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BLACK-SHEEP COMMENTARIES by Police Have A Right To Speak Out Publicly September 5, 2007 ON Aug. 25 I was honoured and privileged to be in Quebec City to speak to delegates from across Canada at the annual general meeting of the Canadian Police Association. The following is an abridged version of my remarks. “We have to start treating criminals like criminals” Edged with bitterness and frustration, those words, under the headline “It’s time to take a stand,” were spoken by a decent citizen who had been beaten severely by young rowdies after he had asked them to stop revving up their engines outside his home in Vancouver. My friends, we must take a stand. Here’s a take-a-stand grab bag for politicians: · Remove the anything-but-jail option from the criminal code. · Enact a public-safety amendment to the code restoring the right of police to deal with 21stst Century ne-er-do-well vagrants, druggies, petty thieves and pimps infesting our public places. · Toughen up bail to eliminate the revolving-door release of offenders who take it as licence to carry on committing offences. Bailees, parolees and convicts serving sentences in the community commit 1/3 of all offences.
We have too many youth and adult thieves and thugs who sneer at our tattered scarecrow of criminal justice as they go about their burgling, stealing, drug dealing and violence for violence sake; and, when arrested, mouth off at police about the certainty of release on bail or that they will finagle a sweetheart plea bargain. The same thing can happen in court, particularly bail court. Etched in my memory is a two-bit addicted drug dealer that I detained. “Hey wait a minute” he shouted, “I’ve got rights you know, I have a right to bail so that I can go to detox and get off drugs before my case comes to trial.” “Is that so,” I replied turning away to get his criminal record, a seamless computer printout. I unfolded it and held it up and was appalled to find that it spanned six feet. “Take a look at this! It’s your record. This is what you have done for your country, now get out of the dock and get back in the jail.” Off he went loudly protesting that he was being wronged. The breakdown of the criminal justice system began in the 1970s when the federal government chose to coddle convicts at the expense of public safety. On Oct. 7, 1971, then solicitor General Jean Pierre Goyer announced in the House of Commons the government’s intention to stress rehabilitation of criminals even though it posed a risk to the public. Goyer said that “…too many Canadians … disregard the fact that the correctional process aims at making the offender a useful and law abiding citizen, and not any more an individual alienated from society and in conflict with it. “Consequently, we have decided from now on to stress the rehabilitation of individuals rather than protection of society.” In making rehabilitation of criminals the prime purpose of our justice system, government abrogated the one area of its constitutional responsibility which is absolutely inalienable: that is to enforce the criminal law and maintain order to the end that every citizen is reasonably shielded from violence and property crime. I say: Rehabilitation, maybe, but never in the community among unsuspecting innocent citizens. In the years since then I have seen a mounting affront to victims of crime perpetrated by the judicial and penitentiary systems as they obstinately engage in so-called restorative justice and nonsensical attempts at rehabilitation. In heedless fashion they send predictably dangerous convicts among us on conditional sentences, probation and parole. Public safety, once a reality, is fast becoming a legal abstraction. Let me give you a stark example: In 1970 a young immigrant opened an auto service station and has continued in business to this day at the same location. Not too long ago he took me outside his shop and pointed out the remnants of a four-foot decorative green fence, then to a sturdy seven-foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top, and finally to the gleaming malevolence of coiled razor wire on top of the barbed wire. The same razor wire surrounds our jails and the camps of our Canadian troops in Afghanistan. A decent man finds himself behind barbed wire. As he has been betrayed so have all of us. Our True North is slowly becoming “fortress Canada” and we are expected to accept the unthinkable as normal: barred windows, multiple locking devices, security systems and security guards, all formerly the accoutrements of jails. It is a terrible metaphor: decent citizens behind bars while rogues they fear prowl about on bail, probation, parole, or while serving sentences in the community. Here is the mindset that brought us to this irrational state. In 1975 Dr. Guy Richmond published a memoir: Prison Doctor. It included his 17-year stint at British Columbia’s notoriously tough Oakalla Prison. Richmond ended his memoir this way: “If I were asked to summarize what I learned I would submit that traditional methods of punishing the criminal, and attempts to deter him, have proved a failure; some other ways must be found. It is not as if we are dealing solely with the criminal. He reflects the state and guilt of society as a whole. … “The great majority of offenders can be retained in the community to continue to pay their dues under varying degrees of supervision. A few will need a therapeutic setting; others will need to be detained in some kind of residence, be it among the forest or in the cities. Anywhere else but gaol.” Richmond’s purpose of anywhere-else-but-jail has been fulfilled and to a large degree it is the strategy of first and last resort in our criminal justice and penitentiary systems. Faced with these inane attempts to rehabilitate criminals using soft sentences, conditional sentences and early parole, our police forces have consistently attempted to do their sworn duty to keep the peace and maintain right over wrong. Never forget that you (the police) are the most important component of our criminal justice system, and you alone do your duty in blood-and-guts reality at the risk of injury. You deal face to face with criminals and their victims. It is an actuality in which you know real facts in every detail. Many of your cases will have gone through the prosecutorial process and then the courts too often softened from a detailed reality to an abstraction that barely reflects the offence committed: first degree murder becomes second degree or even manslaughter; a breaking and entering is transformed into mischief; aggravated assault to common assault; trafficking to simple possession. It is a process that brings the administration of justice into disrepute and is deserving of stringent criticism. Through it all you soldier along largely in silence. But there is an awakening within your ranks that a police voice, collective or individual, must be raised on behalf of society to demand the resources and manpower you need to produce law and order. I call upon you to engage in discussion with your elected representatives at all levels of government. Keep them informed about any of their constituents who have been victimized and left bewildered and confused; and remind them that it is their duty to maintain a watching brief as cases proceed. I urge upon you the words of Louis Brandeis, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1930s and 40s: “The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is an inert people.” I say to you that among all law abiding citizens it is you, and you alone, who know the true nature and extent of crime in our communities and whether crime is lessening or worsening. No other group is better positioned to offer parliament information and advice on changes that ought to be made to the Criminal Code. However it is not enough to be united under the banner of the Canadian Police Association in pressing for reforms to the criminal law and procedure. Each one of you has the same right that I have to enter the arena of public debate over the decades-long experiment stressing rehabilitation of convicts over protection of society. This corruption of our criminal justice system blunders along leaving a trail of murder, mayhem and property crime. It is time for police to take a stand. I’ll be with you. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. Wallace Craig -
wallace-gilby-craig@realjustice.ca |
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