| Among Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s five major policy areas, the tough-on-crime position stands out as one that promises to be both expensive and ineffective. He wants tough minimum sentences for "serious," violent, and repeat offences, and for trafficking, exporting, importing or manufacturing heroin, cocaine or crystal meth or more than three kilos of marijuana or hashish. He also wants to eliminate conditional sentences, house arrest and statutory release.
In 2004, Correctional Service Canada did a study of the costs of putting the Harper program into effect. When asked about that study, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day refused to make it available, but the Ottawa Citizen had already published the results – an additional cost of somewhere between $5 billion and $11.5 billion over 10 years. Day claims that these estimates do not take into consideration the deterrent effect that the tougher measures will have. He’s wrong.
Criminologists have identified three factors in deterrence: likelihood of being caught, severity of punishment and speediness of consequences. It gets a bit more complicated, but these will do for our purposes. In most studies, severity has been shown to be ineffective. The U.S. experience in criminal justice is illustrative of the failure of this approach and of its costliness – something that is beginning to be recognized even by their politicians. As one Alabama official put it, "smart on crime" is the answer, not "tough on crime."
While Harper fearmongers about "the rising levels of crime," Statistics Canada found that the 2004 crime rate fell by one per cent, largely because of a five per cent drop in Ontario. "Most of this decline was due to large decreases in reported crime in the census metropolitan areas (CMAs) of Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and St. Catharines-Niagara." The homicide rate in Toronto was 1.8 per 100,000, lower than in any of the Prairie or western cities with populations over 500,000 listed in the StatsCan report. U.S. cities typically have a rate at least five to 10 times as high, with a rate of 20 times as high or higher not unknown.
We have an artificial crime crisis, which is to be met with extremely expensive measures that are bound to be ineffective. So what are the other parties doing to respond to this hysteria? The Liberals call for doubling mandatory minimum sentences for "key gun crimes," as former prime minister Paul Martin put it. Not to be outdone, the NDP calls for "much stronger targeted sentencing for crimes involving guns." It also raises alarm over a rate of violent crime 35 per cent higher than 20 years ago, failing to mention that it declined 12 per cent from 1995 to 2004. On their website, the NDP even taunt the Liberals because former justice minister Irwin Cotler got it right when he said that "mandatory minimums are neither effective nor are they a deterrent."
So Harper has all the cards in his hand on his crime strategy. All the parties in the House are on side, with the exception of the Bloc Québécois, whose justice critic Réal Ménard declares his opposition. And while the Correctional Service figures – with the wide range that they offer – may not be too alarming, the cumulative effect of more and longer incarceration is bound to mean ever greater costs as the years go by, with more people jailed for longer periods of time. That is the American experience.
The costs of this program plus the costs involved in increasing the size of the military and buying new and expensive equipment for it are on one side of the ledger. On the other are Harper’s tax cuts. How can these two things be combined? We have already seen one answer: attack child care. Other social programs will also be targeted, as Harper is not fond of them in any case.
However, the long-term answer can only involve taking a page from George W. Bush’s book: massive deficits and debt. |
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