2086...Churchill Said

That you can judge a society by the way it treats the lowest level of society, that being prisoners.

[BTW, if I misquoted Sir Winston I know that Anonymous will point out my folly.]

If the laws proposed by the Stephen Harpers had been tested [they have been in the USA] and had worked [they have not in the USA] that would be one thing but facts are facts and facts are something that works against people like Mr. Goldstein's facile arguments.

To that end articles like the one published today in the Toronto Sun and other papers that are part of that web are troubling to say the least.

Read for yourself:

Pardon us, we want justice: Goldstein
In Canada, the rights of criminals take precedence over those of law-abiding citizens and crime victims

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, Toronto Sun

Last Updated: April 11, 2010 2:30am

You have to ask yourself.

If Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn't know serial killers like Clifford Olson are getting government pensions in prison, or that the National Parole Board hands out pardons like candy to sexual offenders like Graham James, what else doesn't he know about our justice system?

And what else don't we know?

In fact, Harper should have known about the potential for sex abusers like James to obtain pardons because in 2006, Stockwell Day, then public safety minister, ordered a review of the pardon process after a former Toronto teacher was pardoned for the sexual assault of a student.

Following that, the Conservatives made some minor changes to the review process for pardoning sex offenders, but didn't stop them.

Indeed, James received his shortly after Day's review began.

While the Tories are now promising to toughen the system, again, such examples raise the question of what will it finally take to rebalance our justice system so that it puts the rights of victims and the law-abiding public ahead of criminals?

So powerful are the lobbies against reform - most opposition MPs, much of our judiciary, criminal lawyers, prisoners' rights groups, academics, liberal media - that even a Tory majority government might be unwilling or unable (because of judicial decisions) to tackle the job.

Bad enough someone convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to nine years in prison can be out on unsupervised temporary absences in 18 months, full parole in just three years.

Bad enough that when the previous Liberal government passed the Youth Criminal Justice Act, replacing the Young Offenders Act, it omitted deterrence as a principle of sentencing, despite pleas from victims' rights groups.

Save for the Conservatives - who apparently don't know how soft our justice system is, despite being in charge of it for four years - no other party is going to make cracking down on crime a major election issue.

Nor will Canada's chattering classes, who spend far more time rationalizing and defending outrages like the James pardon than explaining how pardons work.

Or rather, don't work, since pardons appear to be virtually automatic, as long as you don't commit another crime for a few years, according to the explanation Public Safety Minister Vic Toews offered Charles Adler on AM640 last week.

111,769 approved

As Sun columnist Alan Shanoff reported, in 2008-2009 alone, the National Parole Board issued 39,628 criminal pardons. In the last five years, 111,769 criminal pardons were approved. You can bet many went to sexual offenders like James, who preyed on young hockey players.

Of course none of this ever phases our soft-on-crime elites.

Harper and the Conservatives are also at fault for playing political games with their own "tough on crime" agenda, to the point where many of the bills they've introduced haven't yet passed, due to their own gamesmanship.

That said, let's not kid the troops. The biggest complaint all the usual suspects have against the Tory's anti-crime agenda isn't that they haven't passed it, but that they dared to introduce it.

In this, they're aided and abetted by our liberal media, who keep insisting there's no need to get tough on crime because "the crime rate is going down," ignoring the fact the violent crime rate today remains over 300% higher than it was when comparable records first started being kept in 1962.

The government's own justice surveys show fewer people are reporting crimes to police - now down to about one victim in three - and an estimated 92% of sexual assaults, 61% of physical assaults, 54% of robberies, 51% of motor vehicle/parts thefts and 46% of break-ins are never reported.

Usual suspects

Yet all the usual suspects continually condemn any efforts to rebalance the justice system in favour of ordinary citizens. They often appear to oppose not just what they perceive as harsh punishment for criminals, but punishment itself. While the victims reap the whirlwind.

Correction: In Thursday's column, I wrote former Liberal finance minister John Manley advocated raising the GST to balance the federal budget. In fact, Manley said while it may be necessary to raise consumption taxes in future, it's premature to talk about raising the GST today.

lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca

This is the kind of mean rhetoric that got the United States of America to become the nation state that has the most people in jail per of any nation in the western world now and probably since the fall of National Socialism. And the streets of Detroit and Oakland and Buffalo are no safer than they were before these draconian laws were promulgated.

WFDS



WFDS