Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Justice Minister Vic Toews, and Public
Safety Minister Stockwell Day are all Evangelical Bible-believing Christians. C.S. Lewis’ Professor Kirk (The Lion, The
Witch, and The Wardrobe) might have asked: “Just what Good Book are they
reading anyway?”
Is the final biblical
word for God love or hate?
Is there any scriptural word for God that means hate? How often did Jesus call God (loving abba
– ‘daddy’) Father? How often
did he call God (harsh sentencing) Judge?[1] What has been the dominant image of God
in (Christian) Western culture since the eleventh century?[2] Where is the family resemblance to Jesus in
their “new” crime policies?
At least Prof.
Kirk would have scolded these Christian leaders for deficient logic, vile
vengefulness, or both. Can one teach
flying from a submarine? Can one teach appropriate
citizenship from a (demeaning) punitive institution? Can one find any reputable
criminological/sociological study that
concludes crime may best be stopped
through ever-harsher punishments (and society remain
“civilized”/non-totalitarian)? Does one find a plethora of academic
studies
that establish two tenets: “(1) prison rarely rehabilitates, rarely
deters, and
often increases the risk of recidivism, and (2) a strongly punitive and
law-and-order approach to complex criminal justice problems in general
brutalizes prisoners, prison staff and society at large.”[3]?
Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner
wrote recently (February 24, 2006, emphasis added): “Two flies cling to the
side of a stagecoach as it rolls across the desert, trailing a thick cloud of
dust in its wake. One fly looks back. ‘Wow!’ he says. ‘Look at what we’re
kickin’ up.’… [P]oliticians, police
chiefs and activists [similarly] delude themselves about crime policies… Crime policies don’t control crime rates.
The broad state of social development does…
Nobody wants to hear this, of course, because it means there are no quick fixes and no way to win elections by
beating crime. But reality is reality. The flies aren’t kicking up the
dust, no matter what they think.”
In another article
(April 26, 2006, emphasis added), Gardner
asked: “Are Mr. Harper’s tough mandatory minimums worth the cost? Will they make
people safer? Vic Toews, Mr. Harper’s Justice Minister, insists they will. They
proved themselves in the United
States, Mr. Toews told reporters a few weeks
ago. It was tough mandatory minimums that drove down crime in the 1990s. But
Mr. Kleck [American criminologist and deterrence expert] says that’s not true: ‘The consensus of
American experts who have looked at that is that the mandatory minimums didn’t
help and may well have hurt.’ ” (Hmmm. A politician lying… A Christian
politician lying… What does the Good
Book say about that?)
The vast majority
of those caught committing crime, and the general public, have no awareness of how tough any laws are. “[Most criminals who land in jail] tend to be young, semi-literate and dumb. They don’t
subscribe to newspapers. They don’t watch Question Period. They don’t read
criminology journals or the latest amendments to the Criminal Code. What they
know about the system tends to come from equally clueless buddies ‘boasting
about what they did and got away with,’ says Mr. Kleck.” (Their ignorance in fact is matched only by
the above Christian leaders whose “clueless boasting buddies” are crime policy
makers to the south.)
But what about incapacitation at least, Gardner asks? Longer sentences have to mean less crime? “Wrong, unfortunately. In reality,
incapacitation is a big, complicated issue and longer sentences deliver
diminishing returns.” (Gardner promises future
articles on this. You can also read Gary
Kleck’s and others’: “The Missing Link in General Deterrence Research.” Criminology
43(3):623-659, available on line for a fee.)
In Peter
McKnight’s “The sham of mandatory sentences” (The Vancouver
Sun, Saturday, May 6, emphasis added) the Conservatives’ recent
pronouncements are dubbed “profoundly
destructive justice policies”. The
author says mandatory sentences will result in:
·
skyrocketing rates of HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) infection, and with them, a dramatic
increase in health care spending, since rates of HIV and HCV infections are
already at 10 times the national average in federal prisons, and will greatly
increase with incarceration that more than doubles the risk of HIV infection of
people who use illegal drugs;
·
soaring
costs to the taxpayer, since lifetime treatment costs are currently $215 million/addict;
·
drastic
increase in prison use, building and cost;
·
significant
increase in use of illicit drugs;
·
great
increase of imprisonment of addicts and of their consequent greater danger and
cost to society upon release.
McKnight concludes: “While Stephen
Harper might be proud of himself for gaining widespread support through his
tough-on-crime demagoguery, he really ought
to be ashamed, for his war on drugs is nothing less than a war on Canadian
society.” (So for that matter should
all Canada’s
political parties be ashamed (except the Bloc
Québecois), since they all joined
this punitive, misinformed and dangerous cacophonous chorus.)
Further, the vast majority of those living in the
democratic West – in particular the self-proclaimed ‘law-abiding’
like… well, Mr. Harper, Mr. Day and Mr.
Toews, are what Canadian criminologist Thomas Gabor calls: “opportunistic
repeat offenders.” He writes at the
outset of his peer acclaimed 1994 book, ‘Everybody Does It!’: Crime by the
Public (emphasis added): “I wanted to take issue with the hypocrisy
displayed by many citizens who routinely condemn what they consider to be our
leniency towards convicted criminals, while they justify their own
illegalities.”
He adds, as though
responding directly to this month’s déjà
vu discredited “new” crime procedures by the Conservative government, “Draconian
policies may appeal to our tendency to project all that we find unacceptable in
ourselves onto some identifiable social group, but they do nothing to help us
understand or deal with criminal victimization (pp. xiii and
xiv).” World renowned cultural
anthropologist René Girard claims this is fundamentally culturally ubiquitous scapegoating violence, and points to
Jesus’ story as the way out (I See Satan
Fall Like Lightning).
Three final questions
to these Christian Conservative leaders are: Do you think Saint Paul is on to something in that Bible
you read (?) when he claims love (theologically, ceaseless offer of friendship) is “the most excellent way”? Do you think just maybe a Higher Power is trying to teach you
something like… “Love your enemies/[criminals/terrorists, etc., etc., etc.]” (Jesus)? Do you ever wonder that maybe one day, the
person needing “mercy not sacrifice” (Jesus) might be you?
[1] I counted them three times.
Are you ready for the two numbers in order of the questions?: 177 and
0.
[2] You guessed it: Hangin’ Judge! See: Law and Revolution: The
Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harold J. Berman, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge and London, 1983.
[3] Criminologist Matti Joutsen, former Director of the European
Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, presently with The Ministry of
Justice, Finland,
is summarizing the professional studies in the field. The answer is: Yes! Why don’t we get this in North America?
Crime has been politicized and “mediatized”.