BUST-UP PRISON PARTY

Jail time should send a sterner message to criminals

The inmates aren't running the prison system.

They don't have to ... the Correctional Service of Canada is doing it
for them.

A strange mindset infects our prison keepers, one foreign to most
innocent Canadians. It's based on what you might call the three Rs --
rights, rehabilitation and release.

Prisoners, they believe, have certain rights which cannot be trifled
with -- ignoring that the very notion of prison requires a forfeiture
of rights.

These so-called rights aren't just guarantees of the Constitution --
they're rights to things like conjugal visits and golf excursions and
university degrees.

The watchword of their system is rehabilitation -- the theory
prisoners can be "corrected" by counselling, educating and
social-working them through a progression of ever less-restrictive
confinement.

Ultimately it's focused on release, paroling these "corrected" inmates
back to society, apparently the sooner the better. Corrections brass
think 50% of all federal inmates could serve their sentences in the
community.

This week a Correctional Service report revealed that of 14,000
federal inmates, 1,300 use cocaine daily, 1,300 take heroin and 5,400
smoke marijuana.

Most innocents would imagine prisons should be the least likely drug
dens. Not when prisoners' rights matter most -- rights to freely roam
the jail, to privately entertain visitors, to avoid searches, to defy
rules, to enjoy unsupervised passes.

Most innocents would imagine it would be pretty easy to crack down and
clean up a mess like this.

Solicitor General Lawrence MacAulay would rather correct than crack
down. His answer? Addiction counselling -- solve it from the bottom
up, rather than the top down.

Here's another answer -- to the drug problem and to the host of woes
most innocents see too clearly.

Ditch the three Rs. Give the three P's a try: Protection, punishment
and prevention.

The most basic role of prisons is protecting the public -- get the bad
guys off the street, lock 'em up, and keep 'em there every minute of
their sentences if they're a danger to anyone else.

Make the time behind bars punishment -- not a semester in some sort of
adult-education boarding school.

We're not talking bread and water. Just spartan institutions with
tough rules -- modest rewards for obeying and certain punishment for
defiance.

No fun. No games.

If prison was a grim, unpleasant place, bad guys might decide to do
whatever it took to avoid going back.

They might spread the word that the straight and narrow is better than
the alternative.

That's called prevention.

Do-gooders argue prisoners are damaged goods, victims themselves, with
histories of illiteracy, broken homes and addiction. The logical
extension is that, somehow, the prisoners aren't really to blame for
their misdeeds.

It's an attitude that patronizes prisoners and demeans everyone who
has overcome a similar background.

The three Ps send a different message. Your actions have consequences,
both good and bad.

That's called responsibility. But that's an R word you won't hear in
our prisons.