Facing facts in the battle with crime
The Canadian government should take a lesson from a remarkably frank acknowledgment by senior U.S. justice authorities that decades of tough-on-crime laws in that country have been a miserable failure. The Safe Streets and Communities omnibus bill the Harper Conservatives passed into law two years back has been widely criticized as an ideologically driven, right-wing initiative from the moment it was rammed through Parliament. It took an excessive approach to fighting crime at a time when crime rates were in decline and prisons were already overcrowded.
Despite abundant evidence that mandatory sentences are a blunt instrument with no discernible effect on crime rates, the federal bill imposed fixed terms for many new offences that were certain to jam the courts, frustrate judges and put more convicted people in jail for longer periods.
That get-tough agenda put Canada in lockstep with a harsh American justice stance that dates back to the “war on drugs” campaign launched in the early 1970s. The U.S. prison population has grown by an astonishing 800 per cent since 1980 as that tough-on-crime mentality progressively took over the justice system under Republican presidents. This week, though, reality trumped ideology. It is particularly telling that when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared Monday that his country’s justice system “is in too many respects broken,” many Republican leaders publicly agreed with him.
“Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law-enforcement reason,” Holder said in a speech to the American Bar Association that signalled sweeping changes to American justice. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.”
With less than five per cent of the world’s population, the United States has almost one-quarter of the world’s prisoners — some two million inmates. With a rate of incarceration that’s about six times higher than China’s, and a bloated correctional tab that exceeds $80 billion a year, something clearly has to give. The U.S. is moving to abandon harsh mandatory sentences for drug offenders and forego prosecutions for non-violent, low-level criminals whose offences carry mandatory minimum terms. Holder’s plan will also see the release of elderly prisoners who are not deemed a threat to society.
Our southern neighbours have concluded they can no longer bear the human and moral costs that come with holding the world’s largest number of prisoners behind bars. Here in Canada, those costs are no less sobering. This country already spends about $4 billion a year on its prison system. Some estimates have put the total cost of implementing the Harper crime bill at more than $5 billion.
The lesson seems obvious. To be really tough on crime, governments need to make the social investments in diversionary programs and alternatives to incarceration that can actually make a difference, rather than emulate failed U.S. corrections policies that even the Americans are now abandoning.