The Crime Bill

Comments.  Considerations.   Questions.   

                     By Kenneth Bagnell

      It’s now over a hundred years since Winston Churchill spoke one of the first of his many eloquent and wise lines: “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country.” He was, as he so often was, absolutely right. In which case Canada for the first time in history is moving in the very opposite direction:  throwing the proverbial prison key away. We are, through a crime bill of the Harper government, poised to jail more people, hand down longer sentences and make imprisonment more harsh, brutal, and so embittering that when an inmate is released he’s virtually certain to be more dangerous than when he entered. This despite the counsel of all the country’s scholars of criminology and indeed its criminal lawyers, including the eminent Edward Greenspan, who at a lecture in 2012 in Eglinton St. George’s United Church in Toronto said: “All serious empirical research in Canada and Europe over the last thirty years shows beyond a doubt that longer sentences do not deter offenders.”

    The Harper “tough on crime bill” was utterly unwarranted. For example, when former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – ironically once head of the party the current Prime Minister leads – commented, he was very pointed. In an article by two of the country’s top experts on crime, criminologist Anthony Doob and lawyer Edward Greenspan the former Prime Minster said: “If locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies then the United States should be the safest country in the world. In fact the United States affords a glaring example of the limited impact that criminal justice responses have on crime… Evidence from the U.S. is that costly repressive measures alone fail to deter crime…” (Canada’s crime rates have, according to Statistics Canada,  been descending for over a quarter century.) As I write, I happen to be in the US, thereby witness to the obsessive fear, mirrored on TV newscasts, that accompanies the policies Mulroney mentions. So much for the foundation on which this policy rests.

          Still, there are intimations of promising, if gradual, change on social and penal attitudes. For one thing, in the U.S. and in Canada, professional correctional people — those managing the institutions and those in policy positions — are letting it be known that longer sentences and harsher punishment only make things more difficult, especially dealing with the inmates. Back in 1971, Kingston Penitentiary — a dreadful place I visited for interviews in the 1960s — erupted in a terrifying riot. Things then got worse everywhere in the penal system: hostage incidents, violent rampages and so on. A federal committee investigated, concluded there was no justice for prisoners and called for humane, enlightened change. It helped. Even just announcing a parliamentary committee would visit and talk to inmates calmed things. It was an indication that while regressive measures fail, progressive measures help:  Correctional people changed and are still changing. For the better.

     Moreover there’s hope in a new sentiment, developing in the US, that might also help. It’s among the country’s conservatives. The Republican Party, the cradle of the reactionary Tea Party and its devastating role, may be entering a time of change.  The key reactionary figures – Sarah Palin, Rick Santorin, and Newt Gingrich– have been properly disavowed by many senior Republicans.  As I write, Senator John McCain has just called them “Wacko-birds,” obviously hoping to see the end of their influence. (Newt Gingrich responded by saying he was “really disappointed in John McCain.” Imagine that. After all the Tea Party only cost Republicans their influence in the Senate.)  Enough of them thank you. In general the Republican party has, particularly in recent years been home to the most reactionary elements of American political thought. Now with more moderate Jeb Bush emerging as a refreshing figure in Republican leadership ranks, the party may begin a move to more centrist and rational policy. It’s of course overdue but give it time — it may well reform and renew US conservative perspective. This matters to us all. It may move toward the point of view Republicans have long held since the days of the greatest of them all, Abraham Lincoln.

     Why does this matter to Canada? Because we are subtly but deeply influenced by our close and powerful neighbor. American thinking has always influenced us through its megaphonic media reach, not just on the television and movie screen but print media: every Sunday, our largest circulation newspaper, carries an entire section from The New York Times. There are countless other avenues of US influence from business cooperation to mutual travel . Because of the influence flowing from this proximity, in the first decade of the 2000s, surveys showed that over sixty percent of Canadians favored the death penalty and another sixty believed long sentences reduce crime. Not a shred of evidence justified it. American values had influenced Canadian values. That, I hope, is about to change, slowly for sure. But as one senior commentator put it yesterday: “A new generation of Republican thinking is about to emerge.”  

          The Harper view of crime is deeply American. It rejects and repudiates the opinion of every qualified expert in Canada in this field who knows that virtually all crime is primarily rooted or formed in poverty. It replaced this informed opinion with the notion that crime is the product of personal evil thereby deserving harsh and vindictive punishment. It never works. As Canadian formal policy on crime the Harper Crime Bill may very well make more apparent a truth spoken decades ago, a truth with historic echoes: we citizens can become victims of the state, just as as we can become victims of the criminal.                         

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    Toronto’s Eglinton St. George’s Speakers Series, which informed this blog, is sponsored by the congregation’s Compassionate Justice Group. The series opened on October 28, 2012 with Graham Stewart, longtime advocate for prisoner human rights and a former director of the John Howard Society. Subsequent speakers included Mike Federico, deputy chief of Toronto’s police department, Jonathan Rudin, lawyer and program director of Aboriginal Legal Services, Bill Radigan, Roman Catholic Deacon who works with inmates. It concludes April 7 when at 12:30pm Harry Nigh a chaplain at a Toronto correctional centre will act as moderator for a panel of offenders now about to return to normal life. For further information email: jimblack@gmail.com.     

All past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome.