For all that, tougher-still measures resonate with voters. Some 44 per cent of Canadians think crime rates have increased in the past five years, according to an international poll conducted earlier this year by Angus Reid Public Opinion. Just 26 per cent said crime has declined. (In fact, police-reported crime has been dropping for a decade.)
Conservatives are speaking to a law-and-order constituency as strong as that in the U.S. Two-thirds of both Canadians and Americans agreed in the Reid survey that “When lawmakers set mandatory minimum sentences, they are getting tough on crime and sending a message to criminals.” More Canadians than Americans favour hard time for crime. Some 62 per cent of Canadians agreed that “long prison sentences are the most powerful way to reduce crime,” a sentiment shared by 57 per cent in the U.S. Even a return to the death penalty is supported by 57 per cent of Canadians surveyed—and by 70 per cent in the Prime Minister’s Alberta base.
Canada, inevitably, will embark on a prison expansion program to house its growing inmate population. Truth in Sentencing will require $1.8 billion in prison construction in the next five years, according to the parliamentary budget officer. Mandatory minimum sentences will also boost the jail population, though some predict police and prosecutors will use those sentences as threats, a way to get offenders to plead guilty to lesser charges. “Please, please, please plead guilty to the lesser offence,” says Kinney, “so we don’t have to house you.” With good reason. The average annual cost of keeping a person in a provincial jail is $84,000. It rises to $224,000 for a man in maximum security and an astonishing $344,000 for a woman doing federal time.
Critics decry the lost opportunity to invest that money in softer alternatives: anti-poverty initiatives, education and rehabilitation. But Martin, a criminologist who supports the government initiative, says prison expenses are just one side of the coin. “We’re not getting an honest accounting of the actual cost in allowing offenders to accumulate dozens and dozens of victims,” he says. “Policing costs, insurance costs, medical costs. The pain and suffering of victims that cannot be quantified in dollars and cents.” Nicholson quotes a 2003 Justice Department estimate that puts the annual cost of crime at $70 billion, much of it borne by victims.
Notably, as the Conservatives head down this path, the U.S. is retreating from policies that generated a massive four-decade expansion of its prison system. Some 26 recession-battered states this year have cut prison spending, often by turning out prisoners who’ve served a fraction of their sentences. At least four states—Kansas, Michigan, New Jersey and New York—have been reducing prison populations for a decade using strategies like drug-treatment diversion programs, electronic monitoring and elimination of mandatory minimums; a study of those states found no increase in crime. New York cut its incarceration rate by 15 per cent between 1997 and 2007; violent crime fell 40 per cent.
Canada already imprisons more people that most countries in Western Europe, but it’s hyperbole to equate Conservative reforms with America’s war on crime. America’s incarceration rate is 6½ times that of Canada’s. Some 2.3 million American adults are in state, local or federal custody and another 5.1 million are on parole. One of every 31 American adults is under correctional supervision—an enormous economic and social cost. But is it an effective deterrent? Crime rates are falling in the U.S., but they are in Canada, too.
Regardless, in Nicholson’s view, the rate remains “unacceptably high.” As his office noted in a statement this summer, after a broadside from the opposition: “Unlike the Liberals, we do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.”
As for Punko, his luck ran out this August. The B.C. Court of Appeal more than quadrupled his 14-month sentence, concluding it was “demonstrably unfit.”
Like so much in the sentencing debate, the appeal ruling can be interpreted two ways: that mandatory minimum sentences would have prevented the mess in the first place, or that the checks and balances of the existing system work just fine. Either way, a fallen Angel spends four extra years behind bars.
