jail

By donalee Moulton, The Lawyers Weekly

A controversial report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) slams private prisons and mass incarceration in the U.S. for harming imprisoned individuals and the government’s bottom line while making companies extremely wealthy.

Legal experts in Canada say that the same jailhouse problems — ​escalating violence, increased costs, and overcrowding — ​exist in this country, and the federal government’s new omnibus crime bill may sow the seeds for private prisons here. There is, however, a constitutional issue that may make this impossible. The federal government is also saying private prisons are not coming to Canada. Read more »

Beatrice Fantoni, The Province

Ontario to investigate treatment of inmates by guards

Ontario's ombudsman has launched an investigation into how the province handles complaints about the mistreatment of inmates in provincial jails.

"We had more than 100 complaints in the last year from inmates who say correctional officers assaulted them, and more than 25 since this April alone," Andre Marin said in a statement Tuesday in which he announced the investigation.

"Even more disturbing are the allegations that violence has been covered up," Marin added, saying that it appears several institutions have been the subject of complaints.

"There is a concern that a code of silence has taken hold among some guards." Read more »

By: GLORIA GALLOWAY, Globe and Mail

The man who headed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency under U.S. president George W. Bush says Canada should avoid the mistakes that caused incarceration rates to soar in his country.

Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who represented Arkansas in the U.S. Congress and a former prosecutor who advocated a tough approach to crime, has joined other high-profile members of his party in advocating a revision of harsh American justice policies.

“We have made some mistakes and I hope you can learn from those mistakes,” Mr. Hutchinson told the Commons public safety committee on Thursday. Read more »

Editorial: Montreal Gazette

It's hard to know who is more to blame: The Conservatives for twisting the facts about crime in Canada to convince Canadians they are living in dangerous times. Or Canadians for going along with the Conservatives' imagined higher crime rates when the evidence right under their noses - from their everyday lives - shows that crime rates are falling.

The Harper government has made its "tough on crime" agenda a cornerstone of the electoral campaign it is constantly waging in case its minority government falls.

It might be wrong on the facts, but the Conservative government knows its constituency well: Getting tough on crime - whatever the actual need to do that - appeals to a steadfast core of supporters. Read more »

By NEIL BOYD, Vancouver Sun

The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, it seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.

It’s not that marijuana is benign. For some people and in some circumstances it can be a problematic drug, as can most other psychoactive substances that are widely circulated in our culture – tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, maybe even chocolate. What’s initially much more puzzling is the extent to which the Harper Conservatives are ignoring all relevant evidence regarding the utility of mandatory minimum terms for drug offences. We know that mandatory minimums are the leading cause of the massive explosion in U.S. prison populations, imposing extraordinary costs without any demonstrable benefits – the percentages of Americans who use cannabis and other illegal drugs has not been impacted by this massive project of imprisonment, and today most American legislators of both the political left (Barack Obama) and the right (Newt Gingrich) are now trying to figure out how to make the criminal justice system less reliant on imprisonment, and more effective. Perhaps even more oddly, the percentage of both Canadians and Americans who used cannabis in the last year sits at 10 per cent,  about 50 per cent higher per capita than the percentage of Dutch citizens who used cannabis –  a country in which the drug can be bought without prosecution, at any number of so-called coffee shops. Read more »

Editorial, Nanaimo News Bulletin

The federal Liberals plan to shoot down a crime bill proposed by the Conservatives that would include stiffer sentences for drug possession and could also require tens of millions, even billions of dollars to build new prisons.

The Liberals also worry Bill S-10 – which was passed by the Senate and is before the House of Commons – would unfairly target younger criminals, as it would carry the same mandatory six-month sentence for possessing six marijuana plants as it would for having 200.

“This bill isn’t tough on crime, it’s dumb on crime,” said Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. Read more »