Calling Canada's youth justice system a "perfect act" that already allows for stiff sentences for youth found guilty of serious violent crimes, a newly formed national coalition of lawyers, youth groups, and front-line youth workers took aim at Conservative election promises of tougher sentences for young offenders.

"Canada is not a raging ball of youth crime," Mary Birdsell, a lawyer with Justice for Children and Youth legal clinic, told reporters at the Coalition for Children and Youth's first press conference this morning, held at a downtown Toronto law firm.

The group, which has 12 members, including the Criminal Lawyers Association, Pro Bono Law Ontario, the Canadian Association of Psychoanalytic Child Therapists and the Toronto Youth Cabinet, is calling for an abandonment of proposals that would create more jails, increase sentence lengths and identify young offenders.

The group said academic studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have consistently found that longer jail terms are costly and increased incarceration rates do not result in crime reduction and called on all parties to instead invest in early intervention programs and social supports.

As examined in Crime & Punishment, a recent 8-part, Star investigative series, scores of academic studies have shown increasing sentences and imposing mandatory sentences have had little if any affect on crime rates. Some studies have shown jailing more people actually leads to more crime. In the U.S., which saw incarceration rates soar over the past three decades, the crime rate remained fairly stable. In Canada over that period, incarceration rates remained stable and the crime rate in the past decade has steadily declined.

The coalition describes itself as non-partisan, and non-political, but clearly it was formed to address Conservative crime plans, which include naming young offenders and adding mandatory, longer sentences for murder convictions.

Increased incarceration does not deter and doesn't make for safer cities, said Keegan Henry-Mathieu, 21, a York University student who sits on Toronto's youth cabinet. He urged voters to reject the Conservative tough on crime agenda and vote Liberal or NDP.

Tim Greenwood, a community worker in Toronto's Jane and Finch neighbourhood who spent more than a decade working in prisons, said Canadians would be wrong to think that longer sentences would result in meaningful rehabilitation.

He likened trying to rehabilitate in prison to trying to teach tennis in a submarine. "It's absurd," he said. "These changes really frighten me."

Getting tough on crime by implementing more punitive measures has been embraced over the years by federal politicians of many stripes, with the exception of the Bloc Québécois, which has what many criminologists regard as the only serious crime reduction approach.

Prior to the election call, the Conservatives toughened existing minimum sentences for certain gun crimes that had been introduced in the 90s by the Liberals and created new gun crimes that come with mandatory sentences. The Conservatives have promised to introduce legislation that would impose stiff, automatic sentences for young offenders found guilty of serious, violent crimes.

The party had also proposed new mandatory sentences for drug offences, including one that would punish those guilty of growing just one marijuana plant with a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in jail.

Putting more people in jail, for longer, costs money, as many U.S. states, such as Michigan, have discovered. Michigan embraced strict sentences for firearms and drug offences and, since 1985, had to build 35 prisons. The state now has 50,000 inmates, housed in 50 prisons, and an annual prison budget of $2 billion (U.S.) - equal to the prison budget for all of Canada.