Posts Tagged ‘corrections’
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Tough-on-crime bill toughest on taxpayers
Sunday, November 6th, 2011
Nov. 4, 2011
Even if Canada never reaches the startling levels of U.S. incarceration (with less than 5% of the global population, it is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners), for every new prisoner created by the Harper government’s toughon-crime bill, and for every year the new laws add to a prisoner’s sentence, there will be impacts to not just the cost of prisons and courts, but even more lingering strains on provincial health and social program budgets.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, standard of living, tax
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
There is no crime epidemic
Friday, November 4th, 2011
Nov. 04, 2011
A recent thorough study of homicides by Tina Hotton Mahony of Statistics Canada lays all the facts before Canadians. It’s too bad – indeed, it’s a tragedy – that these sorts of facts have no influence on the Harper government’s expensive and counterproductive, politically motivated “tough on crime” agenda… this is the government that abolished the long-form census, the method every statistician here and abroad said would produce the most accurate facts. In that file, as in criminal justice and others, it’s a government that either looks simple facts in the face and denies them, or willfully disregards them.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, featured, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Tory crime bill is too tough on the provinces
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Nov. 02, 2011
Ottawa’s crime agenda could cost the provinces billions of dollars over the next few years, and… Quebec and Ontario say they will refuse to pay. The tough-on-crime omnibus bill now before Parliament is hardly a sterling example of co-operative federalism. It is heavy-handed federal policy-making, which (along with some previous crime bills) will cost the provinces dearly… How should Quebec and Ontario pay for extra prison costs – by cutting education, health care, daycare? By raising taxes?
Tags: budget, corrections, ideology
Posted in Governance Policy Context | No Comments »
The Tories’ tough-on-crime agenda is intellectually bankrupt
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Oct 19, 2011
The Canadian government’s web site points visitors to several Justice Department studies on mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. None strongly support the idea that Bill C-10 will reduce drug use or improve public safety. “The evidence points the other way… the bill represents… a complete divorce between policy-making that affects millions of people, and real-life research and experiences…
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Why Hospitalizing Sexual Predators Is Not Mollycoddling
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Oct. 3, 2011
Is this mollycoddling? Hardly, since the offender may never be released. Moreover, no release is permitted unless and until a board of psychiatrists judges the offender is no more likely to offend than any other citizen. He stays in custody, and that decision is supported by a committee of the provincial cabinet followed by an order-in-council from cabinet as a whole… The issue is whether we’re going to let a sexual molester back on the streets without any therapy, or let him out only after he has been treated and found safe to release…
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, mental Health, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Preaching austerity at the wrong time
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
Sep 27 2011
They won’t raise taxes on the wealthy. They won’t stop subsidizing the wealthy oil companies. They won’t consider taxes on financial transactions even though a tax of just pennies a trade could reap billions of dollars that could be used to stabilize economies, and they keep lowering business taxes to ridiculously low levels, thus starving their governments of desperately needed revenues. Even the governor of the Bank of Canada has said lowering business taxes has done nothing to create jobs or improve competitiveness.
Tags: corrections, economy, ideology
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
Scary are the Tory measures to combat crime
Saturday, September 24th, 2011
Sep. 24, 2011
Canada is about to adopt policies whose failures are well understood in the U.S. and whose costs will be large but remain unknown. No wonder the government admits its policies are not based on “the latest statistics,” but on another order of analysis – namely, raw politics. The Harper government has this weird contempt for solid evidence… Sloganeering prevailed, as in “tough on crime,” despite the evidence that most of the proposed measures wouldn’t work or had proved to be counterproductive elsewhere.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
The Conservatives’ crime obsession is not magnificent
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
Sep. 21, 2011
The government is obsessed with the tough-on-crime-and-drugs approach of the United States, even as U.S. conservatives move in the other direction – the Canadian one – because jail costs are outstripping investments in higher education… The government should also be spending some of its political capital, energy and money to address the causes of crime, including poor mental health, addictions and child poverty.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, economy, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Sweeping Conservative crime bill only ‘the beginning’
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Sep. 20, 2011
Bill C-10, tabled in the Commons on Tuesday, combines nine separate bills that the Conservatives failed to enact into law during their minority government years… It will rewrite laws on the production and possession of drugs, on young offenders, parole and house arrest, pardons and anti-terrorism, among others… Opposition critics denounced the measures as retrograde and costly, but… In many cases, the Tories are increasing, or introducing, minimum sentences for offences… No MP relishes being labelled soft on crime.
Tags: budget, corrections, crime prevention, ideology, rights
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
The spark and the blaze [security]
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Sept. 10, 2011
… the “War on Terror” actually causes more violence and death than it prevents, the real threat is our narrow-minded understanding of security. As a young person growing up in this society, I fear not the threat of terrorism, but rather the threat of rapid global climate change, environmental pollution, world hunger, child poverty and growing inequality resulting in attacks on freedom and opportunity. All of these threats in actuality increase the likelihood of war and terrorism.
Tags: corrections, crime prevention, ideology, multiculturalism
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
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