Locking 'Em Up ... and Throwing Away The Key?

I see that the provincial PC's are starting to bang on the "Get Tough On Crime"(™) drum.

The first gem is this:

The Youth Criminal Justice Act is near the top of Stevens' agenda.

He wants a complete review of the act launched early in the new year, and would like to see more aggressive pre-trial detention for youths, so they can't reoffend while awaiting trial.

I see...so the first thing this nutjob wants to do is start locking up kids because they have been accused of committing a crime. Please remember, even though we are talking about young offenders here, they are still legally presumed innocent until proven otherwise. In other words, if you incarcerate them leading up to a trial, there had better be either a substantial past record, or the case has to be exceptionally vile (as in what happened in Medicine Hat a couple of years ago), demonstrating that the accused poses a real danger.

There's also heated debate about legislating credit for time served in a remand centre. Lawyers and criminals are "playing the system," he said, because they know they can get anywhere from three-to-one or five-to-one credit for serving time in remand.

Justice ministers would like to see a maximum 1.5-to-one for exceptional circumstances and one-to-one credit for the vast majority cases.

Again, I question the complaint here. Remand Centres are jails. Let's be honest here. The accused who are held in custody are still technically innocent. Their legal rights are substantially restricted while they are held in custody, yet the case against them has yet to be proven in court.

There may be "just cause" to hold them, and I have no objection to that. However, we are also obliged to acknowledge that the period of detention prior to trial is unquestionably not related at all to punishment for the crimes they are accused of.

While they are detained, the accused have no means to earn an income, no freedom, limited access to their families and a host of other day to day constraints that are the reality of prison life. Economic assets such as houses may be seized by banks as a result of non-payment and a variety of other events may come to impact them as a result of that detention.

All of this is taking place during the time when the accused is still legally innocent.

Are we, as a society, obliged to compensate for "hard time" prior to trial? Absolutely. If, as Minister Stevens suggests, we stop doing so, then we create a more serious problem for ourselves, as we erode the notion of "Presumed Innocence" to the point where it is little more than a phrase with little meaning.

I have little problem with the idea of providing "credit for time served" as a multiple of raw time. If we take that away, then we are essentially saying that accusation is equivalent to guilt, and that punishment starts the day you are accused. Can you imagine the lawsuits that will start flying about - someone who is accused of a crime and is later found "not guilty" would suddenly be quite free to start suing the government for compensation.

What is "fair compensation" for time already served? I'm not sure - I can't say I've personally had the opportunity to compare and contrast between remand centres and penitentiaries (nor do I especially want the chance, thank you). I see compensatory time as a way to reflect the impact of detention on the accused while they remain legally innocent, as well as a means to ensure that the justice system does not drag its heels too long in bringing a case to trial.

While I might agree that a 5:1 ratio is perhaps a bit more generous than I would expect, a 3:1 doesn't necessarily give me the same impression. Taking away a full year's worth of someone's ability to earn an income is a pretty harsh punishment to start with - worth an arbitrary amount from $20,000 to as much as over $100,000 depending on the individual. That's a pretty harsh penalty to levy on someone prior to being convicted of anything.

Should we allow people we consider dangerous (or a significant risk) to simply walk the streets because they are presumed innocent? Of course not. But, if we fail to appropriately recognize the impact of that detention on citizens who are still held to be legally innocent of a crime, then I believe we open the criminal justice system from the police through the courts to a raft of compensatory lawsuits from people both convicted and serving their sentences and those who are ultimately found not guilty.

Of course, the current crop of what passes for "conservative" these days doesn't seem to quite get the notion that accusation is not a synonym for conviction. Federally, the HarperCon$ have shown a disdain for the concept of "presumed innocence", and it seems that Alberta's Ron Stevens is equally thick-headed about the subject.