I’M TURNING into one of those “tough on crime” guys. It happened during our recent federal election.
I was visiting a young inmate waiting for trial in a provincial jail. He said that he’d just voted for the first time.
“What was that like?” I asked. “I sure didn’t vote for the guys who think they’re tough on crime,” he answered.
“They think longer sentences reduce crime. They’ve got no idea what our lives are like. Fighting, getting drunk, no place to stay.
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“None of us thinks ‘I better not steal that because the sentence has gone up.’ We don’t even know what the sentences are. If those politicians were really tough on crime they’d do more about the tough problems that land us in here. They’re not tough on crime, they’re lazy. Lock ’em up – that’s their only solution.”
Lock ’em up. We’ve been locking up a lot of our young people, especially in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The most recent Statistics Canada figures (2005) show Saskatchewan had 230 and Manitoba had 209 out of every 100,000 of their youth in jail.
That compares to 39 for Quebec, 41 for British Columbia and 71 for Alberta.
In Alberta and most of the rest of Canada, the rate of youth imprisonment is significantly less than that of the adult population. But not in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. There, the youth lock-up rate approaches that of the United States, which is far and away the world leader in imprisoning its people. It’s not something we should aspire to.
Though the number of youths being sentenced to jail has dropped in the last five years, the numbers being held in jail while they wait for trial (often up to two years) has increased 22 percent.
This “remand” time is destructive. The Germans dropped it for most crimes when they realized, as one scholar put it, that “short-term imprisonment does more harm than good; it disrupts the offender’s ties with family, job and friends, introduces the offender into the prison subculture and stigmatizes the offender for the rest of his or her life.”
And that’s before it’s been determined whether the person is guilty.
Is this jail time working? Not at all.
Canada Corrections research, consistent with research around the world, shows that simple incarceration actually increases crime rates.
It’s just another injury added to a life of injuries for many of these youths. There’s no opportunity to provide restitution for the victim or learn better life skills. What works is outcome-based programming with strong community co-operation.
Even ordinary Canadians know this, according to the 2008 Canadian Justice survey.
Almost 70 percent think that providing youth with employment skills is more effective than locking them up.
And a lot cheaper. It costs $100,000 per year for federal inmates, $52,000 a year for each provincial inmate. That’s a lot of program money.
Maybe our politicians can’t figure this out because they’re spending their time fighting with each other. Perhaps we should lock them up for a while until they come to their senses and pay attention to us and our young people.
Cam Harder is associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon.