HALF-BAKED JUSTICE

Manitoba's seven provincial jails are full to bursting.

Designed to hold 1,192 prisoners, they house 1,512. And that doesn't
include the 843 convicted persons serving conditional sentences,
which means they are doing time at home rather than behind bars.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in Winnipeg last week that he
plans to eliminate conditional sentences for "serious" crimes this
year. Manitoba Justice Minister Gord Mackintosh applauded Mr.
Harper's plan. Given that jails already are overcrowded, and given
that Mr. Mackintosh is about to get more inmates as a result of fewer
conditional sentences, Manitobans might expect that he has a plan to
expand jails and at what cost. But if that is what they expect, they
expect wrong. He has no plan other than to await federal legislation.

That Mr. Mackintosh is so gung ho on a new law and order measure that
he embraces it before he has a plan or resources to deal with it
might be forgivable were this the first time that he put the cart
before the horse, but it is not. It is simply the latest example of
talking the talk but not walking the walk, which has been his
hallmark, one that is unbecoming in a minister of justice.

Surely Mr. Mackintosh knows that overcrowded jails are unsafe places
for both inmates and Corrections personnel.

Most Manitobans recall vividly the riots at Headingley jail that led
to its expansion.

That jail, however, is again seriously overcrowded, with a population
of 632 compared to a capacity of 459. Many of those are persons on
remand -- they are charged with a crime but presumed innocent.

Why are such persons in Headingley and not the Remand Centre? Because
Mr. Mackintosh believes it is good public relations to make it
difficult to get bail but he is unwilling to create storage capacity
for those persons, and so they languish behind bars. And because the
presumed innocent are treated badly in this way and because Mr.
Macintosh never gets around to providing adequate resources to ensure
they are dealt with a timely way, we have created a practice in which
they are given double credit for time served, which makes a mockery
of sentencing even as Mr. Mackintosh complains conditional sentences
do just that.

Manitoba's Crown attorneys have repeatedly warned Mr. Mackintosh that
his crackdowns on crime require additional resources if justice is to
be served. But the resources seldom come and when they do they are
gobbled up by new programs to focus on domestic abuse, or gangs, or
Internet porn. Crown attorneys are quitting in significant numbers
out of frustration with massive caseloads and the suspicion that some
of the guilty are free for lack of resources to prove cases.

Even the chief provincial judge in his most recent annual report
warned of inadequate resources and the need for more judges.

Someone should tell Mr. Mackintosh that it is justice that is blind,
not the minister.