TOUGH ON TAXPAYERS, BUT DUMB ON CRIME

The non-confidence motion that toppled the Harper government kills
every bill before the House and Senate, including the Tories' ill
considered tough-on-crime package.

It, more than any other, led to the historic contempt citation
against the Conservatives after the government balked at providing
comprehensive information on the costs attached to it.

Considering that conservatives around the world are backing away from
mandatory minimums and other tough-on-crime measures that the
Conservatives are pitching, it was an ironic sword for the Tories to die on.

Rather than choosing less expensive, long-term rehabilitative
solutions, the Conservatives are stubbornly bent on building prisons
and other punitive measures, which none other than Conrad Black
describes as "brutish."

Black, who knows a bit about prison life, wrote in the National Post
that the Conservatives' tough-oncrime initiatives are "bad, unjust
and expensive" and criticized Harper's proposed "orgy of prison building."

It is the same punitive approach that American conservatives are
rejecting and which David Cameron's Conservatives in Britain are
finding to be horrendously expensive.

In the U.S., prominent conservatives Newt Gingrich, former U.S.
attorney general Edwin Meese III and ex-federal "drug czar" William
J. Bennett are among the signatories of an initiative called Right on
Crime: The Conservative Case for Reform (rightoncrime.com).

"Conservatives are known for being tough on crime, but we must also
be tough on criminal justice spending," the group says.
"Conservatives correctly insist that government services be evaluated
on whether they produce the best possible results at the lowest
possible cost." Prisons don't deliver, instead often resulting in
prisoners returning to society more hardened, they say.

The Harper government's crime package prescribes mandatory minimums
that include, for instance, stiff sentences for as little as six
marijuana plants, which critics say will nab students and other small users.

It is an approach at odds with a 2002 federal Justice Department
report saying that mandatory minimums "do not appear to influence
drug consumption or drug-related crime in any measurable way. A
variety of research methods concludes that treatment-based approaches
are more cost-effective than lengthy prison terms."

Taheratul Haque of Queen's University's faculty of law agrees. "The
evidence is quite clear -such a bill not only hurts small, vulnerable
offenders who are much better off with other correctional solutions,
but it also hurts taxpayers in costing them a lot of money for no
benefit." Similar sentencing legislation is being repealed in many
American states due to high cost and ineffectiveness.

Black wrote that mandatory minimums reduce judges to little more than
clerks with rubber stamps.

"The underlying suspicion of Stephen Harper's government which is
that the bench is infested with softies and that it is right to
punish crimes more severely than they have been in the past -is a
reactionary and brutish reflex that is presumably aimed at a
political constituency unlikely to stray into the arms of this
government's opponents anyway," Black wrote.

Black argues judges are "virtually all better qualified" to bring
down a sentence than uninvolved legislators "shooting arbitrarily
from the hip."

Retired Alberta provincial court judge John Reilly is one of those
perceived bench softies. He is so incensed at the Harper crime bill
that he's running as a Liberal in the Alberta constituency of Wild Rose.

"Sending people to prison on the pretence of deterring crime is
futile, wasteful and counterproductive," Reilly writes in his book,
Bad Medicine. "I have seen very few people in all my years on the
bench who are really bad. The vast majority are alcoholics whose
lives are out of control." Prison, he says, forces them to turn to
gangs for protection, making them beholden to the gang on release.

The Conservative crime bill does offer the enlightened approach of
suspended sentences to those who go into drug treatment court
programs. But there are not enough drug treatment courts in Canada to
fill the demand.

The election should serve as a face slap to the Conservatives that
their tough-on-crime initiative needs a serious rethink. Tough on
crime is tough on taxpayers, and not as effective as being "smart on crime."

Leave prisons for incorrigible repeat offenders, and properly fund
less expensive alternatives that, as Reilly notes, "deal with the
underlying causes of crime rather than punishing the results of those
underlying causes."