THE COMING PRISON BOOM

If the federal government gets its way, Canadians will witness a boom
in prison construction coinciding with the longest steady decline in
crime rates in Canadian history. That's the consequence of the various
pieces of "get tough" legislation recently passed or currently working
their way through Parliament.

Consider this: the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for
"serious drug crimes" in the National Anti-Drug Strategy, plus the
limiting of judicial discretion in regard to credit for time served in
pre-trial detention is projected by Statistics Canada to increase the
rate of incarceration by as much as 10 per cent.

The government claims that ending two-for-one credit for pre-trial
detention will alleviate the overcrowding crisis in provincial
detention centres by encouraging more guilty pleas and introducing
"truth in sentencing."

The resulting surge in Canada's rate of incarceration, currently
hovering around 149 per 100,000 population, would require roughly
3,000 new beds for men and about 10 to 15 per cent of that number for
women.

So what? Bad people go to jail, right? It should be that simple, but
it's not. Here's why: when governments "crack down," the American
evidence shows that they quickly catch the worst of the worst before
reaching into the pool of the non-violent: people who might represent
a threat to themselves, but little risk to their communities.

The worst crime for most of these people is either that they are
racial minorities (aboriginals will be particularly hard hit) or that
they started falling through the cracks in elementary school and carry
the burden of various learning and cognitive challenges, including
ADD, acquired brain disorders, ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrome,
depression, trauma and a whole alphabet soup of psychiatric and
psychological syndromes.

The result is prisons swollen with greater numbers of the non-violent,
mentally ill and poor, and racial minorities.

Approximately 10 per cent of the federal prison population is now
double-bunked. Prison crowding undermines the success of treatment and
degrades the working conditions of staff, encouraging higher rates of
staff turnover and poorer treatment outcomes for prisoners.

Most non-violent prisoners can be more effectively, humanely and
economically treated in the community than they can in prison, and the
government has the research to prove this. Community supervision costs
roughly $23,500 per year per person compared with approximately
$101,000 per year per person on average across all security levels to
keep a man in prison, and $185,000 per year per woman.

Then there's the issue of where to put them.

Current infrastructure is at or over capacity. The passage of Bill
C-25 will require temporary housing in the short term, but it's the
long term that ought to concern Canadians -- for the only land that
the federal government can start building on quickly is the prison
farms.

Some of the best farmland in Canada could be swallowed up by super-max
prisons based on the American model. That is the vision endorsed by
the "independent panel" commissioned by the government and chaired by
the former minister of corrections for the province of Ontario, Rob
Sampson.

So let's connect the dots. The crime rate has been declining for 26
years -- those are the government's numbers -- but the same government
wants to build more prisons at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars.

Who benefits? In the U.S. case, private prison contractors and
correctional officer unions. Everyone else loses: education, social
assistance and health care.

Does prison building buy safer communities? Not in the U.S. Money
spent on increased imprisonment and longer, harsher sentences is money
wasted, because more prisons do not increase community safety -- and
there is ample evidence that prisons create and reinforce criminal
attitudes and pre-dispositions.

If more prisons resulted in less crime, the U.S. would be the safest
place in the world. Canada does not need to increase its rate of
incarceration, particularly in a context of declining crime rates.

We do not need to "get tough," but we do need to "get smart."