the community’s success to his experience in Cambay. Johnson was the SAO there while that community was getting its wellness program off the ground. Ten years later, he gushes enthusiastically about the team and the community that launched the wellness centre, which he calls “probably the best in Nunavut.”

“I learned from that one to get ours going, and it’s not where it should be, but I don’t think we’ve done too badly in three years,” he said.

But more investment is needed to get Kugaaruk up to the level of the Cambay, which offers counseling programs on a weekly basis and, in the past 10 years, has had a remarkable influence on the community — so much so that Judge Earl Johnson recently commented, in a CamBay courtroom, on the positive impact he’s noted in the crime rate in that community, where the number of charges on the court docket went from 200 almost a year ago to 75 on the latest circuit.

Unless community wellness programs are developed, the violence will continue, and judges will continue to find few alternatives to jail time, where “the chances of a repeat offense are enhanced, not reduced,” by sentences that offer no programs to help offenders heal and move on with their lives, Judge Kilpatrick told a Kugluktuk court in February [see sidebar on page 5].

In a press release from the Kitikmeot Law Centre, lawyer Peter Harte notes that Nunavut’s crime rate is six times the national average; the number of reported assaults is 10 times the national average; and the rate of reported sexual assaults is 25 times the national average.

“Only Cambridge Bay, with its very active wellness centre, has been able to make a positive impact on crime in a Kitikmeot community,” Harte said.

Without counseling, mental health and drug and alcohol services for inmates at the Baffin Correctional Centre, first-time offenders are likely to become repeat customers.

Recent GN statistics from 1999 to 2004 show that about half of all offenders — 51 per cent — returned to custody after being released. In 2005, 130 out of 180 inmates at BCC were repeat offenders.