Media Interviews and Reviews A review by Ian Mulgrew – Vancouver Sun – Tuesday, May 6, 2003 JUDICIAL GADFLY SHOWS NO MERCY Judges have gone soft, criminals are coddled, retired judge says Wallace g. Craig retired two years ago from his provincial court judge’s bench, celebrating more than a quarter century of service.  But at 72, Craig has not gone quietly into the good night of retirement, as some undoubtedly wished. Instead, he has collected his reminiscences, polished his sometimes caustic opinions and is readying to publish a book that is part memoir, part local history and part polemic.  . . .  Craig thinks Vancouver’s future is in jeopardy because too many judges have gone soft on crime and too many politicians have gone soft in the head.  . . . “Released from the constraints of the courtroom I (was) free to protest the decline of law and order in Vancouver and to express outrage over the fact that we have to endure the prospect of violence and injury in our schools, in public places, on our roads and even in our homes, where a knock on the door may announce a new style of robbery combined with kidnapping – the ‘home invasion.’ ” . . . “During my 26 years in court,” he writes, “I sensed that the criminal justice system and particularly the judiciary was dispensing justice without any real sense of law and order, leaving our fair city teetering on the brink of being a world-class drug capital, a place where property crime is rampant and perpetrators of violence receive only notional punishment.” Like his late hero, Judge Les Bewley, Craig is a jurist who expressed his opinions in the hardheaded common-sense vernacular heard more often in the barroom than in the courtroom.  . . . “Proposals for safe injection sites, free heroin for hard-core users, testing the strength of heroin and cocaine, social centres for addicts, these things and more are reported to be part of the city’s ‘strategy’ (for dealing with the open drug market and social decay),” he says. “They are smoke and mirror initiatives” . . .