October 18, 2006

"Feds move against repeat offenders"

Stephen Harper knows a good trick when he sees it: the fear tactic. It has worked wonders for George Bush for five years - with yellow alerts, hints of danger and the passing of new draconian laws that convince many Americans that such laws are really necessary.

Harper is doing the same thing with a string of new laws to “fight crime.” This kind of politics is truly despicable not just for deliberately misleading people about how much crime there is in Canada and providing false solutions but for consciously and strategically trying to corrupt the political culture.

As we have witnessed for years in the US, a country afraid of its own shadow is a country that ignores the many far more important issues of everyday life: economic security, health care, the environment, energy costs, the collapse of American public schools, the erosion of pensions, child care, etc.

Keep them scared - and you can keep them distracted.

And that, of course, is exactly what Bush and Harper want to happen - they want people to forget about all those issues because that is where their most important agenda lies. Privatization of health care, the war in Afghanistan, killing child care - all these things are moving ahead but if people can be caught in the vengeance orgy of new and tougher laws, they might just forget what really matters to them.

This is an extremely important issue. Not just the bill introduced today - a version of three strikes you’re out bill - but all these crime bills. There is a real danger that a lot of people will be taken in by this. Why? Because the media plays into constantly. Here in Vancouver the major TV news outlet obviously has a policy of leading with crime stories - sometimes 5 or 6 before they get to other news.

The impression is left that the whole city is awash in crime (though sometimes they have to go to the US to fill their quota). In fact, as StatCan has been telling us for years, the crime rate is going down virtually everywhere in Canada - including Vancouver.

Click here to WRITE A LETTER TO-THE-EDITOR...

1. Frame the message in you letter as I have above. Just say in your own words that you are not going to be sucked in/taken in/fooled by/distracted/ stampeded by (pick one!!) the politics of fear or whatever phrase you feel comfortable with - such as you’re going to frightened into forgetting that Harper killed the national child care program - which by itself would have reduced crime by more than this bill ever will.

2. Use today’s legislation (see CP news story: Three-time losers to face indefinite jail time under new bill, by Jim Brown) to make your point. The law states that three-time offenders will now be faced with a complete reversal of the innocent until proven guilty principle - they will have the reverse onus of proving that they SHOULD NOT be declared a dangerous offender and kept in jail indefinitely.

3. And take the media to task for being obsessed with crime instead of covering the important issues (the orgy of coverage of the killings of the Amish school girls was a perfect example)

Here’s what thoughtful people have said about the law - use their arguments or even quote them:

• Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, noted that similar three-strikes laws in the United States have failed to reduce the crime rate.
  
  “It catches the wrong people, puts too many people in jail and doesn’t really deal with predatory violence,” said Boyd. “None of this (legislation) is empirically based, it’s all kind of a populist appeal to the fears of Canadians.” [excerpt from CP news story ]

• Some of the other crime bills Boyd was talking about: measures to impose mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related offences and moves to curtail the use of house arrest as an alternative to jail time for many other crimes. They also changed the age of consent - implying that there is some sort of huge problem with exploitation of teenagers.

• The law is very likely unconstitutional.

• These laws play to the worst side of Canadian values - vengeance and punishment.

• “Dr. Michael Boudreau, assistant professor of criminology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, said it was just another instance of crime's being used for political gain.
  
  “In reality, crime rates keep going down,” Dr. Boudreau said. “This (bill) is not really looking at the main issues. All they're doing is putting more people in prison.” [from todays Globe and Mail]

• Professor Irvin Waller, director of the University of Toronto's Institute for the Prevention of Crime said... Canada should be very wary of any legislation that resembles the three-strikes laws in the United States.
  
  “They incarcerate very large numbers of people who are not that dangerous,” he said of such laws. “All the evidence says if you want to reduce rates of violence, you need to tackle the risk factors of people, particularly young, violent men.” [G&M above]
  
  You might point out that budgets for this kind of difficult, intensive but effective work has been continuously cut sine the mid-1990s.

• But also - in the context of crime and prisons -“Better education, better programs in prison: That's what reduces crime,” according to Boudreau. [see CP news story ]

• What else reduces crime? You know the answer to this - better social programs, more low cost housing, the rights of employees to work in stress-free environments, an end to the laws criminalizing drugs, more resources for people on social assistance - the very things Harper is cutting.
  

Click here to SEND YOUR LETTER NOW!

« back to index