'AMERICAN' JUSTICE? HA!

Our Canadian Prison System Is Nothing Like the U.S.
Version

Crime will be high on Parliament's agenda this fall, 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 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 1% 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-and-you're-out laws and long mandatory sentences are
rapidly forcing up the prison population.

But the debate about corrections and prison 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 critics, you'd believe
that we have already reproduced the American "justice" system in
Canada. But according to research by Carleton University professor Ian
Lee 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 (CSC), that number has essentially
been stable for the past decade.

In the U.S., long sentences are part of what drive the growth in the
prison population. But in Canada, the total federal prison population
over the past decade has fluctuated very little -- between 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% of federal inmates are
there for violent crimes; more than a quarter of all federal inmates
are in for homicide, for example.

How about the idea that we are engaged in a vast orgy of
prison-building?

Not quite. The last new federal prison was built in 1988. On the other
hand, 28 federal prisons are more than 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.

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 CSC is $230 million.

The federal government is starving the prison system of the capital
budgets needed merely to maintain what we have in good working order.

Canada must indeed be vigilant to avoid the excesses of the American
justice system. But claims of the wholesale Americanization of the
Canadian criminal justice system are highly exaggerated.