BAD GUYS WILL LIKELY MISS THE MESSAGE

Getting Tough On Crime Won't Work If Dumb Criminals Aren't Clued In

Even among his detractors, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is said to
be an ideas man. A policy wonk. The sort of guy who reads
spreadsheets on the beach. For Harper, politics is the distasteful
process one must engage in if one wishes to do the really juicy work
of crafting and implementing public policy.

I'd like to bring to Harper's attention a fascinating paper published
last year in an academic journal.

It shows that Harper's plan to revolutionize the criminal justice
system won't work. As a wonk who values public policy above all else
I'm sure Harper will be as shocked as I am by this and rethink the whole thing.

The paper appeared last August in a journal called Criminology. The
title is "The missing link in general deterrence research" -- which
is not the most exciting title around, but a true wonk like Harper
knows that the duller the title, the sexier the stats.

The author, Gary Kleck, is a criminologist at Florida State
University. Like Harper, he is interested in what experts call
"deterrence:" If you impose tougher sentences on convicted criminals
- -- send more of them to prison and keep them there longer -- many
would-be criminals will decide that crime really doesn't pay. Crime
will drop and we'll all be safer.

Harper's big plan for crime -- one of his famous five priorities --
calls for a long list of tough new mandatory minimum sentences. The
main rationale is deterrence. Send a message that serious crime means
serious time, put the fear of God and the prime minister into the bad
guys, and crime will drop.

As I said, this stuff seems to make sense. But things aren't always
what they seem. They have to be tested.

There are many ways to test whether deterrence works. For his paper,
Kleck focused on one simple fact: For people to be influenced by the
law, they have to know about it. What matters isn't how tough the
system is; what matters is how tough people perceive the system to be.

Kleck and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,500 people in 54 major
American cities. They asked, how likely is it that someone in your
city who commits a crime known to police will be arrested? How likely
is it they will be convicted? How likely that they will be sent to
prison? And how long is the sentence likely to be?

The researchers asked these questions for five major crime types.
Then they compared people's answers to the official statistics.

"We wanted to know how close the relationship was between perception
and reality," Kleck says on the phone from Florida. "And the answer
was, there was no relationship. It was almost exactly a correlation
of zero. It could scarcely have been a weaker relationship. Put
another way, people's perceptions might as well have been completely
random guesses."

Over the past 15 years or so American media became obsessed with
crime and punishment, and American politicians turned boasting about
tough new laws into a campaign cliche on par with kissing babies. But
despite all this talk and attention the American public still has no
clue about the basic realities in courtrooms.

Whatever, you might say. It's not the ordinary person we want to
deter. It's criminals. And criminals know the system inside and out.
Pass tough new laws and you can bet the word will get around.

Kleck thought of that, too, so he asked people if they had ever been
arrested for a non-traffic offence. Then he compared the answers of
people who had been arrested with those who hadn't. Result: Those who
had been arrested were, if anything, even more ignorant than the rest.

That's less surprising since there's lots of research that shows
criminals aren't the jailhouse lawyers we imagine. In fact, they tend
to be young, semi-literate and dumb. They don't subscribe to
newspapers. They don't watch Question Period. They don't read
criminology journals or the latest amendments to the Criminal Code.

What they know about the system tends to come from equally clueless
buddies "boasting about what they did and got away with," says Kleck.
"And that's probably not too sound a foundation."

Without a connection between people's perceptions of how tough the
system is and how tough it really is, politicians don't have the
power they think they have. They can make the law tougher. But they
can't make people think the law is tougher. And that means their
tough new laws cannot deter anyone.

To be fair to Harper, there is another way that tougher sentences can
reduce crime. Experts call it "incapacitation:" If a thug is locked
up, he can't commit new crimes. It seems obvious that longer
sentences mean more incapacitation and less crime. Simple, right?

Wrong, unfortunately. In reality, incapacitation is a big,
complicated issue and longer sentences deliver diminishing returns.

But for Canadians who aren't interested in the hows and whys of
crime, there is a bottom line: Are Harper's tough mandatory minimums
worth the cost? Will they make people safer?

Vic Toews, Harper's justice minister, insists they will. They proved
themselves in the United States, Toews told reporters a few weeks
ago. It was tough mandatory minimums that drove down crime in the 1990s.

But Kleck says that's not true: "The consensus of American experts
who have looked at that is that the mandatory minimums didn't help
and may well have hurt."

I feel for Harper, I really do. It can't be easy to admit you got a
major issue all wrong. But he's no mere politician. He's an ideas man.

I'm sure he'll do the right thing.