THIS IS YOUR CRIME PROBLEM ON DRUGS

Williams Lake has done a good job of highlighting the problem of
"prolific offenders" in recent weeks.Instead of playing down its
becoming B.C.'s crime capital, Williams Lake Mayor Scott Nelson used
police statistics to tackle the problem head-on.

He says numbers are driven by a handful of hardcore repeat offenders
who, especially in a small town, can generate a crime wave by
themselves. The same story could be told in communities around the
province, and it's usually about what people will do to get drugs.

In Williams Lake, they're demanding that repeat offenders be kept in
custody until sentenced, so they can't rack up new crimes while
awaiting trial. While that's an appealing idea, B.C. Solicitor
General John Les says it has a major flaw.

Career criminals (and their lawyers) will maximize time "in remand"
awaiting trial, especially if the case against them is a slam dunk.
In a time-honoured (and naive) tradition, judges kindly give them
two-for-one credit for time served while they are still technically innocent.

Holding suspects creates another problem for the B.C. correctional
system, which runs addiction programs for inmates.

"The reality is they spend more time there in remand than actually
sentenced, and when they're there on remand, there's not much we can
do with them, because there's the whole presumption of innocence
thing," Les said. "You can't impose anything on them. And then when
they're sentenced, typically they don't spend a whole lot of time
there anyway."

Another popular notion is that the threat of harsh sentences will
deter the impulsive property crime that plagues communities. But does
it really?

One sobering study done in 1992 examined the most direct of
consequences, delivered by Irish Republican Army enforcers to
juvenile car thieves in Northern Ireland, which was shooting the
thief in the leg with a handgun. Did this reduce the number of car thefts? No.

Other studies suggest that 80 per cent of car thieves believe they
will never be caught.

For those desperate for drugs, fear of consequences seems an even
more remote notion. That's why today authorities are looking toward
the community court or "drug court" model for solutions.

Les has high hopes for B.C.'s community court pilot project, due to
open next spring in Vancouver. Its goal is to deal with offenders
quickly, giving them one shot at serving a sentence in a treatment
program before going into the regular system.

Les says the big city is the logical place to start, since it has the
most treatment programs available, but smaller towns can benefit too,
and Williams Lake has already begun talks with police and community agencies.

Last week the federal government launched its latest anti-drug
strategy, amid much squawking in the big-city media about a
U.S.-style war on drugs, and the allegedly urgent need for more
defeatist pest-holes along the lines of Vancouver's unsafe injection site.

About half of the Stephen Harper government's $64 million anti-drug
strategy is supposed to be directed to treatment programs. Given the
Conservatives' ideological rigidity, that probably means
abstinence-based programs, which by happy coincidence are the only
ones that actually work.

How will repeat offenders be made to stick to programs, and how will
the public be kept safe? Les says he'll have more to say on that in a
few weeks.