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Posted on 07/14/2003 12:47:52 PM PDT by knighthawk
The Walter Jacobson case is just the tip of the iceberg
Widespread outrage was the result last week when it was learned the Correctional Service of Canada saw no harm in releasing a serial sex offender to a halfway house in the same Toronto neighbourhood from which 10-year-old Holly Jones was abducted and murdered in May. How could agency officials be so callous and so blind, just two months after Holly's death?
Dave Pisapio, Correction Canada's assistant director for the Toronto region, admitted officials may have underestimated public concern about the transfer of Walter Jacobson, who has a 40-year history of sex offences, from a federal penitentiary to the Keele Centre, just blocks from Holly's home and within walking distance of seven schools. Thankfully, Jacobson has opted to return to prison until a more suitable location can be found for his transition back into society. For the resolution of this controversy, we are therefore in the bizarre position of having to thank a multiple sex offender for his common sense in proactively rectifying a terrible decision made by government authorities.
The service's decision is a head-scratcher -- until one considers the unearthly ideological world in which Corrections Canada operates. Thanks to its embrace of liberal criminological and sociological theories, Corrections Canada, at least at the administrative level, no longer views crime and criminals as do ordinary Canadians.
The trouble can be traced back to 1971, when the Trudeau government announced that, henceforth, the purpose of incarceration in Canada would no longer be punishment and rehabilitation, but rehabilitation alone. For more than 30 years, Canada's prisons have been meant to hold the country's murderers, rapists, car thieves and armed robbers only so long as it takes to make them good little boys and girls. Indeed, since Corrections Canada believes most offenders can be rehabilitated best "outside an institutional setting," it has been working diligently for the past decade to ensure no more than half of criminals sentenced to federal time -- two years or more in prison -- serve their sentences all, or mostly, outside a bricks-and-bars penitentiary. Indeed, of the more than 150,000 Canadians in the service's care (including parolees and prisoners on conditional release), just a few more than 31,000 -- about one-fifth -- are in prison.
Admittedly, a lot of nuttiness has been foisted on the federal prison and parole system by Parliament, prisoners' rights groups and criminal lawyers. Conditional sentencing, which permits judges to bring down sentences entirely without jail time or fines, was a contribution made by elected officials. Courts have ordered prisons to start providing vegetarian diets for prisoners who object to the consumption of meat; have insisted the correctional service permit and pay for sex-change operations for inmates; and even permitted a B.C. murderer to sue Corrections Canada for waking him for midnight head counts, thereby causing him dizziness and "neurological damage." It is not just Corrections Canada, but every branch of government, that seems intent on mollycoddling the criminal class.
But Corrections Canada itself has been an enthusiastic promoter of flaky fads, too. It has held focus groups in which prisoners were consulted on the design of guards' new uniforms. It was the service that designed and sought the funding for a prison with a golf course and riding stables -- Ferndale, in B.C. -- and the service that promotes deck-top barbecues at certain posh cottage-style prisons.
No one forced the service, either, to design prisons where the cells more nearly resemble university residences. The service's desire to permit inmates and their visitors to maintain their privacy may be commendable, but it has helped cause a drug crisis inside, too, even though there are guards at every entrance and locks on all the gates. Until recently, many Canadian prisoners even had access to soft-core pornography delivered via satellite. (Corrections Canada pulled the plug on the programming last week, days after the Post reported the story.) And it is the service's own ombudsman -- the correctional investigator -- who insists it is violating prisoners' rights whenever the service is forced to make them sleep in bunk beds, gives them no warning of cell transfers or isn't sensitive enough to their "cultural diversity."
Nor did anyone have to force the service, kicking and screaming, into supporting sentencing circles and healing lodges for native prisoners, Wicca priests for warlock inmates or fenceless, lockless prisons and unescorted absences, the twin sources of most of the nearly 100 federal prison escapes annually. In 2000, one prisoner even called a taxi from inside the prison, met it outside the gate and drove off.
No wonder it costs $200 a day to feed, clothe and house a federal inmate. (The average cost of a one-night stay at a downtown Canadian business hotel, by comparison, is $178.) And no wonder no one at the service could see in advance the wrath their decision to release Walter Jacobson into Holly Jones's neighbourhood would generate. At Corrections Canada, too many people have trained themselves to see things from the criminal's perspective alone -- while ignoring the sensible concerns of the communities they menace.
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BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Dang Canadians.
How 'bout we compare Canada to Japan or Singapore, where they're a little bit smarter on penitentuary issues? Maybe then you won't be so smug.
Ask them.
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