MANDATORY SENTENCES WILL BOOST PAROLE WORKLOAD AND PROVINCIAL JAIL
POPULATIONS, SENATE HEARING TOLD

A federal bill that would impose mandatory jail time for serious drug
crimes would increase the workload of the parole system, and the
government intends to inject more than $100 million over five years
to ease the burden, according to the commissioner of the Correctional
Service of Canada.

Commissioner Don Head said at a Senate committee hearing Thursday
that if the bill is passed, CSC will receive an additional $116.5
million over the next five years to support an expected increase in
cases for the National Parole Board.

The parole board supervises both federal offenders who are sentenced
to two years or more, and provincial offenders in some provinces.

Under the proposed legislation, mandatory sentences would be handed
out to everyone convicted of a serious drug offence, such as
trafficking, production, and possession for the purpose of
trafficking narcotics. A person who grows five to 200 marijuana
plants with intent to sell would get a minimum six-month sentence. An
addict selling heroin to fellow addicts near a park could go away for
two years.

Head said that while there's no evidence that federal prison
populations will increase with mandatory sentences, provincial
institutions likely will be affected by the proposed changes outlined
in the Conservative government's Bill C-15, which is now being
debated in the Senate.

"There's going to be some impact in terms of [provincial] sentence
populations and [the provinces] will have to re-visit their approach
to providing programs to provincial offenders," Head said after his
testimony. "At this point, the figures that we have don't allow us to
draw definitive conclusions in terms of the impact on the federal
institutional population, and we'll continue to assess that as time goes on."

Head said CSC continues to invest in prison substance abuse programs
and treatment.

Critics of Canada's proposed mandatory drug sentences compare them to
similar failed U.S. policies and say they lead to prison overcrowding
and end up punishing street-level dealers, most of whom are drug
addicts who need treatment, not jail time, they say.

Furthermore, the bill would imprison people who do not pose an
immediate threat to the public, said Neil Boyd, criminology professor
at Simon Fraser University in suburban Vancouver.

"Bill C-15 will have the unfortunate consequences of annually jailing
thousands of Canadians who do not threaten the social fabric any more
than those who produce, in a regulated framework, drugs such as
tobacco and alcohol," Boyd said at Thursday's hearing.

He asked for an amendment to the bill so that cannabis growers are
not treated along the same lines as heroin and cocaine traffickers.