COMMUNITY COURTS HAVE GREAT POTENTIAL

Canada's first community court opened this week in Vancouver,
designed to help offenders whose offences stem more from
homelessness, mental illness, and drug or alcohol addiction than from
calculated criminal planning. Set up on an experimental basis, this
is a program that should be followed carefully by jurisdictions
throughout the country.

If defendants can be steered away from jail, all the while ensuring
that the safety of society is not compromised, everyone wins.
Taxpayers will not have to house and feed people who don't really
need to be imprisoned. Defendants can be helped to overcome whatever
conditions preceded their crimes. New generations of career criminals
are not created.

In the Vancouver experiment, called Downtown Community Court, those
convicted of crimes ranging from shoplifting to assault to drug
possession can be offered the option of alternative measures,
including community work and counselling.

This innovative program is not quite the same thing that Chief
Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada called for
in a much-noted 2006 speech. She spoke in that address of the need
for mental-health courts to handle the swelling number of the
mentally ill who end up in Canada's prisons and jails. Keeping the
mentally ill out of prison requires better funding for mental-illness
treatment. It continues to be a disgrace that mentally-ill people are
sentenced to jail for actions committed under the compulsion of disease.

The Vancouver project is a little different, but grows from the same
general idea, to prevent repeat crime by intervention; in this case
by offering people a second chance after a first offence.

This will, we expect, work sometimes, depending on the circumstances,
the offence and the ability of the accused to take him-or herself in
hand, with help. There will, however, always be times when jail or
prison is the right answer.

Key to the possible success of the Vancouver project are the social
workers, drug counsellors and other community experts standing by in
teams, as the Globe and Mail reported, to take on defendants who
qualify for alternative measures.

This initiative has the potential to be an important step forward.
Without support - medical, physical and/or social - the vulnerable
people who find themselves charged with minor crimes could easily
slip into a life of a petty criminal. Each time that happens another
life would be wasted, society is burdened and the justice system is
clogged up. We hope this experiment succeeds.