OUR PRISON SYSTEM IS NOTHING LIKE AMERICA'S

Crime will be high on Parliament's agenda, given the priority that the
Conservatives attached to the issue in the last election.

You don't have to be Conrad Black to have strong feelings about crime
and punishment. But as on so many policy issues, feelings, no matter
how strong they are, only get you so far.

If we try to think analytically about crime and punishment issues,
however, we quickly see that each side in the debate brings something
valuable to the table.

Take the opponents of Conservative policy. They are properly concerned
to avoid the excesses of American penal policy. In the U.S., the
numbers of people in prison beggar belief: According to the U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, about one per cent of American adults
were in prison or jail at the end of 2009.

And many of them are there for frivolous reasons. People can be locked
up for years for trivial drug offences or property crimes. Less than a
10th of prisoners are there for violent crimes. Three
strikes-andyou're-out laws and long mandatory sentences are forcing up
the prison population ever more rapidly. Spending on prisons in
California now outstrips spending on state universities.

But the debate about corrections and prisons in Canada is becoming
much like the debate on health care: Any attempt to introduce needed
reforms is immediately attacked by its opponents as "Americanization,"
regardless of the actual merits of the proposal.

In fact, to hear the anguished cries from some of the government's
critics, you'd believe that we have already reproduced the American
justice system in Canada. But according to research by Prof. Ian Lee
of Carleton University for my institute, the facts belie this view.

Take the numbers of people being put in prison in Canada. In 2009,
almost 2.5 million crimes were reported to police in Canada. Only a
10th of these resulted in a perpetrator being convicted. Of those,
about a quarter were sentenced to provincial prisons.

How many went to federal prison? Fewer than 5,000. And according to
the Correctional Service of Canada, that number has essentially been
stable for the past decade.

In the U.S., long sentences are part of what drives the growth in the
prison population. But in Canada, the total federal prison population
over the past decade has fluctuated within a very narrow band: a low
of 12,400 in 2003/04, and a high of about 13,600 in 2007/08. If just
under 5,000 are entering the system every year, and the total
population is less than 14,000, the average inmate isn't staying long.

How about the idea that Ottawa, like the U.S., is locking people up
for trivial reasons? In Canada, nearly 70 per cent of federal inmates
are there for violent crimes; over a quarter of all federal inmates
are in for homicide, for example.

Yet the myth persists that Canada is now locking up a number of people
totally disproportionate to other nations.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, however, (the best source of statistics that allow
sensible comparisons between rich industrialized countries) we are no
outlier. We incarcerate about one-seventh the number of people per
100,000 population in Canada versus the United States, but they are
the great outlier. We put fewer people in jail relative to population
than any of the other rich English speaking democracies with a common
law tradition (the U.K., New Zealand and Australia) and we are below
average for the OECD countries overall.

How about the idea that we are engaged in a vast orgy of prison
building to house our burgeoning prison population? Not quite. The
last federal prison was built in 1988. On the other hand, 28 federal
prisons are over 40 years old. The normal lifespan of a prison is
considered to be around 50 years. The Kingston pen, built in 1835, is
still very much in use today in Ontario.

According to testimony from the Parliamentary Budget Office, a new
medium or maximum security prison should cost approximately $240
million. The entire annual capital budget of the Correctional Service
of Canada is $230 million.

Far from lavishing scarce tax dollars on unnecessary prison
construction, the government of Canada is starving the prison system
of the capital budgets needed merely to maintain what we have in good
working order, and has been doing so for decades. Yet old decrepit
prisons are a huge obstacle to rehabilitation.

Canada must indeed be vigilant to avoid the excesses of the American
justice system.

The government has an obligation to justify its corrections policies
in terms of the real increased protection they can offer to Canadians,
while also making all reasonable efforts to rehabilitate offenders.

But claims of the wholesale Americanization of the Canadian criminal
justice system are highly exaggerated.