Vic Toews, Scourge of the Criminal World

The Vic Toews brain trust was in the news again, this week. Not content with their efforts to prosecute the War on Youth with their proposals to raise the age of consent and lower the age of criminal liability, Toews' Justice Department now wishes to introduce "three strikes and you're out" sentencing for violent offenders.

You may be familiar with the concept already in its American form. After three convictions, a criminal goes to jail for life. In Toews' proposal, this would be limited to "violent offenders", whatever that means. I recently had a client prosecuted for assault for throwing the contents of a glass of Coca-Cola at her common law partner. Not the glass, just the beverage. I am not sure if this would count as one strike under Toews' new rules, but it seemed a ridiculous waste of police and judicial resources to me, but I digress.

In the United States, the prison system is full of these "three strikes" people. I believe down there, the three strikes refers mainly to drug offences. As a result of the overcroweded prisons, the parole authorities have been compelled to grant parole to convicted rapists, murderers, and paedophiles because they were eligible for parole, the three strikes people were not, and there was not enough room in the prisons for both. The Canadian prisons are not nearly so busy, but already the head of the union for Corrections Canada staff is complaining that there is no room for all these new "three strikes" offenders to serve life sentences in Canada's prison system.

Of course, all rational experience suggests that you can make sentences as harsh as you like but it will not deter criminals from committing crimes. In the United States, where there is not just a "three strikes" system but also the death penalty in many states, the crime rate as conspicuously higher than it is in Canada. For that matter, states which have no death penalty or three strikes sytem generally have a lower crime rate than states that do have a death penalty or a three strikes system or both. In short, there is no rational reason for Vic Toews to want to implement a three strikes rule in Canada.

Now I know that this sounds counterintuitive, but sentences do not deter criminals. As Dr. Johnson once pointed out, the most dangerous place for pickpockets in eighteenth century London was during the public hangings of criminals at Tyburn. There is a simple reason for this that good police officers and justice ministers appreciate: criminals are generally stupid and do not think that they will be caught. Consequently, they do not worry about the sentence they might face.

What really deters criminals is effective policing and a high conviction rate. Many Canadians do not appreciate that our police have a very high conviction rate for the charges they lay. For offences like impaired driving, it is over 90 per cent. For murder, it is even higher. I have long argued that this is the main reason why Canadians are less criminally inclined than Americans.

If Mr. Toews wants to replace an effective system with a system which does not work, that is his business as justice minister. That does not mean that I have to respect his intellect.