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Fly on the Web
By Marshall Jones
Look up in the sky? Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a caped Conservative cruising across the country to keep us all safe from the hordes of criminals and their partners, the cowardly judges and lawyers.
We join our heroes at their headquarters in Ottawa where they are planning their counter offensive. Public Safety Captain Peter Van Loan has the power to make his judges impose mandatory minimum sentences for financial crimes, drug trafficking and to make sure they spend time behind bars, not at home.
Oh, I give up. I try to make it sound like a pulpy comic book but comic books have more basis in reality than the Conservatives’ tough on crime agenda.
It’s too simple to think mandatory-minimum, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key thinking will solve all our problems. And before we even get there, exactly what problems do we have to solve?
Canada’s murder rate has remained relatively stable since 1999. White collar crime deserves more attention and I will come to that later, but let’s be honest—this is a vote getter. People are rightfully pissed off by the Arthur Joneses, the AIGs and all the other thiefs and fraud artists of which Kelowna seems to have more than its share. But that’s not a great reason. Drug trafficking should also deserve more attention given the other peripheral crimes that comes with it, but we should demand more thought than these amendments offer.
Mandatory minimums cause more problems than they solve. If they did, the United States would be all puppy dogs and rainbows, the safest place in the world since they have one of the largest incarceration rates of any country in the world.
Er, no.
Mandatory minimums are also terribly inefficient. In court, when you remove negotiation as a tool for hard-headed lawyers they become, well, hard-headed. It takes years to get to trial as lawyers comb evidence and law to find some charter challenge, something—anything—to attack because they have nothing to lose. Mandatory minimum sentences apply for impaired driving and there is a direct correlation to how complex many of those investigations and trials have become.
Throwing and keeping more bad guys in jails is also expensive. Provincial ministers in charge of prisons are already negotiating for more federal money they will need to comply with Bill C-15 and others. The government won’t say, but it’s expected to cost $245 million to beef up the federal prison system alone. The costs should be so high that it sinks the legislation. Bill C-15 includes a “comprehensive review” after two years, including a cost benefit analysis. If these sentences are so effective, should it matter what it costs?
The trouble with kind of sentencing is it makes prejudicial presumptions about classes of people. We don’t line up groups of thieves and sentence them all together because one of them might have done it 100 times already who deserves more jail. One may have only done it once to feed his family and deserves a different sentence. We have judges who consider the individuals and what sentence is best. This legislation would suggest judges are incapable of doing that. They try hard to identify the real bad guys and when they do, sentences are rarely light.
And none of this nonsense is a deterrent to crime, which is what we all want to happen in the first place. Having mandatory minimums only changes how bad guys commit their crimes, how they destroy evidence and try to protect themselves. A dishonest man is going to take opportunities to rip off old ladies and investors or take the easy money in the drug world. A sentence isn’t going to change his mind.
The likelihood of being caught is. Drunk driving dropped significantly since the 1980s but it wasn’t the mandatory minimums, it was the public relations campaign that made the difference. All those commercials told us we will be caught if we drink and drive. We see the check stops. We believe we will be caught. So most of us don’t do it.
What matters is the police and how effective they are. You want to spend that money effectively, help police do their jobs. They are just fine in most areas, but catching white collar criminals is complicated. There are few resources for this. It requires study and coordination if we hope to catch these guys before it’s too late. And if you don’t think making radical changes in how we deal with drugs in our society, then police need help there, too if they have any chance (I would argue they don’t have a chance in a global drug trade) of getting to the major players at the root of the problem.
I don’t argue that some of these crooks, particularly gangsters and fraud artists, don’t deserve long stays in the crowbar hotel. I do. I think tougher sentences are entirely justified in the right cases. Judges make plenty of mistakes but they are far better to decide than any vote-getters in Ottawa. And judges can do it without all the problems caused by a mandatory minimum sentence.
marshall@kelowna.com
250-575-0831
3 Responses to “The Conservatives’ tough on crime agenda is only tough on taxpayers”
Tags: Bill C-15, conservatives, Peter Van Loan
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I love it when a writer has a bias and then chooses only those statistics that support that point of view. In this case it’s about crime and what we should or should not be doing about it.
First, let me say that the statistics used are only those reported to police. Statistics Canada believes that only about 34% of crimes are reported. Further, 92% off sexual assaults are not reported and 46% of break ins are not called in. Startling numbers, but check it out folks.
Since 1962 violent crime has leaped from 221 per 100,000
to 932. property crime is up by 62% and most categories are the same.
The reason we hear that crime is down is that it did drop
in the early 1990’s through out North America and no one knows why. Another weird anomaly is that the statistics do not include federal drug offenses. Given the huge impact of drugs that is hard to accept.
Perhaps the most difficult anomaly in the statistics is that they exclude multiple offenses. Only the most serious crime is reported. If one or more individuals or a group assaults you, then only one individual criminal act is recorded.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why some people
can claim that crime is down. The reality is that our Minister of Justice is doing a good job trying to protect us and we need to demand tougher measures as drugs and organized crime hurt our society.
If we really want to help our Police force, we can start by making sure the crooks they arrest go to jail.
Helping police do their job also means that Judges have to be made to protect society. No one can defend the number of criminals let off without reasonable sentencing
nor can we condone killers let out of prison so early.
Getting a bit tougher on crime is better than giving that drug dealer or murderer a big hug! A step in the right direction begins by looking at all the statistics and understanding what they mean.
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What the first commenter fails to realize is that while his/her stats are on unknowns and unproven, the stats on criminals who are put in jail for longer, extended period, all it does is make them more likely to commit more crimes when they get out.
Keeping them in indefinitely doesn’t work either as we already have a HUGE problem with over-crowding in Canadian prisions.
What Canada sorely lacks is a program that will put the accused face to face with their accuser(s) (in a controlled, monitored environment). These kind of meeting have been shown to have an over 95% effectiveness at stopping repeat offenses.
Keeping inmates in jail is VERY costly to taxpayers and seems to have no control on the amount/types of crimes committed – http://www.thestar.com/specialsections/crime/article/668064 – the USA is a great example of a FAILED system that our current government seems hell-bent on copying to win some votes.
I for one would like to keep more of money instead having the government invest it in a system is proven to be broken and not working.
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Marshall
The statistics always have to be taken with a grain of salt!Our biggest problem in Canada is we dont have enough prisons to keep our offenders in,or the economy to build them? In the U.S prisons are a huge money maker,youve got corparations building them every where.In Canada we complain about where theyre to be built as no one wants them in their back yard!so on goes the struggle of sentancing,home arrest,on and on.Build more prisons and they will come,plus it creates employment.
Please continue discussion on the forum: link