BEHIND BARS

The case against an American style justice system; Across the world,
politicians have heard that the U.S. has found the solution to crime, but
the American illusion of safety through punishment has been bought at an
awful expense.

One evening last spring I took a walk on the famous streets of San
Francisco, looking for a little solace. It had been an exhausting week of
travel and research -- not just physically exhausting, but morally.

A day's drive north of San Francisco, I had toured Pelican Bay state
prison, one of the new breed of "supermax" lockups -- tiny, alien worlds
where prisoners spend virtually every waking moment in concrete cells,
stripped of almost all human contact, as days, weeks, months and years
creep by.

I had spoken with a retired police officer who argued that all prisoners
should be locked in solitary and joked about preventing escape by
outfitting inmates with explosive neck-collars.

I turned on the television to see a congressman attack the sentence of a
13-year-old boy convicted of second-degree murder -- life with no chance of
parole for several decades -- as unacceptably soft.

I walked the dark steel ranges of San Quentin prison and met a man
sentenced to life under the state's "three-strikes" law for possessing a
single rock of crack cocaine.

These raw realities were numbing to witness. Worse was what they said about
the culture that created them. This was a culture that understands only an
innocent "us" and a predatory "them," a culture obsessed with the
infliction of punishment, a culture in which videotapes of police officers
beating suspects into submission had become highly rated television
entertainment.

But San Francisco was a relief. In that beautiful city of light and colour,
the punishing reality seemed far off, at least if you forget that San
Quentin is just a few kilometres away. So I walked and tried to forget.

And as I walked, three different street dealers offered to sell me crack.

Roughly 20 to 25 years ago, the United States embraced a package of harsh
criminal justice policies often marketed under the slogan "tough on crime."
The idea is simple: Putting more criminals in harsher prisons, and keeping
them there longer, will remove the bad guys from the streets and deter
others from getting involved in crime. Punishment is the key to crime
control, in this philosophy. If punishment is light, crime goes up. If it
is tough, crime goes down.

It's not a new idea. In the modern era, the first state to create a
tough-on-crime justice system was the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. As
a result, from Stalin's time until the fall of Communism, the U.S.S.R. had
by far the world's highest rate of imprisonment. Today's Russia inherited
the Soviet Union's swollen prisons, but it recently ceased to be the
world's top jailer. That honour now goes to the United States of America.

In another age, the American public would have been bothered by the
knowledge that the United States puts more of its people behind bars than
Russia. Not today. Since the early 1990s, crime in the United States has
dropped precipitously. For the great majority of Americans, the conclusion
is obvious: The country got tough on crime and the streets became safer.
The hardline approach worked.

Inevitably, that conclusion did not stay within American borders. American
cultural exports consist of more than just Hollywood and Coca-Cola. Public
policies are also sold internationally, and few fields of American public
policy have been exported more successfully than criminal justice.

Across the western world, politicians have heard that the United States has
found the solution to crime. They have also learned from American
experience that crime can be the perfect political tool. Motivated by both
principle and self-interest, many have begun pushing their nations to adopt
American justice policies. In no country is this truer than Canada.

The government of Ontario's approach to crime is a virtual duplicate of the
American model. So is the crime platform of the Canadian Alliance. Even the
language many Canadian politicians use when they talk about crime -- "zero
tolerance," "truth in sentencing," "adult time for adult crime" -- was
invented by American politicians to sell American reforms.

We should be concerned. While it's true that Americans overwhelmingly
credit the get-tough approach with reducing crime, the few who disagree
include the experts who actually study crime: Most criminologists believe
tougher laws did little to make the streets safer. Punishment is simply not
an effective way to cut crime. Even something as draconian as, say,
sentencing a man to life in San Quentin for possession of crack won't stop
crack dealers from popping up on street corners.

Worse, the American illusion of safety through punishment has been bought
at awful expense. Part of that cost lies in the billions of dollars spent
building and staffing prisons. But payment also comes in more intimate and
insidious forms. A nation cannot sweep up and imprison vast numbers of
people without inflicting manifold harms on families, neighbourhoods and
communities. And who can quantify the costs paid in lost liberty, as
freedom is seized in the search for a mirage?

This series will explore crime and punishment in four countries: Canada,
the United States, Russia and Finland.

In Russia, the prisons are jammed, filthy and rife with disease and
violence. This is the legacy of Stalin's get-tough policies, a legacy
modern Russia is struggling to leave behind.

In the United States, justice policies remarkably similar to Stalin's have
produced the greatest incarceration boom since the Soviet tyrant's death.
American wealth has allowed the U.S. to deal better with its nation behind
bars, but still, the damage inflicted on both sides of the prison gate is
terrible.

In Finland can be found the alternative -- and proof that harsh punishment
does not reduce crime. About 30 years ago, Finland began a wholesale
revolution in criminal justice, moving from a tough, Russian-style system
to the western European model in which punishment is not the focus of crime
control and prison is used as sparingly as possible. If there was anything
to the tough-on-crime philosophy, that shift should have caused crime to
soar. It didn't.

Canada, as usual, is suspended somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, halfway
between the American model and the Western European. We imprison more
offenders than western European countries, but far fewer than the United
States. Some of the sentences we hand out are similar to western European
norms, but some, especially for the worst crimes, are in line with American
norms. Some of our prisons look and operate like Western Europe's while
others are in the American mould.

The root of these contradictions is a fundamental clash of visions. Whether
we recognize it or not, that clash can be found in just about all criminal
justice controversies. Parole, young offenders, "Club Fed," mandatory
minimum sentences, boot camps, sentence lengths: When we debate these and
other issues, we are really making a choice between two visions of crime
and punishment. Slowly and steadily, we are choosing between the western
European and American models.

Unfortunately, the debates are never framed that way. Instead, we focus on
one small aspect of criminal justice, wrench it out of context, and make a
decision about it that ignores the wider implications.

Consider the protest by family members of murder victims upset that
convicted murderers were sometimes being sent to lower-security prisons
early in their sentences. The families, and some politicians, were furious.
When the issue got media attention, the solicitor general immediately
announced that offenders serving life sentences would have to spend at
least two years in maximum security. The families and the police were
satisfied and that was the end of it.

But as we will see in this series, the original policy was in line with the
western European model, while the new policy is very American. It is also
likely that the new policy is illegal because it violates a federal law
aligned with the western European philosophy.

So which is the right way to go? To give a full answer to that, you have to
first see that more is at stake than just this one issue. One policy
follows Western European justice principles; the other takes the American
lead. In choosing the one that follows the American lead, we tacitly
accepted key American principles of crime and punishment and put in place
an important precedent that could well affect future policies. We nudged
the whole criminal justice system a little more in the American direction.
Did anyone consider that? Not at all. There was no discussion of the
underlying principles involved. Even the fact that the new policy probably
violates federal law was never mentioned. There was simply a blur of
emotions, headlines and announcements. And then it was on to the next
controversy.

That's why criminal justice issues have to be put in a broad context. What
we decide about parole affects the whole criminal justice system. The same
for young offenders, "Club Feds," and the rest of the hot-button issues. In
each case, we are choosing between the western European and American
criminal justice philosophies. It's happening whether we realize it or not.
Do we want an American criminal justice system? That's the fundamental
question. And each time we deal with issues like sentence lengths and
prison conditions, we go some distance to answering it.

If it seems impossible that Canada would ever become as punitive as the
United States, consider California. Just 25 years ago, that state had one
of the most liberal justice systems in the United States, a system that
was, in some ways, far more liberal than Canada's is today. Now it has one
of the toughest. California's Democratic governor supports the death
penalty and has boasted that no lifer will ever be released while he's in
power. The most powerful political lobby is the prison guards' union. The
phrase "zero tolerance" was invented in California. It is home to one of
the harshest new prisons on the planet, Pelican Bay State Prison. It is a
state with prisons the size of towns, a place where a man was sentenced to
life for stealing a slice of pizza.

And all of this has the overwhelming support of the people of California --
the same people that, just a few decades, supported a liberal criminal
justice system.

In 1910, an earnest young prison reformer declared: "The mood and temper of
the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the
most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country." That reformer was
Winston Churchill.

I thought of Churchill's maxim while touring Pelican Bay. At the
checkpoints, guards sell an array of souvenirs that puts to shame many a
museum gift shop. There are ballcaps, pens, mugs, cups and T-shirts in
assorted varieties. "Pelican Bay Bed and Breakfast," one of the T-shirts is
emblazoned: "The Hard Time Inn."

There's no question about the mood and temper of the American public in
regard to the treatment of crime and criminals. The only question is
whether we feel the same way.