Pubdate: Wed, 30 Mar 2011
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2011 Times Colonist
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/letters.html
Website: http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: Robert Remington
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Marijuana - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Conrad+Black

TOUGH ON TAXPAYERS, BUT DUMB ON CRIME

The non-confidence motion that toppled the Harper government kills 
every bill before the House and Senate, including the Tories' ill 
considered tough-on-crime package.

It, more than any other, led to the historic contempt citation 
against the Conservatives after the government balked at providing 
comprehensive information on the costs attached to it.

Considering that conservatives around the world are backing away from 
mandatory minimums and other tough-on-crime measures that the 
Conservatives are pitching, it was an ironic sword for the Tories to die on.

Rather than choosing less expensive, long-term rehabilitative 
solutions, the Conservatives are stubbornly bent on building prisons 
and other punitive measures, which none other than Conrad Black 
describes as "brutish."

Black, who knows a bit about prison life, wrote in the National Post 
that the Conservatives' tough-oncrime initiatives are "bad, unjust 
and expensive" and criticized Harper's proposed "orgy of prison building."

It is the same punitive approach that American conservatives are 
rejecting and which David Cameron's Conservatives in Britain are 
finding to be horrendously expensive.

In the U.S., prominent conservatives Newt Gingrich, former U.S. 
attorney general Edwin Meese III and ex-federal "drug czar" William 
J. Bennett are among the signatories of an initiative called Right on 
Crime: The Conservative Case for Reform (rightoncrime.com).

"Conservatives are known for being tough on crime, but we must also 
be tough on criminal justice spending," the group says. 
"Conservatives correctly insist that government services be evaluated 
on whether they produce the best possible results at the lowest 
possible cost." Prisons don't deliver, instead often resulting in 
prisoners returning to society more hardened, they say.

The Harper government's crime package prescribes mandatory minimums 
that include, for instance, stiff sentences for as little as six 
marijuana plants, which critics say will nab students and other small users.

It is an approach at odds with a 2002 federal Justice Department 
report saying that mandatory minimums "do not appear to influence 
drug consumption or drug-related crime in any measurable way. A 
variety of research methods concludes that treatment-based approaches 
are more cost-effective than lengthy prison terms."

Taheratul Haque of Queen's University's faculty of law agrees. "The 
evidence is quite clear -such a bill not only hurts small, vulnerable 
offenders who are much better off with other correctional solutions, 
but it also hurts taxpayers in costing them a lot of money for no 
benefit." Similar sentencing legislation is being repealed in many 
American states due to high cost and ineffectiveness.

Black wrote that mandatory minimums reduce judges to little more than 
clerks with rubber stamps.

"The underlying suspicion of Stephen Harper's government which is 
that the bench is infested with softies and that it is right to 
punish crimes more severely than they have been in the past -is a 
reactionary and brutish reflex that is presumably aimed at a 
political constituency unlikely to stray into the arms of this 
government's opponents anyway," Black wrote.

Black argues judges are "virtually all better qualified" to bring 
down a sentence than uninvolved legislators "shooting arbitrarily 
from the hip."

Retired Alberta provincial court judge John Reilly is one of those 
perceived bench softies. He is so incensed at the Harper crime bill 
that he's running as a Liberal in the Alberta constituency of Wild Rose.

"Sending people to prison on the pretence of deterring crime is 
futile, wasteful and counterproductive," Reilly writes in his book, 
Bad Medicine. "I have seen very few people in all my years on the 
bench who are really bad. The vast majority are alcoholics whose 
lives are out of control." Prison, he says, forces them to turn to 
gangs for protection, making them beholden to the gang on release.

The Conservative crime bill does offer the enlightened approach of 
suspended sentences to those who go into drug treatment court 
programs. But there are not enough drug treatment courts in Canada to 
fill the demand.

The election should serve as a face slap to the Conservatives that 
their tough-on-crime initiative needs a serious rethink. Tough on 
crime is tough on taxpayers, and not as effective as being "smart on crime."

Leave prisons for incorrigible repeat offenders, and properly fund 
less expensive alternatives that, as Reilly notes, "deal with the 
underlying causes of crime rather than punishing the results of those 
underlying causes."  
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake