The Bruce Report

So here I am, a public offender, sitting at my kitchen table, slurping a double cappuccino, reading the morning paper, when suddenly I come across a story that confirms the federal government’s intention to introduce mandatory minimum sentences.

            Well, now, that makes me think twice about my chosen profession, doesn’t it? I guess I’ll cancel next week’s home invasion. And I won’t even think about that bank heist next month. Does anyone know a good career counsellor?

            The Harper government would have us believe that most violent criminals are a calculating, coolly rational bunch sensibly persuaded by legal edict to change their ways as one might change one’s socks. Curiously, a growing number of Canadians concur.

            According to a new Angus Reid public opinion survey, the Globe and Mail reports, “65 per cent of respondents had a moderate or strong feeling that mandatory minimum sentences send a tough message to criminals. . .62 per cent favour capital punishment for murderers, while 31 per cent believe that rapists should be put to death. The figure is a significant boost from the last survey, in 2004, when 48 per cent favoured capital punishment.”

            If these results are accurate, then perception once again triumphs over reality in this formerly tolerant, reasonable nation.

Here’s what Statistics Canada says on the subject of violent crime: “The rate has gone down slightly in recent years from a peak in the early 1990s.  For instance, in the year 2004, [it] fell two per cent, making it ten per cent lower than a decade earlier.”

            And here’s how the Canadian Council on Social Development interprets its own data: “The overall crime rate in Canada rose steadily from 1960 to 1990. It peaked in 1991, then started dropping throughout the 1990s. These fluctuations are attributed in part to the ‘baby-boom’ and ‘baby-boom echo’, where the proportion of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 25 was very high for many years before it dropped sharply in 1991.”

            But let’s say they’re wrong. Do stiffer sentences provide a disincentive to commit crime, or do they reinforce a perpetrator’s determination to avoid capture? Can criminal behaviour be analyzed as a set of reducible properties common to every human being, or is it rather a product of unique circumstances?

            These are enormously complex questions, but most serious studies conclude that lawlessness is a function of many factors: genetic make-up, age, gender, geography, and socio-economic conditions. And of these, the last exerts the most persistent influence on an individual’s comportment.

            In the United States, violent crime rates among poor, young, black men are anywhere from 30 to 50 per cent higher than among their more affluent white counterparts. African-American males are also ten times as likely to find themselves incarcerated at some point in their lives.

            In Canada, lack of educational and economic opportunities has been consistently linked to crime, particularly in the inner cities and in impoverished rural areas. Again, the bottom line in this country is that increases in income inequality raise crime rates. Naturally, then, the policy approach should be clear: Fighting poverty is the best way to fight crime, mandatory sentences notwithstanding.

            Of course, none of this satisfies our bloodlust, our thirst for vengeance.

            “Our brains are primed to freak out faster than to deliberate,” Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, observed in the Globe article. “There is a kind of elevated, metaphysical anxiety that is disconnected to specific events or persons. We are swept up in a miasma of underwear bombers, 9/11 and earthquakes in Haiti – with all of this thrown together in a kind of disarticulated confusion.”

            If this is truly how we feel, the least we could do is own up to our collective panic disorder. Retribution is not rehabilitation. And punishment is not equivalent to prevention.

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