Can We Afford Conservative "Justice"?

Harper's speech to Police Association once again resurrects the idiocy that came out of the United States during the 1980s and 1990s - "Mandatory Minimum Sentences".

In the United States, "Mandatory Minimum" sentences and "Three Strikes Laws" were intended to send a message to criminals - do the crime, and you will do the time. US Prison Populations have soared since, with 1 in 31 US adults under some kind of criminal supervision in 2004.

Compare a few numbers - incarceration rate in the United States: 724 per 100,000 population compared with 107 per 100,000 population in Canada.

That means that the US population is supporting seven times as many prisoners compared to Canada. More troubling is the fact that for most major crime categories the US crime rate remains much higher than Canada's.

So, if I were to project even a doubling of prison population over the next five years as a result of "minimum prison sentences", that means we are going to have to double our prison capacity - increasing both the capital expenditures that are directed through Corrections Canada, as well as vastly expanding the administration required, the number of parole officers and goodness knows what else.

When both Canada and the United States have enjoyed more or less similar overall declining crime rates since 1991, it seems to me that "Mandatory Minimum Sentences" only benefit the "Prison Industry" (those businesses who provide services and products to prisons - be they buildings, people or toilet paper). Certainly, it won't be the taxpayers who foot the bill.

Remember, this is the same party who intends to chop several billion in government revenues out by cutting 1% from the GST - so just how do you suppose they intend to pay for this?