Tough On Crime, Or Criminally Stupid?

Critics say the Conservatives' policy on crime could turn Canada into a post-acopalyptic hellscape where prematurely released prisoners roam the streets in search of blood. They call it "California."

The reviews are starting to come in on Stephen Harper’s “tough on crime” agenda, and they are, so far, not so good. Culling from a report released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Charles Pascal writes in the Toronto Star that Harper’s plan to build more prisons and institute harsher sentences even as statistics show crime is decreasing “reinforces the notion that he has created a fact-free zone in Ottawa.” Pascal says the new policies will actually increase crime while simultaneously increasing the costs to taxpayers, who will fork over more than $5 billion for new prisons and longer sentences. Pascal sounds a little naïve when he argues that crime would be better prevented if that money was spent on literacy programs, and that some one caught with marijuana plants likely intends on little else than “sharing with his friends and providing arthritis relief for his grandmother” but he does provide one pointed example. Under new laws, if a prisoner doesn’t receive parole, he’ll serve a longer sentence but then be released with zero supervision. Pascal calls this “a recipe for recidivism.”

In the Globe and Mail, Erika Sasson takes aim at one soon-to-pass bill that would create mandatory sentences for drug offences, an idea Harper’s borrowed from our American friends. “It’s absurd to adopt a trend from a country that incarcerates the highest proportion of its population in the world,” writes Sasson, “and one that’s starting to move away from the culture of mandatory minimums.” Some jurisdictions in California have had to arbitrarily release prisoners because the system can’t afford the longer jail terms caused by mandatory sentences. The Conservatives say the law is meant to target organized crime, but Sasson counters that current law already allows for longer sentences for convicted criminals with links to organized crime, and that the new law “will over-incarcerate all sorts of minor criminals but never the Tony Sopranos.” To be fair, Tony always was a bit of a slippery fish.