IF YOU DON'T LIKE 'EM, PUT 'EM IN PRISON

If you were a Prime Minister who inherited a $13.6 billion surplus and
then six years later you were trying to eliminate a $40 billion
deficit, how would you do it? Well, you would probably start by
putting a minister in charge of cost-cutting who was experienced in
the misappropriation of funds and you would likely hire a
$90,000-a-day consultant to tell you where you could save money.

Most certainly, you would introduce regressive "tough on crime"
legislation that would take you back to the 1980s and add billions of
dollars a year to the costs of your criminal justice system.

The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.3
million people currently in prisons or jails - a 500 per cent increase
over the past 30 years. Every year, a million Americans are imprisoned
on drug charges, about a quarter of them for marijuana offences. One
in every 100 American adults lives behind bars. The number spiked
dramatically after mandatory minimum sentences were introduced in the
1980s.

The result has been prison overcrowding and governments overwhelmed by
the burden of funding, despite increasing evidence that incarceration
is not the most effective means of achieving public safety. Changes in
U.S. sentencing law and U.S. justice policy, not increases in crime
rates explain most of the near six-fold increase in the U.S. prison
population.

Public Safety Canada in its 2010 Annual Report says the overall crime
rate in Canada has fallen by 19.0 per cent since 1998. Property crimes
dropped 28.4 per cent in the same period. Canadian demographer David
Foot, author of Boom, Bust & Echo, says crime rates are falling
because there are fewer people in the age group that commit most
crimes - late teens and early 20s. He says the crime rate was highest
when baby boomers were wearing bellbottoms and listening to American
guitarist/singer-songwriter "Jimi" Hendrix in the 1970's.

The bad news is that drug related offences (possession, trafficking,
etc.) in Canada have increased by 23 per cent since 1998, giving Mr.
Harper his sole justification for obsessing over crime.

Interestingly, the "Sentencing Project" a U.S. organization promoting
reforms in sentencing law and alternatives to incarceration (The
Nation Magazine Sept. 12, 2011) reports that state legislatures are
now shuttering prisons. As many as 13 states have closed, or are
considering closing prisons this year because they are too expensive.
In Michigan, for example, the correction services make up almost a
quarter of the state's budget. Michigan is closing 21 prison
facilities and introducing novel sentencing reforms such as replacing
"mandatory minimums" for drug offences and introducing sentencing
guidelines that will permit judges to use their discretion in
sentencing. Clearly Michigan has not been taking advice from Stephen
Harper.

In 2009, the cost of keeping an inmate in a Canadian prison was
$109,000 a year for men and $180,000 a year for women. An estimated
35,000 people (about 0.13 per cent of our population as compared to
1.0 per cent of the American population) are incarcerated in Canada on
any given day. Correctional Services Canada manages over 50
correctional facilities, employs more than 20,000 people, an increase
of 38 per cent since 2005-06 (when Harper came to office) and has an
annual budget exceeding $3-billion.

With implementation of Harper's Omnibus Bill, our criminal justice
system will need more courthouses, more staff, more police, more
correctional officers, more parole officers, more defense lawyers,
more legal aid, more prosecuting attorneys and more judges. Trials
will be more frequent and appeals will be endless. Parliamentary
Budget Watchdog Kevin Page notes that the cost of the Crime bill has
yet to be recorded as a budget item, the first time in his career that
he can recall a project of such magnitude being ignored in government
budget plans. Clearly Conservative ideology trumps the reality of
budgetary transparency.

The Government is so confident in the merits of its 102 page omnibus
crime bill (that wraps together nine separate bills the Conservatives
couldn't pass during their minority government years) that it has
decided to allow just two days of debate on the legislation. That
might explain why, the Conservatives twice refused this week to
participate in panel debates on the crime bill aired on CBC
Television's "Power & Politics".

Mr. Harper's 'Omnibus Crime Bill' flys in the face of research and the
experience of others in regards to what makes a safer society. The
Americans are moving away from their infatuation with incarceration to
a more preventative approach to crime involving better enforcement,
training and programs that deter crime more effectively than harsh
sentencing. What have the Americans learned that Mr. Harper has failed
to grasp?

We could save ourselves forty years of unnecessary pain and multiple
deficit expenditures by listening to the American experience on this
one. In the process, we might find billions of dollars to help build a
safer and more prosperous society.