CEFSO News
Omnibus Crime Bill an Injustice
June 29th, 2011 Paula Mallea
This fall the Harper government will pass an omnibus crime bill that will imprison thousands more Canadians and cost billions of dollars. It will not do as advertised by the Conservatives and drive the crime rate down. It will simply incarcerate for longer the many citizens who fall afoul of the new laws and mandatory minimum sentences.
The perverse results of some of the new legislation are already being documented. While the Harper government sells its new laws by saying they will punish violent, repeat offenders, it is clear that many non-violent, first-time offenders will bear the brunt of the legislation.
The most recent example is Bill C-59. This law repeals Accelerated Parole Review. APR used to be available to first-time, non-violent offenders serving time in federal prisons. It was a way of releasing them at 1/6 of their sentences if they were low-risk for reoffending and a good risk for reintegration into society. Now all of these offenders will have to undertake the full parole process, backing up the system, overcrowding prison cells, and ultimately making it impossible for most of these offenders to be released even at 1/3 of their sentence.
C-59 was an opportunistic and popular move by the Harper government to respond to the public, who were outraged that Earl Jones (the Ponzi fraudster) might qualify for release at 1/6 of his sentence. The victims of Mr. Jones’ frauds were vocal and influential, and Bill C-59 was the result.
Like much of Mr. Harper’s crime legislation, the law applies willy-nilly to many other offenders who should properly be released sooner rather than later. Thus we learn that, perversely, non-violent first-time women offenders have been the most affected by this law.
A year ago, there were about 500 women in the federal prison system. Now there are almost 600. That is an increase of 20% in one year. It costs $556 per DAY to keep a woman behind federal bars. Overcrowding results in the spread of disease, the heightening of tension, more violence, less access to programming and visiting rights. It is an extremely destructive method of accommodating prisoners.
The Harper government has drafted a large number of laws which will result in the same anomalous endgame, and no one is asking any questions. When Mr. Nicholson insists that his drug law is targeted at organized crime members selling drugs to children in the school yard, he is misrepresenting his own legislation. His drug law will capture large numbers of small players and people who have nothing to do with organized crime. They will be your young neighbours growing a few plants in the basement for sharing at a grad party. They will be people in pain who need marijuana for treatment purposes. They will most certainly not be vicious gang members, using guns to defend their turf.
It can be predicted with confidence that the omnibus bill will result in billions of dollars spent for no good purpose, a rising rate of violence and sickness in prisons, and a negative rather than a positive effect upon public safety.
Paula Mallea, B.A., M.A., Ll.B, practised criminal law for 15 years in Toronto, Kingston, and Manitoba. She acted mainly as defence counsel, with a part-time stint as prosecutor, and spent hundreds of hours in penitentiaries representing inmates. She is a Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. She is the author of The Fear Factor: Stephen Harper’s Tough On Crime Agenda and Lorimer Publishing will be releasing her book on the tough-on-crime agenda this fall.
Ontario Tories promise manual labour for prison inmates
Inmates in Ontario jails will be busy doing manual labour if voters elect a Conservative government, party leader Tim Hudak vowed on Thursday.
In an announcement in the lead-up to a fall provincial election, Mr. Hudak said he’ll make work programs mandatory for provincial inmates, those convicted of sentences of two years or less. Such work programs are currently voluntary in the province.
Mr. Hudak said prisoners could be put to work for up to 40 hours a week raking leaves, cutting grass, picking up the trash and cleaning up graffiti. Prisoners would be paid in "credits" they can use for "rewards" such as being able to watch TV, drink coffee or use the jail gym.
"Offenders should be made accountable for their own actions and that includes making them give back to society," Mr. Hudak said.
The Conservatives said the program would likely cost $20-million, or 5% of the entire budget for corrections.
A Statistics Canada report earlier this month found that fewer than half of the inmates in Canadian jails and prisons are serving time for criminal convictions, down from 60% a decade earlier.
The majority of prisoners in Canada, 58%, are in jail on remand awaiting a court date and wouldn’t be subject to mandatory work programs.
National Post
tmcmahon@nationalpost.comRESPONSE:
Tim Hudak has clearly jumped on the Federal Conservative “Tough on Crime” bandwagon but fails to take into account the following:
The forced mandatory labour of prisoners is essentially enslavement.
It will violate Canadian Charter law.
It will violate the United Nations 1984 agreement on the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners which Canada has signed on to.
It will violate international Human Rights Law.
Your question to the Provincial Conservative party should be exactly where will the $20 million that they themselves admit it will cost come from? What programs and services are they planning to cut to fund this initiative?
He is modeling this on similar programs in the U.S. The U.S. prison population is growing 13 times faster than the general population (Washington Post January 7, 2011). Three days ago the US Supreme Court upheld an order for California to free thousands of prisoners because of overcrowding. Why are we modeling the Canadian penal system on a failed U.S. experiment that has virtually bankrupted the United States?
Bryonie Baxter
Acting President - CEFSO
