THE SHAM OF MANDATORY SENTENCES

Evidence Shows That Jailing Drug Offenders For Fixed Terms Imposes An
Expensive Price On Society And Does Nothing To 'Cure' The Problem

Don't say I didn't warn you. In January, I wrote about how the
federal Conservatives' profoundly destructive justice policies would
result in dramatically increased prison costs and lead to the
imprisonment of an unprecedented number of Canadians.

In Tuesday's budget, the Conservatives recognized as much, as they
announced that they've socked away an undisclosed amount of money to
expand prison space. What the Conservatives haven't recognized,
though, is that the damage they're doing won't be confined to prisons.

On the contrary, policies like mandatory minimum sentences for drug
crimes will result in skyrocketing rates of HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV)
infection, and with them, a dramatic increase in health care spending.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper maintains that the Conservatives will
institute mandatory sentences of two years' imprisonment for
trafficking in Schedule 1 drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.

According to Harper, such measures will "go a long way to help beat
back the epidemic of guns, gangs and drugs that is plaguing our
cities." According to the evidence, they will do no such thing.

Indeed, the evidence from the United States, which began imposing
mandatory sentences for drug offences after the 1986 cocaine-related
death of basketball star Len Bias, suggests that such measures will
only make a bad situation worse.

Certainly, mandatory sentences will put more people in jail: A report
from the U.S. Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice says the number
of Americans imprisoned for drug offences rose from 38,000 in 1986 to
458,000 in 2000.

This is higher than the total number of people imprisoned for all
offences in European Union countries, despite the fact that the EU
has 100 million more citizens than the U.S. The price tag for housing
American drug offenders, who now account for one in four inmates, is
estimated at $9.4 billion US.

The really damning statistic, though, is the one that shows that this
unprecedented imprisonment has done nothing to arrest illicit drug use.

On the contrary, evidence gathered by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control suggests that as states began imposing mandatory sentences,
drug use actually increased. As a result, many U.S. jurisdictions
have begun dismantling mandatory sentencing regimes.

Nevertheless, many Canadians maintain that laws aimed at imprisoning
drug traffickers, rather than drug users, are worthwhile in any
event, since they get dealers off the street and away from our kids.
Harper has suggested as much, saying that "to those who would traffic
drugs in order to peddle them to our children, our message is clear."

But mandatory sentences apply to every dealer, not just to those who
peddle drugs to our children. This is one of the problems with such
sentences -- they don't allow judges to look at individual
circumstances and then fashion sentences that are appropriate. In
fact, Steve Sullivan, president of the Canadian Resource Centre for
Victims of Crime, opposes mandatory sentences for precisely this reason.

Even worse, the distinction between traffickers and users is a false
one. Although the popular conception is that dealers, or "pushers" as
they're called in popular parlance, prey upon the vulnerable -- even
former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, who should have known better,
once said "the user is sick and the dealer is evil" -- dealers and
users are often one and the same.

Indeed, many addicts become dealers because it provides a steady
supply of drugs and steady source of income to those who would
otherwise be unemployed. According to the Vancouver Injection Drug
Users Study, 20 per cent of those surveyed admitted to (low-level)
dealing, and those who were most severely addicted were most likely
to begin selling drugs.

Further, as the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network argues in an
excellent report titled Mandatory Minimum Sentences for Drug
Offences: Why Everyone Loses, low-level dealers are most likely to
get caught, since large-scale traffickers are good at insulating
themselves from law enforcement.

Further, when drug kingpins do get nabbed, they're often able to plea
bargain their way out of mandatory sentences because they possess
valuable information and are willing to provide it to prosecutors in
exchange for lighter sentences. Low-level street dealers, on the
other hand, possess little evidence of value and are therefore likely
to face the full brunt of the law.

This means that despite Harper's rhetoric, mandatory sentences will
result in the imprisonment of many more addicts, and will
disproportionately affect the lowest-functioning users.

One need not be an addiction expert to realize that jail will only
exacerbate an addict's problems, but the experts suggest the
imprisoned addicts' problems will soon become ours.

According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a 1997 RAND
Corp. study found that "spending additional funds to provide
treatment for heavy cocaine users would reduce consumption by nearly
four times as much as spending the same amount on law enforcement,
and more than seven times as much as spending the same amount on
longer sentences." Further, "RAND estimated that treatment reduced
drug-related crime as much as 15 times more than mandatory sentences."

In 2002, the Canadian Department of Justice came to similar
conclusions, reporting that mandatory sentences, while increasing
enforcement and prison costs, will reduce neither drug consumption
nor drug-related crime.

Hence mandatory sentences will cost a lot more money and give us a
lot fewer benefits than those provided by other means of dealing with
addiction.

But that's just the beginning of the bad news. The Canadian HIV/AIDS
Legal Network (the Network) provides convincing evidence that
mandatory sentences will exacerbate the HIV and HCV epidemics in
Canadian prisons.

In 2003, the Correctional Service of Canada reported that the rates
of HIV and HCV infection in prison are at least 10 times higher than
the rates in the Canadian population, with 1.8 per cent of inmates
testing positive for HIV and about one-quarter testing positive for
HCV. Female inmates fare even worse: Five per cent have HIV and an
unbelievable 40 per cent are infected with HCV.

The Network observes that these figures represent a 35-per-cent
increase in HIV infection in just the past five years. That shouldn't
really come as a surprise, since the Correctional Service of Canada
has admitted that its efforts to keep drugs out of prisons have met
with failure. Indeed, the CSC's own studies have found that as many
as 40 per cent of inmates admit to having used drugs while in prison,
and that needle-sharing is rampant, given the lack of needle exchange programs.

The Network also points to a Vancouver study which reported that
"incarceration more than doubled the risk of HIV infection of people
who use illegal drugs," and that "21 per cent of all HIV infections
among Vancouver injection drug users may have been acquired in
prison." Further, according to one Irish study, 20 per cent of drug
users began their injection drug use while in prison. All of this
means that mandatory sentences for drug offences, while providing no
tangible benefits, will almost certainly increase HIV and HCV
infection. And the cost to the taxpayer? The Network notes that "in
Vancouver alone, using the older and lower estimate of cost per
infection, at current rates of HIV infection among people who inject
drugs, the lifetime cost of medical expenditures is estimated at $215 million."

The cost of treating HCV will be even higher given its greater
prevalence in prison populations, and as the number of infections
increase, so too will the expenses associated with treatment.

And we're still not done: Addicts who receive mandatory sentences of
two years will be eligible for parole in eight months, meaning
they'll soon return to the community. And given that their addictions
will be untreated, they'll likely continue using drugs and will be at
risk of spreading their infections to others.

This is the havoc that Conservative "justice" policies will wreak.
While Stephen Harper might be proud of himself for gaining widespread
support through his tough-on-crime demagoguery, he really ought to be
ashamed, for his war on drugs is nothing less than a war on Canadian society.