TOUGH TALK

Julian Fantino's comments on criminal sentencing are the words of a man
whose interests lie not in addressing the root causes of crime or in
minimizing the harm it does, but merely in exacting revenge. He adopts the
Saturday-morning-cartoon view of the world, where evil can be localized to
shady characters whom he calls "bad asses" or, even more convenient,
distilled down to the impersonal catch-all menace of drugs. The key to a
safe and orderly society, then, is to be really really mean to the bad guys
and the drug merchants until either they turn good or they die. The social
conditions that produced these people, and continue to produce more like
them, are seen as incidental. This attack-the-symptom approach to
criminality is naive, and is doomed to fail.

Matt Butler,
Toronto.