Candidates' Corner: Crime

Rory Ziv has been a defence lawyer in St. Albert for six years, and has seen a lot of accused criminals. He's also this issue's questioner in Candidates' Corner.

"Rehabilitation is the key to reducing recidivism," Ziv says, "not deterrence and denunciation."

He says he's encountered many people who have turned their lives around through court-ordered treatment programs. "What policies are [the parties] developing with regard to rehabilitating offenders?"

Conservative and Liberal

An un-rehabilitated criminal is a future cost to society, says Conservative candidate Brent Rathgeber. "Prevention programs, if they can save lives, property and tax dollars by keeping people out of the criminal justice system, [are] a good investment."

Rathgeber rattled off a long list of crime-prevention programs his government has funded over the last five years, such as the $100-million National Anti-Drug Strategy and Edmonton's drug treatment court. "It's amazing what it does," he says of the latter— it offers non-violent, non-commercial criminals with drug additions the chance to avoid jail by finishing a treatment program.

But no amount of rehabilitation will help some criminals, Rathgeber says. "If you talk to the instructors and the wardens at the Edmonton Max, for example … they'll tell you [the prisoners] don't want treatment."

The Conservatives plan to spend about $443 million in the near future to expand some 23 prisons, Rathgeber says. It's expensive, he says, but "incarcerating people who have broken serious laws … is one of the primary ways to protect society from offenders and criminals."

Putting more people in jail for longer won't help their rehabilitation, counters Liberal candidate Kevin Taron. California tried that and is now bankrupt from pouring billions into its prisons and has a great many repeat offenders.

Taron says his party would invest more in addictions treatment and mental health services in order to reduce crime.

"I've worked with a lot of high-risk youth," he says, and the key traits shared by many of them are poverty and poor education. "Recidivism rates plummet once you start working with these kids."

One example is Edmonton's Youth Restorative Action Project, which he worked for, that gets youth to accept responsibility for their actions and receive treatment for their issues.

NDP and Green

Brian LaBelle of the NDP took a similar stance, criticizing the Conservative's plans to spend billions on new prisons and to make it easier for youth to be sentenced as adults for some crimes. "We're taking great leaps backward," he says.

"There's no evidence to support [the idea] that building jails and putting criminals in jail for longer periods of time will rehabilitate them or make our society better," he says, but there's plenty to show that community support programs can address the root causes of crime such as drug addictions, mental illness and homelessness. "I think we need to go with the research and invest our money into proven programs."

The Green Party would take the roughly $2 billion the Conservatives plan to spend on prisons and invest it in youth sports, care facilities and poverty reduction, says party candidate Peter Johnston. "If we spent that money on looking after the less fortunate section of society, there would be a much smaller proportion of society that would be inclined to resort to crime."

Crime rates have steadily declined over the last 10 years in Canada, Johnston adds, despite claims to the contrary by the Conservatives. "I believe the Conservatives want to frighten the electorate and make them feel insecure and afraid" in order to justify their many crime bills, he says.