Paying twice for poverty

Re Canadian criminal justice meets the ghost of Christmas past, Opinion Dec. 23 A heartfelt thanks to Catherine Latimer for her article. From my 32 years as a provincial probation and parole officer, I became keenly aware of the multiple factors at play in “justice.”

Aphorisms like “It takes a village to raise a child,” are often used after the fact, but that ideal village is now irrelevant because of massive urbanization.

The disadvantaged are ill-served by a vast patchwork of support agencies dependent on various sources of funding. Poverty is too well tolerated along with its associated costs for many issues like health, dysfunctional families and crime. Criminal justice treats the symptoms, not the causes of crime. Society at large pays at least twice over for its discriminatory neglect of chronic poverty.

Fred Brailey, Orangeville