IN THE NEWS| DRUG STRATEGY - Ottawa citizen Jan 2007 - Justice system failing us and addicts | Lock your doors
Our once-noble justice system has become just another social program, and it's failing to protect Canadians
Margret Kopala, The Ottawa Citizen
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside spans the few blocks north of Pender
before you reach Burrard Inlet and several blocks on either side of Main
Street. Not quite New York City at the height of its crime waves in the
1980s but with 15,000 to 20,000 drug addicts, dealers and illegal
immigrants, it is today Canada's worst city centre for crime, says
retired Justice Wallace Gilby Craig.
As a judge who for 26 years sat on the bench of the Vancouver
criminal division of the provincial court, Craig experienced changes in
the justice system first hand. Despite its constitutional obligation to
protect against crime, he says, a new orthodoxy now requires the system
to release offenders into communities to serve their sentences with the
result they are free to commit more crimes: "The essence of this new
orthodoxy was stated in the House of Commons in 1971 by then solicitor
general Jean-Pierre Goyer: 'From now on, we have decided to stress the
rehabilitation of individuals rather than the protection of society.'"
How did a once-noble criminal justice system embodying the
principles of denunciation, deterrence and incapacitation become just
another social program that in this case rewards deviant behaviour, and
what are the consequences of this change? As Ian Lee, a political
scientist and professor in the Sprott School of Business at Carleton
University, reminds us in the forthcoming How Ottawa Spends, such an
approach was analysed by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, and he concluded
that it led to anarchy.
But it is Craig who, in his columns for Vancouver's North Shore
News, shows how changes in the Parole Act and the Criminal Code along
with "anything but jail" advocacy achieved this. Combining offences,
concurrent sentencing, early parole ... it didn't help either that,
since the 1950s, elite thinking embraced root-cause, society-is-to blame
theories of crime.
These theories argue that social injustice, racism and poverty cause
crime, therefore policing and imprisonment are of little use.
Two new books challenge this view. The first, A Land Fit for
Criminals, by retired probation officer David Fraser, scathingly exposes
a liberalized British justice system that allows the benefits of crime
to outweigh its costs. The second, The Great American Crime Decline by
Franklin E. Zimring, brings the antiseptic discipline of a statistician
to bear on declining U.S. crime rates.
Returning persistent offenders to the community does not work, David
Fraser says, either as a means of reform or of protecting British
citizens, thousands of whom sleep in fear with guns and other weapons at
their bedsides to ward off burglars. Why? Because upward of 60 million
estimated crimes are being committed each year in Britain but because of
policing and other shortages, of the 5.2 million crimes that are
recorded, only one in 16 has a chance of being prosecuted.
The idea that crime is the fault of society and the lenient
treatment of criminals has created a "Criminals' Charter," he says,
while the failure to build enough prisons has resulted in the
overcrowding that keeps them in a state of panic even as it serves the
propaganda needs of the anti-prison ideologues.
And who can forget how, in the 1950s, we left our doors unlocked and
children wandered the streets safely? Fraser explains why by producing a
chart revealing how high prison populations in the '50s coincided with
low crime rates, while low prison populations match Britain's escalating
crime rates today. Disarmingly, Fraser states the obvious: "... when
offenders are in prison they cannot commit offences ..."
The state must honour its duty to protect the public by accepting
rising prison populations and by reviving police operations, he says. If
it fails its duty, the public should have the right of redress.
The effectiveness of incarceration and policing operations are a
constant theme in U.S. law and order initiatives and though U.S. crime
rates declined through the 1990s, few social scientists agree about
their causes. Zimring's The Great American Crime Decline analyses "the
usual suspects," namely demographics, the economy, changing drug use
patterns and higher prison populations and finds complex answers. But in
this nuanced and cautious book, even he concludes that the only
explanation for New York's stunning crime decline, double that of the
rest of the country, were "police trends."
Such "trends" are now the stuff of legend, but as a 2001 Manhattan
Institute paper by Dr. George L. Kelling and William H. Sousa explains,
New York simply returned to the first principles outlined by Scotland
Yard's Sir Robert Peel in 1829: "The basic mission for which the police
exist," he wrote, "is to prevent crime and disorder."
In 1990s New York, this meant tackling the small problems before
they became big ones (the "broken windows" theory) while increasing
police accountability and numbers to include more foot patrols.
And here in Canada? Although Canadian crime rates mirror declining
rates in the U.S., Britain's "Criminals' Charter" easily applies here.
Why else bar our windows and bolt our doors? "It's a terrible metaphor,"
says Craig, "decent citizens behind bars while rogues ... prowl about on
probation ..."
Whether rehabilitation efforts work or not, the larger question of
human agency -- that is, the ability of the individual to make moral
choices and accept their consequences -- remains. And the fact also
remains that violence to another human being is a violation of the
fundamental human right to live in peace.
But the point, finally, is that the criminal justice system
shouldn't concern itself with the causes of and cures for crime.
Protection of society through the humane application of the law is the
only function of the criminal justice system that makes sense. This
needn't deny motivated offenders support; rather such support should be
the purview of civil society and other branches of the state.
"Our communities will never be besmirched by an enlarged prison
estate," concludes Fraser, "but they will decay and rot under the
influence of unchecked criminality."
Posted January 16, 2007
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December 15, 2007
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