IF PUBLIC SECURITY REQUIRED MORE PROSECUTIONS, THE MONEY WOULD BE FOUND.

judges are elected, the defence speaks last to the jury, grand juries and public defenders are not just stooges of the prosecutors, and prosecutors have much more difficulty extorting inculpatory perjured evidence, all compared to the United States. The sweet land of liberty, in such matters, is not much more of a society of laws than North Korea.

The fact that our justice system is better than that of the United states does not make it very good.

The triage report in Alberta, while claiming to be a response to the Supreme Court decision, emphasizes a lack of funds. The reason invoked of the Harper regime, which did all but erect Haman’s Gallows on Parliament Hill as it busily built more prisons to deal with a declining crime rate.

Ubiquitous security cameras and an aging population have helped reduce crime, and the new prisons are bound to be occupied in inordinate numbers by native people, whose problems and offences will not be remedied or corrected by imprisonment. Now, public policy has begun a 180-degree turn, not because of misgivings about the whole antediluvian nonsense of throwing non-violent offenders in prison at immense cost to the taxpayers — of course it is unjust and counter-productive, a failure both as deterrent and cure — but because it is costly.

The same trend has surfaced in the United States, where there are 49 million official felons (including ancient drunk-driving and disorderly conduct convictions), and the country has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, the nearest comparably prosperous democracies.

We, and the Americans, who have belatedly detected that their justice system is unsustainably costly but not that it is generally unjust, are doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Obviously, if public security really required more prosecutions and more prosecutors, the money would be found, but it is a frill. Canada could lead the world to a brighter sociological and juridical epoch if, in the case of non-violent offenders, we replaced community service and Spartan but not incarcerated living for imprisonment, and we would have less recidivism and save a great deal of money doing it.

We are following a parallel course in health care, where in the name of the asinine, impossible and undesirable cause of equal care for everyone, regardless of means, we are rationing health care and have doomed ourselves to a Sisyphean burden of mounting