Harper crime plan costly, ineffective, illegal

I’m too tired to write something smart about this perhaps it deserves a stupid response, but to vote for the Conservative (Harper) government, you got to be one stupid human being. This and the other crap he’s promising will only destroy this country and US and Canada might as well become one, because.there’s nothing that separates Harper and Bush.

Let the real experts explain why….

Jim
Brown
THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA–Stephen Harper has reignited one of the longest-simmering debates in
criminal justice – whether Canada will be a safer place if more people go to
jail for longer.

There seems to be little doubt in the prime minister’s mind that it will
be.

But criminologists and legal scholars – not to mention Harper’s political
opponents – say he’s headed down a road that has already proven to be a blind
alley in the United States.

They fear he would saddle taxpayers with a bill in the hundreds of millions,
if not billions of dollars, without reducing crime a whit.

“It’s really very much a commitment to the American model,” said Neil Boyd, a
criminologist at Simon Fraser University.

“In America they have crime rate that’s three-and-a-half times higher than
ours and they put five times as many people in jail. That doesn’t seem to me to
be a very workable equation.”

Harper resurrected an old Tory promise Tuesday, pledging to do away with
conditional sentencing – commonly known as house arrest – for a wider range of
violent crimes, and property offences such as house break-ins and car theft.

The Conservatives have already managed to pass a law requiring automatic jail
time for most violent offences, but the opposition stripped out property crimes
and lesser violent offences.

Harper railed at the time that the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois were all
soft on crime and would pay a price at the polls.

“Stephen Harper is lucky there are no mandatory minimum sentences given out
for misleading voters,” Liberal justice critic Dominique LeBlanc retorted
Tuesday.

“Our amendments were put in because we trust that, unlike Conservative
politicians, judges know the difference between arson and unauthorized use of a
computer.”

Harper’s pledge Tuesday came only 24 hours after a proposal that could see
offenders as young as 14 go to prison for life for murder.

The youth sentencing measures drew fire from Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion,
who noted the Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that juveniles have a
fundamental right to be treated differently from adults in court.

“How can Mr. Harper possibly campaign to lead this country when he is willing
to completely ignore a decision from the highest court in Canada?” Dion asked
Tuesday.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson has said the Conservatives are confident they
won’t have to resort to the so-called notwithstanding clause – the
constitutional mechanism that allows Parliament to override judicial
decisions.

The high court left enough room to legislate on the matter without going that
route, Nicholson insisted in an interview last month.

Nick Bala, a Queen’s University law professor and a leading expert on youth
justice, said it’s hard to tell if Nicholson is right in the absence of a
detailed text of the proposed legislation.

But Bala predicted that, at the very least, a move to jail youths for life
would provoke a legal battle.

“They’re certainly sailing into some constitutionally problematic areas,
without much background, in the middle of an election campaign. It’s not an
ideal way to make legal policy.”

Less dramatic, but potentially more wide-ranging, is the proposal to restrict
house arrest for a variety of much less serious offences committed by
adults.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day estimated two years ago that the
house-arrest bill in its original form, coupled with another bill to increase
mandatory sentences for gun crime, would swell inmate ranks in federal prisons
by 300 or 400 inmates a year.

He suggested it could cost up to $240 million to build new cells – not
counting the $80,000 a year it costs to keep each prisoner behind bars.

But NDP justice critic Joe Comartin calculated that the original house arrest
bill would also have doubled provincial jail populations to about 12,000
nationwide, with capital and maintenance costs of up to $1 billion off-loaded by
Ottawa to the provinces.

And none of it would have made Canadians any safer, Comartin said Tuesday. It
would only have ensured that inmates would emerge one day with improved criminal
skills learned behind bars, feeling more bitter and violent than ever.

Comartin sees the move by Harper to revive the bill as a warning of what to
expect if the Tories wins a majority government on Oct. 14.

“It’s clear where they want to go and it’s reprehensible – both because it
doesn’t do any good and because it’s going to dump this huge cost on the
provinces, most of whom can’t afford it.”