I am writing as a concerned citizen who had grown use to living in a
much warmer country than it feels now. Our government is behaving like a
bunch of children who get to say "I told you so". They insist on
behaving with omnipotent authority with no concern for what our society
actually wants them to do. When they won the mandate to govern, I do
not believe that gave them the mandate to issue into law within 100 days
everything their little hearts desire. Previous to now, I do not
believe that it has ever been assumed that you get to ram everything you
want down the throat of Parliament just because "you can".
The latest is their lumping of nine bills into one omnibus crime bill
that is going to cost us a lot of money in the long run and will likely
have our prisons run by private enterprise. The massive penal colonies
that have sprung up here and there in the United States have been proven
less than effective. The owners, having run out of options in the
south are lobbying in the Northern State to build an empire here. There
can be no mistake about the fact that costs will soar and the
governments will have no interest in funding the required prisons.
Ultimately and amazingly enough, private enterprise will be there to do
it more cheaply than the government could ever hope to do it so we will
sell all of the prisons to corporations to run for a profit. Now that
is all pure speculation but it does somehow sound familiar, does it
not? The Canadian Bar Association has said that the bill "would move
Canada along a road that has failed in other countries, at great
expense". The Bar is more concerned with justice and rehabilitation it
seems than with penalizing; somewhat like I think most Canadians that I
know feel.
Prime Minister
Harper claims that Canadians support tough on crime laws. Well, he is
referring to the 40% who voted for him I would suppose because I have
not seen any independent polls to indicate that. Mr. McGuinty has told
Mr. Harper that Ontario has no intent to budget more money for prisoners
that the Federal government wants to create. Quebec has also refused
to pay
for a strategy that has been tried, and failed.
Indications of the hopelessness of the Omnibus Crime Bill have been
proven failures in many of the United States. Conservative Texans are
warning us not to follow a failed fill-the-prisons approach to justice.
If the Texans, who house the highest proportion of its citizens in
prisons are advising against it, we really should be paying attention.
Part of the bill has to do with mandatory sentencing provisions. It has
been proven over the world that mandatory sentences backfire. The end
result is that they take precious resources from
crime prevention programs and rehabilitation, and turn minor offenders
into hardened criminals. Prosecuting and sentencing the increased
number of mandatory issues that should not result in prison time will
clog the justice system and fill prisons. This will force the
provinces, who
pay for most of our justice system, to raise taxes, increase debt, or
cut spending on essential programs like health and education. That sounds like a pretty classic lose-lose situation.
It is well known that there is over-representation of definable segments
of our population that occupy prisons. The crime bill will make the
inequality that those segments represent even worse. It's not tough on
crime,
it’s tough on Canadians suffering from mental illness, addictions, and
poverty. It targets youth for harsher punishments when it is a given in
every other civilized area of the world that you rehabilitate and
encourage youth if you want positive results. It will also put more
Aboriginal people in prison. Whatever the reason is that these people
are in prison, there are tasks to tackle to bring that representation of
their population in prisons down. Sending them to prison will just be
the start of a vicious cycle of recidivism.
We need to make Canada safer, not meaner. Our crime rate has been
dropping and it doesn't seem the time to fix what ain't broke by taking
our justice and penal system back decades. If we are to continue to
reduce crime, we should
focus on what's already working - prevention and rehabilitation. There
are sufficient numbers of studies that indicate prevalence toward
criminal activity. I am certain that if Mr. Harper chose to, he could
commission one for himself. If we
address the major causes of crime, it would make sense that the crime
rate would drop even further. Reducing inequality and supporting
people who need help would go a long way toward bringing the existing
prison population down. Mr. Harper's bill would ultimately cut the
resources that are attempting to move toward that goal. It does not
take a rocket scientist to guess that we may see increased crime because
of that.
