MORE INMATES WORSEN JAIL SITUATION

We're sending more people to prison. A lot more.

Is it a crime wave of epic proportions sweeping across the country? Hardly.

Despite what Conservative MP James Lunney would have his constituents
believe, it's widely accepted and regularly proven through
statistical compilations that crime rates are falling across Canada,
and have been for some time.

Yet with our inadequate prisons already overcrowded, our federal
Conservative government is making things even worse.

Its get-tough-on-crime legislation eliminates 'two-for-one'
provisions - giving two years off a sentence for every one year spend
in remand awaiting trial - meaning people convicted of a crime will
spend more time in jail.

The real 'get tough' aspects of the Tories' new approach comes with
mandatory prison sentences for drug-related offences and scrapping
statutory release, which required prisoners go free after serving
two-thirds of a sentence. There's also changes to conditional
sentences, which kept convicts out of jail, but put them under
(often) strict restrictions regarding their mobility and with whom
they associated.

The union representing corrections officers issued a warning
outlining all of this earlier this week and suggesting the situation
is just going to keep getting worse.

Other issues such as a provincewide shortage of judges, recently
reported in other media, are complicating the issue further, as more
and more accused face longer and longer waits to get in and out of a courtroom.

Some examples given of existing overcrowding include the North Fraser
Pre-Trial Centre, which was built for 300 inmates but regularly
houses some 650. In Kamloops, a jail built for 168 prisoners averages
more than 300 and in Victoria, the maximum security jail on Wilkinson
Road was built to house 206 of our worst offenders, but now holds as
many as 400.

While the union suggests two more facilities will be required as a
result of the new federal legislation, those numbers indicate a
situation that is already past the tipping point.

There's already a bear in the kitchen. Now we're going to poke it.

Ottawa plans to built 2,700 new spots in federal prisons to deal with
the expected increase in inmates, but whether that will be sufficient
to accommodate all the petty criminals who will be getting thrown
behind bars remains to be seen. I say it's doubtful.

But beyond the added pressures on the prison system, which the union
says will worsen working conditions for jail staff while also
worsening conditions for the prisoners themselves, there's also
questions about the added cost.

We'll be paying to build all these new facilities, as well as paying
to keep more inmates there for longer periods.

Furthermore, many of those new inmates shouldn't be there in the
first place. For all the criticism heaped on provisions that allow
people convicted of a crime to walk free (with conditions) or get out
early, there is solid, proven thinking behind those methods.

For me, the primary reason to keep those provisions is that jail
simply doesn't work. It breeds more crime. It turns a petty criminal
into a hardened criminal, in many cases because that is what is
required to survive.

Prison might not be anything like what is depicted on TV or in
movies, but it's no picnic either.

Programs designed to help rehabilitate offenders work in many cases,
but they fail in just as many others.

Efforts such as restorative justice, on the other hand, offer more
effective rehabilitation, while keeping offenders out of jail.

Rather than passing laws that simply result in an expanded and vastly
more expensive prison system, we should be doing the opposite.