CRIME DOWN, PRISON BOOM LOOMS

Money spent on longer, harsher sentences is money wasted, because more
prisons do not increase our safety

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 grow 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.

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 are 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 racialized minorities.

Currently, approximately 10 per cent of the federal prison population
is 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 a year per person compared
with approximately $101,000 a year per person on average across all
security levels to keep a man in prison, and $185,000 a 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 United States.
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 predispositions.

If more prisons resulted in less crime, the United States would be the
safest place in the world.

Canada does not need to grow 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."

Craig Jones is the executive director of the John Howard Society of
Canada.

Kim Pate is the executive director of the Canadian Association of
Elizabeth Fry Societies.