crime
A warning to Canada from inside the "Tough On Crime" US prison system
In lieu of the imminent passage of Bill C-10, the crime bill with mandatory minimums for all drug offenses involving manufacture and distribution – which the Harper Conservatives are set to pass in the Canadian Parliament – it is reflective to consider how the US criminal justice system has gotten completely out of control with these mandatory minimum sentences.
Once mandatory minimums are put in any criminal justice regime, they almost never get repealed despite the disastrous effect on the public safety, the treasuries of the state and federal government, and the cruelty that punishes victims and their families.
Read more »Mayors Endorsing Legalization, and Activists Protesting the Prime Minister
Dearest Miss: This was such a good week! You were magnificent in capturing the zeitgeist of the current politics affecting Canadians. In the last two weeks alone you've been quoted in newspapers, appeared on TV in Vancouver, were interviewed on Toronto and Vancouver radio, did a London, England podcast and the Free Talk Live radio broadcast (talking about your upcoming appearance at the prestigious New Hampshire Liberty Forum on February 23-26), and confirmed a Sun TV news appearance for Monday, and a radio interview in your hometown Kamloops Thursday. Read more »
Transparency remains an issue with crime bill: OUR OPINION
Editorial: The Barrie Examiner
Canada's provinces should be asking how much the federal omnibus crime bill will cost them.
And Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government should be answering.
Because Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, should be relatively well-known to Canadian politicians of all stripes.
It includes tougher laws for sexual predators, drug offences, violent youths, sentencing, offender accountability, pardons, international prison transfers, terrorism and protecting foreign nationals.
It was part of the Conservatives' election platform, one that helped Harper win his majority government last spring.
What has been a mystery, of sorts, is how much it will cost and who will bear that cost. Read more »
Supervised injection sites: Ideology comes with big blinkers
By. JEFFREY SIMPSON, Globe and Mail
In the ongoing struggle between ideology and evidence within the Harper government, ideology too often wins.
The entire field of criminal justice features the government’s determination to ignore evidence. Occasionally, the evidence is so incontrovertible, and the means for forcing it on the government so forceful, that the government has no choice but to adjust course and, in a few instances, to actually retreat.
So it will be with the supervised injection site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after the Supreme Court’s unanimous support of the program’s continuation and its utter rebuff of the Harper government’s opposition to it.
The minister at the time of the government’s appeal against supervised injections at the Insite clinic was Tony Clement, now under justified assault for boondoggle spending in his constituency surrounding last year’s G8 summit in Huntsville. Read more »
Tories slap two-day limit on debate over sweeping crime legislation
By: GLORIA GALLOWAY, Globe and Mail
The Conservative government has decided to allow just two days additional of debate on its omnibus crime bill before the proposed law goes off to a Commons committee for study.
Government House Leader Peter Van Loan announced the time restriction on Tuesday – a move designed to thwart long hours of criticism from opposition benches over the controversial 102-page piece of legislation that wraps together nine separate bills the Conservatives failed to enact during their minority government years.
Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae immediately denounced the cutting off of debate as a act of a “majority abusing power.” Read more »
Crime bill: expensive, ineffective and entirely political
By DAN LEGER, Chronicle Herald
The Conservative government’s omnibus crime bill is such a sprawling mess of wrong-headed provisions that some future administration will need years to untangle it. By then, our courts and prisons will be overflowing with a generation of hardened jailbirds, and we won’t be one bit safer.
The Safe Streets and Communities Act is a misnamed hodgepodge of provisions, few of which make sense if the real goal is to reduce crime. It will make the justice system more expensive and less effective. As Conservative party campaign rhetoric, it worked because it defined the Tories against their opponents. As law, it’s a disaster. Read more »
Tories crime bill draws reaction from MP
By Val Rossi - Trail Daily Times
While local police shed little light on a long crime bill being rolled out by the Conservative government, MP Alex Atamanenko has a number of reasons why the “tough-on-crime agenda” doesn’t work.
New criminal justice changes included in a 110-page omnibus bill tabled in the Commons affects nine pieces of existing legislation including drug laws, youth sentencing, anti-terrorism measures, the pardons system, detention of refugees, parole and house arrest.
“What they’ve done is put all these bills together, rather than going at them one by one so basically we have a choice here to vote for all or nothing and that’s wrong,” said Atamanenko. Read more »
A crime debate without facts or arguments
BY DAN GARDNER, OTTAWA CITIZEN
I suppose I could write a substantive and serious column about the government's omnibus crime bill.
First, I'd explain the many proposals. Then I'd say they are a terrible mistake. They will not reduce crime, but they will waste billions of dollars, spawn injustices, and damage communities. Or so I would argue.
If I did that, I would cite evidence. Lots of it. There's a small mountain of criminological research to support my case, along with much fine writing by jurists and political scientists. There's also practical experience, here and elsewhere - especially the United States, where even rock-ribbed Republicans are having second thoughts about the policies Stephen Harper is importing to this country. Read more »
New pot laws could overwhelm B.C. jails
CBC News
Minimum sentences in the federal government's new 'tough on crime' legislation are going to overwhelm B.C.'s overcrowded jails with small-scale marijuana growers, according to the province's prison guards.
If passed, the federal government's new legislation will mean a six-month minimum sentence for anyone convicted of growing between six and 200 cannabis plants.
Growing more than 200 to 500 plants would draw a year in jail and more than 500 plants would draw a minimum two years in jail. The maximum sentences in all cases would rise from seven to 14 years in prison. Read more »
Are `tough-on-crime' Tories shutting door to restorative justice?
BY DOUGLAS QUAN, POSTMEDIA NEWS
There was a time when Manjit Virk would have liked nothing more than to wring the neck of Warren Glowatski, one of two teenagers convicted of murdering his daughter, Reena, "as if he were a chicken."
But in the fall of 2005, when the two came face to face in a semicircle of chairs in the basement of a church, something very different happened.
"It was the most unusual experience I had encountered in my life," the Victoria father later recounted in his book, Reena: A Father's Story.
"My daughter's killer was shaking hands with me." Read more »
