NEW HIT ON TORY CRIME STANCE

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. -- Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is downplaying
another expert analysis that slams his government's prison-expanding
agenda as a wrong-headed denial of falling crime rates.

Crunch the numbers: Crime rates are going down was the headline on a
report published Tuesday by Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan
and criminologist Anthony Doob of the University of Toronto.

It draws on Statistics Canada reports that violent crime overall has
declined every year since 2000. The agency said last summer reports of
murders, serious assaults, sexual assaults and robberies were all down
again in 2009.

The Harper government's plans to spend billions of dollars on
lock-'em-up policies could be a defining issue in the next federal
election. They would also mean huge costs for provinces already
dealing with overcrowded jails.

"The point that I constantly make is what has the crime rate got to do
with a dangerous person being on the street?" Toews said at a news
conference Tuesday in St. John's, N.L.

"A dangerous person who threatens the safety and security of
individuals... should not be on the streets regardless of what the
crime rate is. That's our focus: to ensure that dangerous people are
not on the street."

That said, Toews also asserted: "It's not that crime rates are
falling. The reporting of crime is in fact falling."

The Tories have seized on increased rates of certain violent crimes.
They include attempted murder, extortion, gun crimes and criminal
harassment.

Toews' remarks echoed parts of a contentious critique published
earlier this month of how Statistics Canada compiles crime numbers.
Criminologists raked the study for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute by
former Harper government adviser Scott Newark as an embarrassingly
selective and highly politicized contortion of justice data.

"By pretending that crime is going up, the government seems to say
therefore we have to bring in harsher sentences, put more people in
prison and so on," Doob said Tuesday in an interview.

"Harsher sentences and putting more people in prisons aren't going to
do anything about crime."

In fact, exposing first-time offenders to seasoned inmates could
backfire, Doob said. He cited research done in the U.S. in eight
states that found young offenders who visited prisons as part of
so-called Scared Straight programs tended to commit more, not less,
crime.

"I know from looking at the data that we're not being made safer,"
Doob said. "What we know is there are better uses of the funds."

Meanwhile, a majority of Canadians support the Conservatives' costly
prison expansion plan but think the government should be compelled to
provide the estimated price tag for its entire law-and-order agenda,
according to the results of a new poll by Ipsos Reid for Postmedia
News and Global National.