In its first major policy announcements of 2011, the Conservative government revealed eight additional prison expansions, putting new bars on the windows and adding new walls to (by latest count) 24 facilities across Canada, at a cost of $2 billion over five years.
In his year-end summary of good works from his government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper lauded their efforts at crime fighting. Of the domestic list of 13 "major successes achieved," fully seven involved legislation to get tough on crime.
In The Fear Factor, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study, Paula Mallea, a criminal law specialist, points out that crime rates have been falling for 20 years, and that just one of the new pieces of so-called anti-crime legislation introduced by the Conservatives -- by abolishing two-for-one credits for remand time -- would cost Corrections Canada $5 billion to implement. She concludes the upshot of the new crime measures would be to increase violent crime, and pay more to do it.
Any reasonable individual should be appalled by the Conservative policy to invest in more criminal detention at great expense for no apparent reason. The CCPA study explains how locking up people for longer periods increases the risk of inmates committing violent crime inside prison -- and after they get out.
And it gets worse. The one sector of the prison system geared to rehabilitation -- prison farms -- is seeing six closures despite local protests that in Kingston included distinguished writer Margaret Atwood.
In an era of one-man rule, no one in Harper's party caucus dares to question the autocrat in power. Yet there is nothing to stop party members, one-time Progressive Conservatives especially, from calling for a different priority from our national government than bogus crime fighting. In fact, the Progressive Conservative Party still exists, and may well stage a comeback if Harper continues to govern using an American Republican playbook.
The CBC are certainly on the crime agenda. Local radio and TV news casts lead with whatever incident of violence turns up, and usually features several stories. Say what you wish about "if it bleeds, it leads" reporting, it is cost effective. Just send a journalist with a camera, and/or a microphone down to the police station, and stories have a way of turning up.
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Suppose Canadians could hear "reporting" about new art exhibits, or new plays being produced when they turned on the local CBC news as the leading stories. Would they object? If news about the publication of a new Atwood book led the National, would be that be a problem? Should we not be treated to a clip of a forthcoming Atom Egoyan film on another night?
Conrad Black says additional prison expenditures are "utter nonsense". Be that as it may, tabloid journalism took over at the once respected Southam broadsheets when Black seized control. Under Canwest and now Postmedia ownership, space once reserved for news and public affairs has been given over to crime reports. Fading circulation major daily papers now do their best imitation of The Police News in competition with the original down-market Sun newspaper chain.
When the Conservatives shut down the long-form census they knew perfectly well what was at stake. The alternative to good statistics is not "no" statistics, it is "bad" statistics. Statistics are used to settle disagreements about policy. Given reliable evidence, people can make up their minds about what has happened, and debate what needs to be done. Statistics Canada research is the basis for the CCPA report The Fear Factor. Given bad statistics, none of us will ever know enough about the parameters of what is being talked about in order to make up our minds sensibly about anything.
For the moment, we have all the evidence we need to say no to the Conservatives on the crime agenda, and the accompanying prison spending spree the prime minister wants us to be so proud about.
Duncan Cameron writes weekly on politics and is president of rabble.ca.
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Here,here on a fine column.
Here's what I see from the Reform Party's new 'crime agenda'.
I think when those RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe were shot dead at a grow op and the'close call' in 2003 when the government almost decriminalized marijuana,the Reform Party and their base supporters were outraged...I think there was a meeting of 'the minds' of the new conservative party in which King Harper promised..'If we get control of Ottawa,we'll make sure this never happens'
If you read between the lines of the Reform Party's drug policy,this 'war' is designed to go after the one product that now rivals beer and pharmaceuticals in popularity.
Straight out of the Jesus Reagan playbook,a war on drugs is designed to target whatever it is that is popular in consumption which would pervert the actual crime rate,incarcerate anywhere from 20-50% more of its citizenry.
And why worry about prison over population?..This is when you PRIVATIZE prisons...And at that point,you (as the government) are no longer interested in 'getting tough on crime'...You NEED an influx of crime to feed the new business you've created...The business of crime and punishment.
Once this happens,the police,our courts and prosecuters would be working with quotas and be bound to having to arrest,try and sentence a set minimum each day,week,month and year.
New laws would have to be written,old laws would have to be toughened and the lion's share of these laws would target the poor (That's the way we can house our homeless and employ our jobless---at a cost of atleast 10 times more than what it would cost with social welfare)
Of course the crime rate is falling...I live in a city of 2 million people...We have a maximum of 50 murders per year,random crime is as rare as a rainbow at midnight and you can walk virtually any time of the day or night in any part of the city without worry of getting yourself killed.
Paranoid Canadians who think we live in a dangerous society should take a drive south to cities such as Detroit,Chicago,Washington DC,Philadelphia,Jersey City,Newark,NYC,Oakland,Los Angeles,Houston,Dallas,St Louis..etc..etc..And THEN talk about Canada's 'mean streets'
But if the crime obsessed Harpercons can get their way,Canada will become as dangerous as the American cities I have mentioned by handing us an American society.
Where there's NO social safety net,everyone is armed and half the populous is a product of our prison system.
I'm sure what I stated could be rebuttaled...I'm sure Stockwell Day could pull yet another 'statistic' out of his ass.
Harper can find billions of dollars to spend on anything that props up his autocratic tsarist rule. What of all the countless studies that show a dollar spent on education and proper benefits saves many dollars in law enforcement and incarceration. Clearly Herr Harper is aware of a growing need in Canada for prisons. As the current crime figures don't support the expense, it becomes clear that Harper worries that there will be an increase in social unrest as the economic and environmental costs of Conservative rule come to pass.