PING!
Posted on 12/29/2006 11:04:02 AM PST by GMMAC
Vic Toews' unfinished business
National Post: EDITORIAL
Published: Friday, December 29, 2006
Almost one year ago, our votes piled up in such a way that we elected a Conservative government with a short leash attached to its neck. The 39th Parliament has been able to pass a few useful measures, but in a splintered House of Commons, the government's agenda remains trapped within narrow limits in many areas. Unfortunately for Canadians, one of these areas is criminal justice, one of the Conservatives' strongest electoral suits.
In the past, Canadians have tolerated, rather than celebrated, the lax policies of Liberal governments on crime and punishment. In cities across the country, the career criminal who kills someone while out on bail has become a fixture of page-one crime stories. And Canadians were shocked in March, 2005, when four Mounties were killed in Mayerthorpe, Alta. by James Roszko, a psychopathic drug criminal and sex offender who had somehow managed to beat the justice system for most of his adult life.
The Conservatives were supposed to change all this. But so far, Justice Minister Vic Toews has found majority backing in the Commons only for two minor reforms -- a street-racing bill and legislation circumscribing the more absurd uses of house arrest as an alternative to imprisonment. His broader reform agenda remains unfulfilled.
Mr. Toews is eager to press forward with increasing sentences for impaired driving and gun crimes, and making it easier for prosecutors to use dangerous offender status to put away violent, habitual, incorrigible criminals. The individual pieces of legislation that comprise his unfinished agenda can be criticized at the margins, but the resistance they are meeting across the floor seems to be founded on a more general knee jerk principle that it is simply hopeless or obtuse to punish criminals. Liberal Derek Lee, for one, scornfully summarizes the Minister's approach as, "Put more guys behind bars."
Well, pardon us for asking, but who -- aside from a handful of turtle necked criminologists still hopelessly bogged down in the 1960s -- says that putting more criminals behind bars won't work? There is statistically powerful and widely accepted evidence from south of the border that increased imprisonment really is the best single means of reducing crime.
Rates of serious offences in the United States doubled between 1965 and 1980, when average criminal sentences and the odds of imprisonment for convicts plummeted under the influence of liberal nostrums.
Sentiments changed during the Reagan years, capital punishment came back into vogue, and around 1990 states began to adopt minimum sentences and "three-strikes" laws. In some cases, states went overboard, throwing away the key on petty criminals whose third strike consisted of stealing a Mars bar or some such. Still, there is a pattern: Whenever U.S. governments have strengthened anti-crime incentives and taken outlaws off the streets permanently, crime rates have responded the way any sensible person would predict.
Meanwhile, despite similar economic conditions, the opposite has happened in Great Britain. Thanks to liberal policies and weak incentives, a society that was once much more orderly and safe than the United States has become markedly less so.
To be sure, the high overall U.S. rate of imprisonment is a symptom of grave and unredressed social problems. And it is certainly wrong for society to seek safety by making criminal justice too vicious. But by arguing that imprisonment doesn't reduce crime -- that criminals, in essence, are immune to the incentives and risk judgments that guide the everyday lives of the rest of the human species -- Canadian parties of the left are adopting a cheap guise of pragmatism to conceal their inherent sympathy for criminals and their faith in rehabilitation.
These impulses deserve a place of high esteem in a civilized society, but they would not need disguising if Canadian voters did not believe they had already been carried much too far by our courts and correctional institutions. Let us therefore wish that Mr. Toews can finish in 2007 what he started in 2006.
© National Post 2006
PING!
Great article, GMMAC.
Wagglebee, you might want to have your ping list check this out.
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