Month: March 2012

I’ve been reading the news on the CBC and on La Presse regarding the new tough crime omnibus bill that Harper’s Tories have rammed through the commons and I don’t like the way things are going for Canada. Having a bit of outside perspective, I’m seeing that Canada really is becoming the 51st state and I really don’t like it.

Prisons-for-profit are commonplace in the US, with the “land of the free” having the highest incarceration rates and prison terms in the world. Seriously. Numbers from 2008 show that approximately one in every 31 adults in the US was behind bars, or being monitored (probation and parole). The prison population has quadrupled since the 1980s, partially as a result of mandatory sentencing that came about during the “war on drugs.”

What’s really scary is that, both in the US and now in Canada, the people behind these tough new crime and immigration laws aren’t in it for the safety of the man on the street. They’re in it for the money. The lobby groups funding these bills and pushing them forward are basically the mouthpieces for privately run incarceration corporations, who want a bigger share of a billion-dollar industry. For these companies to do well, people have to go to prison. For this to happen, new policies need to be enacted, policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole.

I wholeheartedly agree with Bob Rae (scary!): “It makes no sense for the government to be going in this direction. It’s not a real crime prevention strategy, it’s a prison promotion strategy, it’s an incarceration strategy, that I think will prove to be a very costly mistake for Canada,” said Rae.

From the CBC:

The toughening of jail sentences and the introduction of new mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug and other offences are among the measures opposed by critics. Louise Arbour, former justice at the Supreme Court of Canada, is one of those critics and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group that studies and makes recommendations on national drug policies around the world. She told CBC News on Monday that mandatory minimum sentences are generally “bad criminal law policies.”

They preclude judges from considering the specific circumstances of the offender and the offence and tie their hands, Arbour said. With marijuana-related offences, mandatory minimum sentences “go completely against the modern thinking by world leaders about the direction that the so-called war on drugs should take after 40 years of failure,” she said.

The government says it is targeting drug traffickers, but Arbour says mandatory minimum sentences won’t put a dent in what is a global problem. In her opinion, the safe streets and communities act is “a very costly enterprise that is based on ideology rather than science and progressive experimental initiatives that Canada is very famous for,” Arbour said.

So yeah… Mandatory sentencing, strongarm political tactics, dodgy election practices. Welcome to the Land of the Free Up North, Eh?

Current Mood: Angry