Click on the graphic for a breakdown of falling provincial violent crame rates.

With both serious and petty crime dropping steadily in Canada over the last two decades, many are challenging the federal government’s intense focus on imprisoning law-breakers.

Bill C-10, entitled the “Safe Streets and Communities Act,” is an omnibus bill composed of nine different bills that died in Parliament before the May 2 election was called. It includes harsher mandatory minimum sentences for minor offenses such as drug possession, as well as extended possible maximum sentences.

It also includes measures dealing with the sexual exploitation of minors, young offenders and the pardons process. Most of the measures in the bill increase the punitive powers of the criminal justice system.

“The bill will do little to help crime rates,” wrote Pardon Society of Canada Chairperson Ainsley Muller in an email, “and will be a costly measure that the provinces will have to pay for. In reality… prisons are already overcrowded. The bill presents a huge burden for already cash-strapped provinces.”

The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the bill will cost provinces between $6 and $10 billion over the next five years, which will amount to about three quarters of the cost of the bill, according to the John Howard Society of Manitoba.

Despite the cost, some provincial governments are still backing the bill. These include both Saskatchewan and Manitoba, who cite its approach to keeping criminals off the street as reason enough to put up the extra funding.

“It has been acknowledged that some provisions of Bill C-10 will result in additional expenditures in corrections,” Manitoba government spokesperson Rachel Morgan wrote in an email. “This concern alone is not sufficient to oppose federal criminal law amendments.”

Morgan added that the Manitoba government expects “costs will be borne by both levels of government because many crimes, such as drug offences, are prosecuted by federal courts,” and that the government has already begun expanding its provincial prison system.

But in a time when governments are prescribing belt-tightening and balanced budgets in order to prepare for a potential second global recession, spending more on crime, which is already decreasing, strikes many as the wrong approach.

“The premise that the bill is trying to address is faulty in a time when crime is going down in all categories,” University of Regina criminal justice professor Hirsch Greenberg said. “Arresting people after the crime is committed doesn’t make people safer. You need to prevent the crime from being committed in the first place.”

The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, a left-leaning think tank, echoed Greenberg in a recent report. “One of the most serious criticisms of the ‘tough on crime’ agenda,” the CCPA wrote, “with its emphasis on punishment, is that it will actually result in more of a threat to public safety rather than less.”

To Greenberg, the money this bill will cost would be better spent on measures such as housing, health care or education improvement, “which,” he says, “are all things that we know prevent crime.”

“One of the things that crime is about is that we as a society produce it,” Greenberg said. “Crime is not alien, or an outside force in society — it is part of the fabric of society.”

As evidence of this, Greenberg pointed to the disproportionate number of aboriginal people who are jailed across Canada. The problem is especially bad in Saskatchewan.

Despite making up only three per cent of the total Canadian population, First Nations adults comprised 22 per cent of those sentenced to jail in 2007-08, according to Statistics Canada.

That same Statistics Canada report also found that for aboriginal and non-aboriginal people “aged 20 to 34, incarceration rates declined as the education and employment situation improved” in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The Pardon Society of Canada’s Muller says the bill will be harmful to the pardon process as well, which will impact released inmates who may be attempting to restart their lives.

“Those with minor offenses,” he wrote, “mistakes made years ago that they have tried to put behind them, will now find it more difficult to obtain a pardon…. Having a criminal record inhibits their ability to find employment, go to school, volunteer and more.”

According to Muller, more than one in seven Canadian adults currently have a criminal record. Most of these are for minor offenses of the kind Muller says will be affected by the bill.

“Statistics actually show that the majority of pardon applicants have never re-offended,” Muller added.

Both Muller and Greenberg cited the United States, which has long been a proponent of the tough on crime approach Bill C-10 embraces, as a cautionary tale.

Muller addressed the high costs of the model, saying the cost of holding a male inmate in a federal prison for one year is higher than the cost of sending someone to Princeton, an Ivy League American university, for one year. For female inmates, the cost is close to three times the cost of a year at Princeton.

Greenberg, meanwhile, focused on the fact that several legislators and lawmakers in Texas have spoken out against the Canadian Conservatives’ crime bill, though they have one of the harshest criminal codes in America.

Until 2004, Texas had the highest incarceration rate in the world: one in 20 adults was either in jail, on probation or on parole.

“You will spend billions and billions and billions on locking people up,” Dallas County Court Judge John Creuzot told the CBC in October. “And there will come a point in time where the public says, ‘Enough!’ ”

Federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews “was asked about [Texas law-makers speaking against his party’s bill], and his response was, ‘Oh, I don’t know what they’re doing down there,’” Greenberg said. “If he doesn’t know, I think he probably should. And if he does know what they’re doing down there, he knows implicitly that what he’s doing is not right.”

There are some who disagree with Greenberg and Muller, though. Michael Gendron is the spokesperson for the Canadian Police Association, and he says his organization wholeheartedly supports the bill.

“We are entirely happy to see this,” Gendron said.

Gendron claims that the tougher minimum sentences Greenberg, Muller and the CCPA are skeptical of will not necessarily lead to the imprisonment of people who have not committed serious crimes.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” he countered. “Minimum sentences are really meant to help our members. We’re trying to catch people who are trafficking [drugs] — locking up a kid with a joint, that’s not what this bill is about. Our members will still use a lot of discretion.”

Gendron also brushed off the Texans’ warnings about taking this approach to crime.

“I think the problem is you kind of have to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges,” he said. “We’re not talking about adding tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of criminals to our jails.… The scope of our criminal justice system is very different from the scope of the criminal justice system in Texas.”

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Graphic: Brianna Whitmore/The Sheaf