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| Catherine Latimer |
Other elements of the new platform stand a much better chance of reducing crime. If the benefits of the promised building bonanza and enhanced productivity are shared with those from marginalized communities, it will create hope and opportunity. The hardship of the economic downturn of the last period severely impacted those who were least able to bear it. Homelessness, demand for food banks, despair, drug use and crime increased. The evidence shows that crime rates drop when economic opportunities arrive in struggling communities. Those of us working with people on the margins fervently hope that they will be included and able to contribute to the needed building of our nation.
Prisoners and former prisoners are also a resource. Far too many of them are being warehoused when in prison and underemployed when in the community. Prisoners could easily be involved in the production of goods and services needed in Canada — the products could range from modular housing to food. Many countries have successfully allowed prisoners to participate in co-operative enterprises. Italy and Sweden have had prisoner-involved co-operatives for almost 50 years. While imprisoned, many are eager to learn trades that would allow them to contribute both before and after their return to communities. Once released, many good workers are held back from full participation in the workforce due to old criminal records.
There are many opportunities for more efficient and results-oriented government spending in the criminal justice system. The currently complex, expensive and bureaucratic application process for ensuring relief from discrimination based on a spent criminal record is one of them. Once a person has completed a sentence and passed the required number of years in the community without a further conviction, the record could be sealed as an operation of law rather than through the unfair, long and expensive application process. This automatic process has worked efficiently for years with youth records. Promised reforms to the Criminal Records Act have yet to be made.
Other examples of spending efficiencies in the criminal justice system include:
- Reducing litigation and damage costs by proactive compliance with the laws and the Charter: for example, significant damage awards have been paid for violating prisoners’ rights by confining them in isolation for more than 15 consecutive days, yet the Correctional Service of Canada continues to do so;
- Implementing Auditor General’s recommendations to ensure that prisoners have had their required programming by their parole eligibility dates: it is understandable if a person is denied parole because of their risk level but questionable if a person’s parole hearing is delayed or parole denied because they were unable to get the required programs in time (custody costs are about three times higher than community corrections);
- Engaging more community corrections organizations to deliver pre-release planning and reintegration support: they are often less expensive and more effective;
- Providing judges with the discretion to impose other than mandatory penalties to achieve proportionate and fit sentences would both increase fairness and reduce custodial costs; and,
- Reducing repeat crime by committing to and implementing the Federal Framework to Reduce Recidivism: this would allow the government to focus on results.
A major legislative reform to the criminal justice system raised during the election period related to bail. Despite the fact that Canada has one of the highest proportions of total prisoners in remand at 46 per cent, and with the majority of prisoners in provincial jails not convicted of the crime, there are continuing calls to make access to bail more difficult. A comprehensive, evidence-informed and principled overhaul is needed to the law, policies and practices associated with bail. If the process could be more targeted and/or more streamlined, communities would be safer, more people could remain productive while charges are processed, and provincial governments could save resources.
The minister of public safety should be proactive in addressing the continuing Charter breaches associated with solitary confinement, and the growing calls for a public inquiry in light of the very serious abuses reflected in Justice Donna Groves’s recently released fatality inquiry report into the death of a prisoner at Edmonton Institution. Increasingly the public is interested in identifying and correcting abusive correctional practices that continue to occur in federal prisons and tarnish the good work done by so many in federal corrections.
There are significant opportunities for the new government to make a positive contribution to crime reduction and to the criminal justice system that would use funding efficiently to achieve results and increase public safety. Let’s get to work.
Catherine Latimer is the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.
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