Where it has been represented to the accused that the person with whom he or she is communicating by computer is underage, the accused is presumed to have believed that the interlocutor was in fact underage.

This presumption is rebuttable: It will be displaced by evidence to the contrary, which must include evidence that the accused took steps to ascertain the real age of the interlocutor. Objectively considered, the steps taken must be reasonable in the circumstances.

The prosecution will fail where the accused took reasonable steps to ascertain the age of his or her interlocutor and believed that the interlocutor was not underage.

In this regard, the evidential burden is on the accused but the persuasive burden is on the Crown. Such evidence will at once constitute “evidence to the contrary” under s. 172.1(3) and satisfy the “reasonable steps” requirement of s. 172.1(4). Where the evidential burden of the accused has been discharged, he or she must be acquitted if the trier of fact is left with a reasonable doubt whether the accused in fact believed that his or her interlocutor was not underage.

See: R. v. Levigne, 2010 SCC 25

(from left to right: Robert Jagielski, Rajiv Joshi, Aswani Datt, Miss Canada Tourism 2010 Marie, Claude Armstrong, Has Fernando and Bhagmatie Persaud).

The festival is marked by the tying of a rakhi, or holy thread, by the sister on the wrist of her brother. The brother in return offers a gift to his sister and vows to look after her as she presents sweets to her brother. The brother and sister traditionally feed one another sweets.

It is not necessary that the rakhi be given only to a blood brother; any male can be “adopted” as a brother by tying a rakhi on the person, irrespective of whether he is a cousin or a good friend. Indian history is replete with women asking for protection, through rakhi, from men who were not their brothers, nor Hindus themselves.

The rakhi may also be tied on other special occasions to show solidarity and kinship (not necessarily only among brothers and sisters), as was done during the Indian independence movement.

Former Justice Minister Marc Bellemare took direct aim Tuesday at Quebec Premier Jean Charest with damaging, detailed testimony about the role of senior Quebec Liberal party organizers in the appointment of judges.

Mr. Bellemare told the commission of inquiry into the nomination of judges in Quebec, which is headed by former Supreme Court justice Marc Bastarache, that on several occasions party organizers Franco Fava, a construction entrepreneur, and Charles Rondeau, an accountant, insisted that Liberals be appointed to the bench.

Mr. Bellemare testified that he had his first one-on-one meeting with Mr. Charest on Sept. 2, 2003, about four months after the Liberals took power,

“Who appoints the judges in Quebec? Is it Franco Fava or me?” Mr. Bellemare said he asked Mr. Charest during the meeting.

“I found that this (the handling of judges nominations) was unacceptable. I didn’t like it at all,” Mr. Bellemare told the commission Tuesday.

Mr. Bellemare said he explained to the premier that Mr. Fava and Mr. Rondeau exercised “colossal” influence in demanding that Marc Bisson be appointed a judge of the Quebec Court and that Michel Simard be appointed assistant chief justice of the Quebec Court.

Mr. Fava “was unequivocal with a certain arrogance” in insisting that the minister nominate loyal Liberals to the bench, Mr. Bellemare told the inquiry.

“ Mr. Charest told me: ‘Franco is a personal friend, a fund collector who is influential in the party. We need people like him… If he says nominate Simard and Bisson, then do it’. ”
— Former Quebec justice minister Marc Bellemare
Mr. Charest has denied previous allegations by Mr. Bellemare about political influence in judicial appointments under the Liberal government.

When they were first outlined by Mr. Bellemare last April, Mr. Charest immediately launched a $700,000 defamation suit against Mr. Bellemare and appointed the Bastarache commission the following day to examine the allegations.

Mr. Bellemare’s claims were made at the height of damaging accusations by the opposition Parti Québécois that government construction contracts were being awarded to companies with ties or fundraising links to the Liberals.

There was nothing illegal about the judicial nominations, Mr. Bellemare told the commission, but he added: “I didn’t find that this was right.”

The former minister, who held the justice portfolio for a year before leaving politics, said he joined the Liberal party because he wanted to change the province’s no-fault car insurance program, as well as to reform the administration of the province’s justice system. When the Liberal government failed to adopt the reforms, Mr. Bellemare quit politics in April 2004.

“If on September 2 (2003) I had known that the reforms wouldn’t go through, I would have quit on September 2nd . . .

There were ethical problems linked to these (judicial) nominations…but I remained loyal to my Premier,” Mr. Bellemare testified.

There were also potential political embarrassments linked to the nomination of Mr. Bisson as Quebec Court judge, Mr. Bellemare told the inquiry.

The former minister said he was warned by Mr. Fava and junior Transport Minister Norm MacMillan that Mr. Bisson’s father, Guy, was linked to the sponsorship scandal involving the federal Liberal party.

Guy Bisson was a senior Quebec Liberal party fundraiser in the Gatineau region. He was described by a witness at the Gomery inquiry in 2005 as one of the federal Liberal party workers who received improper donations.

“They told me that … ‘You have to be careful with that … Guy Bisson has ties to the sponsorship story’,” Mr. Bellemare told the inquiry Tuesday.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/former-justice-minister-details-allegations-against-charest/article1683587/

For Release Sunday, August 15, 2010

The rest of the world is starting to notice the United States’ incarceration follies.

Case in point: “Why America locks up so many people,” the cover story of the British-based Economist magazine, showing the face of a forlorn Statue of Liberty behind bars.

The grim statistics noted: some 2.3 million people, more than the population of 15 of our states, are now incarcerated — one in 100 Americans. That’s quadruple our 1970 imprisonment rate. For hard-to-defend reasons, and at staggering fiscal cost, we incarcerate people at a rate five times Great Britain’s, nine times Germany’s, 12 times Japan’s.

Congress is on the brink of our first national reassessment in many decades. Sen. James Webb of Virginia is proposing a National Criminal Justice Commission instructed to take an 18-month, stem-to-stern look at the system, its shortcomings and alternatives. The bill recently passed the House without opposition; now the question is whether the Senate (where the measure has a 38 cosponsors) can avoid a procedural objection by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and bring it to a vote.

The Economist notes that along with truly dangerous serial rapists and murderers, as well as Bernie Madoff-like white collar criminals we want to punish severely, the United States incarcerates astounding numbers of low-level blue and white collar offenders.

Among them are street-level drug dealers (generally quickly replaced), people accused of such violations as embezzling, driving without an operator’s license or transgressing environmental laws. In addition to voluminous state laws, there are some 4,000 federally-defined offenses backed up by thousands more regulations — many virtually impossible for any layman to comprehend.

The Economist tells the story of George Norris, a 65-year old Texan who imported orchids. He was suddenly accosted in his home by armed police in flak jackets, frisked, held incommunicado for four hours as officers ransacked his home, and eventually charged with smuggling flowers into America, a violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Norris, who believed himself innocent though he admitted some of his Latin American flower suppliers might have been sloppy in their paperwork, had never made more than $20,000 a year in his importing business. But he was thrown into prison with suspected murderers and drug dealers, accused of being the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring, ultimately sentenced to 17 months — and then, despite his condition with Parkinson’s disease, put in solitary confinement for 71 days for bringing prescription sleeping pills with him to prison.

The tough question raised by the Norris case and others likes it: are some prosecutors going overboard, using their extraordinary powers beyond clear justice requirements? Under threat from prosecutors, it’s claimed, even defendants who are convinced they’re innocent may enter guilty pleas to shorten their potential sentences. Example: a prosecutor might threaten a middle-aged man that he’ll receive such a long sentence he’ll likely will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss.

And then there’s the incarceration youth-aging syndrome. Americans seem anxious to get their youthful violent offenders behind bars, and it’s happening (with especially huge numbers among minorities). But in reality, there are few muggers over 30.

Why long sentences when classic penology says swift and certain punishment is what works? We already have over 200,000 prisoners over 50, often in failing health (with vast medical costs). Yet if released, they’re unlikely to offend again. When imprisonment costs vary from Mississippi’s $18,000 a year to roughly $50,000 in California, when schools and critical social services are being cut to the bone, do long sentences into middle- and late-age serve the public interest?

Webb acknowledges that when he started discussions on today’s criminal system, “we heard a lot of unease, particularly from law enforcement’s side.” But he then met with over 100 organizations, explaining the need and balance of his commission proposal — to include every relevant issue from arrest, prosecution, incarceration and prison administration to prisoner reentry. Now, he claims, the idea of his proposed commission has been “scrubbed through the entire philosophical spectrum with great support,” ranging from the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union to leading national police officers’ groups.

There’s emerging evidence, developed by such organizations as the Pew Center for the States and the Vera Institute of Justice, that we’ve reached a point of diminishing if any public safety returns from cascading levels of imprisonment. Some states — even toughly conservative South Carolina and Mississippi — have begun to reform their practices, reduce incarceration, without impairing public safety. A typical measure: make non-violent drug offenders eligible for parole or probation instead of incarceration.

Reform’s potential net effect? Saving billions of public dollars, for sure. But also fewer deeply disrupted families, fewer deeply embittered ex-cons, and fewer communities impacted by high percentages of their youth imprisoned. And fewer, as the Economist puts it, decades-long sentences “watching hairs go white, and lifetimes ebb away.”

http://citiwire.net/post/2202/

THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.

Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely.

In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?”

Prosecutors described Mr Norris as the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring. He was dumbfounded: his annual profits were never more than about $20,000. When prosecutors suggested that he should inform on other smugglers in return for a lighter sentence, he refused, insisting he knew nothing beyond hearsay.

He pleaded innocent. But an undercover federal agent had ordered some orchids from him, a few of which arrived without the correct papers. For this, he was charged with making a false statement to a government official, a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Since he had communicated with his suppliers, he was charged with conspiracy, which also carries a potential five-year term.

As his legal bills exploded, Mr Norris reluctantly changed his plea to guilty, though he still protests his innocence. He was sentenced to 17 months in prison. After some time, he was released while his appeal was heard, but then put back inside. His health suffered: he has Parkinson’s disease, which was not helped by the strain of imprisonment. For bringing some prescription sleeping pills into prison, he was put in solitary confinement for 71 days. The prison was so crowded, however, that even in solitary he had two room-mates.

A long love affair with lock and key

Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.

In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

Some criminals belong behind bars. When a habitual rapist is locked up, the streets are safer. But the same is not necessarily true of petty drug-dealers, whose incarceration creates a vacancy for someone else to fill, argues Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University. The number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups has increased 13-fold since 1980. Some are scary thugs; many are not.

Michelle Collette of Hanover, Massachusetts, sold Percocet, a prescription painkiller. “I was planning to do it just once,” she says, “but the money was so easy. And I thought: it’s not heroin.” Then she became addicted to her own wares. She was unhappy with her boyfriend, she explains, but did not want to split up with him, because she did not want their child to grow up fatherless, as she had. So she popped pills to numb the misery. Before long, she was taking 20-30 a day.

When Ms Collette and her boyfriend, who also sold drugs, were arrested in a dawn raid, the police found 607 pills and $901 in cash. The boyfriend fought the charges and got 15 years in prison. In a plea bargain Ms Collette was sentenced to seven years, of which she served six.

“I don’t think this is fair,” said the judge. “I don’t think this is what our laws are meant to do. It’s going to cost upwards of $50,000 a year to have you in state prison. Had I the authority, I would send you to jail for no more than one year…and a [treatment] programme after that.” But mandatory sentencing laws gave him no choice.

Massachusetts is a liberal state, but its drug laws are anything but. It treats opium-derived painkillers such as Percocet like hard drugs, if illicitly sold. Possession of a tiny amount (14-28 grams, or ½-1 ounce) yields a minimum sentence of three years. For 200 grams, it is 15 years, more than the minimum for armed rape. And the weight of the other substances with which a dealer mixes his drugs is included in the total, so 10 grams of opiates mixed with 190 grams of flour gets you 15 years.

Ms Collette underwent drug treatment before being locked up, and is now clean. But in prison she found she was pregnant. After going through labour shackled to a hospital bed, she was allowed only 48 hours to bond with her newborn son. She was released in March, found a job in a shop, and is hoping that her son will get used to having her around.

Rigid sentencing laws shift power from judges to prosecutors, complains Barbara Dougan of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a pressure-group. Even the smallest dealer often has enough to trigger a colossal sentence. Prosecutors may charge him with selling a smaller amount if he agrees to “reel some other poor slob in”, as Ms Dougan puts it. He is told to persuade another dealer to sell him just enough drugs to trigger a 15-year sentence, and perhaps to do the deal near a school, which adds another two years.

Severe drug laws have unintended consequences. Less than half of American cancer patients receive adequate painkillers, according to the American Pain Foundation, another pressure-group. One reason is that doctors are terrified of being accused of drug-trafficking if they over-prescribe. In 2004 William Hurwitz, a doctor specialising in the control of pain, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for prescribing pills that a few patients then resold on the black market. Virginia’s board of medicine ruled that he had acted in good faith, but he still served nearly four years.

Half the states have laws that lock up habitual offenders for life. In some states this applies only to violent criminals, but in others it applies even to petty ones. Some 3,700 people who committed neither violent nor serious crimes are serving life sentences under California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. In Alabama a petty thief called Jerald Sanders was given a life term for pinching a bicycle. Alabama’s judges are elected, as are those in 32 other states. This makes them mindful of public opinion: some appear in campaign advertisements waving guns and bragging about how tough they are.
Watching hairs go white, and lifetimes ebb away

Many Americans assume that white-collar criminals get off lightly, but many do not. Granted, they may be hard to catch and can often afford good lawyers. But federal prosecutors can file many charges for what is essentially one offence. For example, they can count each e-mail sent by a white-collar criminal in the course of his criminal activity as a separate case of wire fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. The decades soon add up. Sentences depend partly on the size of the loss and the number of people affected, so if you work for a big, publicly traded company, you break a rule and the share-price drops, watch out.

Eternal punishment

Jim Felman, a defence lawyer in Tampa, Florida, says America is conducting “an experiment in imprisoning first-time non-violent offenders for periods of time previously reserved only for those who had killed someone”. One of Mr Felman’s clients, a fraudster called Sholam Weiss, was sentenced to 845 years. “I got it reduced to 835,” sighs Mr Felman. Faced with such penalties, he says, the incentive to co-operate, which means to say things that are helpful to the prosecution, is overwhelming. And this, he believes, “warps the truth-seeking function” of justice.

Innocent defendants may plead guilty in return for a shorter sentence to avoid the risk of a much longer one. A prosecutor can credibly threaten a middle-aged man that he will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss. This is unfair, complains Harvey Silverglate, the author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent”. If a defence lawyer offers a witness money to testify that his client is innocent, that is bribery. But a prosecutor can legally offer something of far greater value—his freedom—to a witness who says the opposite. The potential for wrongful convictions is obvious.

Badly drafted laws create traps for the unwary. In 2006 Georgia Thompson, a civil servant in Wisconsin, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for depriving the public of “the intangible right of honest services”. Her crime was to award a contract (for travel services) to the best bidder. A firm called Adelman Travel scored the most points (on an official scale) for price and quality, so Ms Thompson picked it. She ignored a rule that required her to penalise Adelman for a slapdash presentation when bidding. For this act of common sense, she served four months. (An appeals court freed her.)

The “honest services” statute, if taken seriously, “would seemingly cover a salaried employee’s phoning in sick to go to a ball game,” fumes Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court justice. The Supreme Court ruled recently that the statute was so vague as to be unconstitutional. It did not strike it down completely, but said it should be applied only in cases involving bribery or kickbacks. The challenge was brought by Enron’s former boss, Jeff Skilling, who will not go free despite his victory, and Conrad Black, a media magnate released this week on bail pending an appeal, who may.

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

“The founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offences, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalisation the first line of attack—a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it’s corporate scandals or e-mail spam,” writes Gene Healy, a libertarian scholar. “You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl.”

“You’re (probably) a federal criminal,” declares Alex Kozinski, an appeals-court judge, in a provocative essay of that title. Making a false statement to a federal official is an offence. So is lying to someone who then repeats your lie to a federal official. Failing to prevent your employees from breaking regulations you have never heard of can be a crime. A boss got six months in prison because one of his workers accidentally broke a pipe, causing oil to spill into a river. “It didn’t matter that he had no reason to learn about the [Clean Water Act’s] labyrinth of regulations, since he was merely a railroad-construction supervisor,” laments Judge Kozinski.
Society wants retribution

Such cases account for only a tiny share of the Americans behind bars, but they still matter. When so many people are technically breaking the law, it is up to prosecutors to decide whom to pursue. No doubt most prosecutors choose wisely. But members of unpopular groups may not find that reassuring. Ms Thompson, for example, was prosecuted just before an election, at a time when allegations of public corruption in Wisconsin were in the news. Some prosecutors, such as Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced ex-governor of New York, have built political careers by nailing people whom voters don’t like, such as financiers.

Prison deters? Not much, not the worst

Some people argue that the system works: that crime has fallen in the past two decades because the bad guys are either in prison or scared of being sent there. Caged thugs cannot break into your home. Bernie Madoff’s 150-year sentence for running a Ponzi scam should deter imitators. And indeed the crime rate continues to drop, despite the recession, as Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an advocacy group, points out. This, he says, is because habitual criminals face serious consequences. Some research supports him: after raking through decades of historical data, John Donohue of Yale Law School estimates that a 10% increase in imprisonment brings a 2% reduction in crime.

Others disagree. Using more recent data, Bert Useem of Purdue University and Anne Piehl of Rutgers University estimate that a 10% increase in the number of people behind bars would reduce crime by only 0.5%. In the states that currently lock up the most people, imprisoning more would actually increase crime, they believe. Some inmates emerge from prison as more accomplished criminals. And raising the incarceration rate means locking up people who are, on average, less dangerous than the ones already behind bars. A recent study found that, over the past 13 years, the proportion of new prisoners in Florida who had committed violent crimes fell by 28%, whereas those inside for “other” crimes shot up by 189%. These “other” crimes were non-violent ones involving neither drugs nor theft, such as driving with a suspended licence.

And now the reckoning, in dollars

Crime is a young man’s game. Muggers over 30 are rare. Ex-cons who go straight for a few years generally stay that way: a study of 88,000 criminals by Mr Blumstein found that if someone was arrested for aggravated assault at the age of 18 but then managed to stay out of trouble until the age of 22, the risk of his offending was no greater than that for the general population. Yet America’s prisons are crammed with old folk. Nearly 200,000 prisoners are over 50. Most would pose little threat if released. And since people age faster in prison than outside, their medical costs are vast. Human Rights Watch, a lobby-group, talks of “nursing homes with razor wire”.

Jail is expensive. Spending per prisoner ranges from $18,000 a year in Mississippi to about $50,000 in California, where the cost per pupil is but a seventh of that. “[W]e are well past the point of diminishing returns,” says a report by the Pew Center on the States. In Washington state, for example, each dollar invested in new prison places in 1980 averted more than nine dollars of criminal harm (using a somewhat arbitrary scale to assign a value to not being beaten up). By 2001, as the emphasis shifted from violent criminals to drug-dealers and thieves, the cost-benefit ratio reversed. Each new dollar spent on prisons averted only 37 cents’ worth of harm.

Since the recession threw their budgets into turmoil, many states have decided to imprison fewer people, largely to save money. Mississippi has reduced the proportion of their sentences that non-violent offenders are required to serve from 85% to 25%. Texas is making greater use of non-custodial penalties. New York has repealed most mandatory minimum terms for drug offences. In all, the number of prisoners in state lock-ups fell by 0.3% in 2009, the first fall since 1972. But the total number of Americans behind bars still rose slightly, because the number of federal prisoners climbed by 3.4%.

A less punitive system could work better, argues Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Swift and certain penalties deter more than harsh ones. Money spent on prisons cannot be spent on more cost-effective methods of crime-prevention, such as better policing, drug treatment or probation. The pain that punishment inflicts on criminals themselves, on their families and on their communities should also be taken into account.

“Just by making effective use of things we already know how to do, we could reasonably expect to have half as much crime and half as many people behind bars ten years from now,” says Mr Kleiman. “There are a thousand excuses for failing to make that effort, but not one good reason.”

http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

Canada’s $10 billion campaign to put more people in prison for longer periods of time will not make this country safer and may backfire by creating a larger criminal underclass, corrections critics warn.

“I don’t think they’re looking at the evidence,” Anthony Doob, a leading Canadian criminologist, told the Star.

Despite historically low crime rates, Canada is expected to spend $9.5 billion to build new prisons and retrofit old ones — a figure that has Conservative politicians scrambling to justify the cost. Last week, Treasury Board Minister Stockwell Day suggested Canada needs more prisons because of an “increase in the amount of unreported crime.” The federal government later cited a six-year-old Statistics Canada survey it said supported his comments.

“The real problem is crime policy is usually reduced to a slogan,” Doob said. “You’re simply increasing the cost to Canadians with no benefit. In the long run, you’re ending up with other kinds of secondary costs. These people are going to get out of prison, they’re going to be less likely to find jobs and they’re going to be burdens on society in a variety of ways, including crime.”

Even if the rate of crime were trending upward, building more prisons would not suppress the crime rate, said Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.

“To suppress the rate of crime, you have to frontload your welfare system so all your children have adequate nutrition, they live in non-violent, non-traumatizing environments — because that’s where your violence originates,” Jones said.

What’s staggering for many critics is that Canada seems to be moving toward an American-style prison model that’s being scaled back in favour of cheaper, more effective community-based programs.

Responding to the fiscal crisis and mounting evidence that high incarceration rates don’t result in safer communities, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Florida and California are now backing out of their penal state.

“As much as you can get political capital for looking tough on crime by putting people behind bars, you can’t sustain it in terms of budget,” says Justin Piche, a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa researching prison expansion in Canada.

The average annual cost of maintaining a single female federal offender is $343,810. Maintaining a male inmate in a maximum security prison costs $223,687. These figures, which represent the 2008-2009 fiscal year, were released in a report from the Parliamentary Budget Office in response to legislation passed earlier this year that will dramatically change the corrections system in Canada.

Bill C-25, the centerpiece of the Conservative government’s tough-on-crime agenda, could double annual prison costs from $4.4 billion to $9.5 billion in five years, according to Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page. The bill ends the practice of judges awarding two-for-one credit to offenders for time served in pre-sentence custody.

Page released a report in June that examined the economic impact of implementing the Truth in Sentencing Act.

Under the new legislation, Ottawa would have to build new and bigger prisons to house an expected increase in inmates, the report says. That would cost an additional $618 million a year in operational and maintenance costs, and another $1.8 billion for construction over five years.

The report says changing the law would lengthen the average time in custody from a year and a half to just under two years. Longer stays would mean an average of 17,058 inmates at any given time compared to an average of 13,304 inmates in fiscal 2007/08.

The report estimates that would require an additional 4,189 cells, at a cost of $363 million a year over the next five years to expand existing prisons and build new ones.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews disputed the figures, standing by his earlier claim that officials at Correctional Services Canada told him the initiative would cost $2 billion over five years. (He originally said the price tag would be $90 million.)

His office did not respond to the Star’s interview request.

The correctional service has begun rolling out plans to accommodate more prisoners by retrofitting dozens of institutions across Canada. The service has a three-year plan to add spaces for more than 2,700 offenders nation-wide. This figure does not apply to the construction of new prisons, plans for which have not yet been released.

“Construction is taking place at institutions and locations where we expect the greatest increase of offender populations and where there’s the greatest need,” said Melissa Hart, a Correctional Service of Canada spokesperson.

The overhaul begins in the Maritimes with Springhill Institution, a medium-security facility in Nova Scotia. It opened in 1967 and accommodates 355 inmates but has been operating over-capacity for some time. It currently holds 456 offenders. The project will see 192 spaces added by 2012, Hart said.

“All of the parties need to give their heads a shake and really critically examine how these laws that are being passed are going to negatively impact the entire country,” said Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

Correctional investigator Howard Sapers, who recently submitted his latest annual report on systemic problems plaguing Canada’s prisons to the Public Safety Minister, paints a troubling picture.

“We’re already seeing the (correctional) service not be able to deliver programs in a timely way,” he said. “We’re already seeing offenders not being prepared properly for release at their parole eligibility dates. We’re already seeing recruitment issues and unfilled positions.

“All of these issues are just going to be made worse if the service is expected to simply house more people without more resources.”

With files from Joanna Smith

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/845272–ottawa-s-prison-plan-won-t-work-critics-say

Ordinarily, they should give: (1) notice of presence by knocking or ringing a door bell; (2) notice of authority, by identifying themselves as law enforcement officers; and (3) notice of purpose, by stating a lawful reason for entry.

While the “knock and announce” principle is not absolute, where the police depart from it, there is an onus on them to explain why they thought it necessary to do so. If challenged, the Crown must lay an evidentiary framework to support the conclusion that the police had reasonable grounds to be concerned about the possibility of harm to themselves or occupants or about the destruction of evidence.

The police must be allowed a certain amount of latitude in the manner in which they decide to enter premises and, in assessing that decision, the police must be judged by what was, or should reasonably have been, known to them at the time.

See: R. v. Cornell, 2010 SCC 31

Setting free a suspected procurer of weapons for al-Qaeda, because the United States paid Pakistan $500,000 (U.S.) to capture and hold him, was the wrong thing for a Toronto judge to do.

Abdullah Khadr is a 29-year-old Canadian citizen who was captured in Islamabad, Pakistan, six years ago when the U.S. was tipped off by his brother, Abdurahman, who was then working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Abdullah Khadr should be held responsible for whatever actions he may have taken in support of terror. He gave a voluntary statement on videotape to the RCMP – whose actions were exemplary – in which he implicated himself. He was a free man in Toronto when he gave that statement.

The abuses of his rights described by Mr. Justice Christopher Speyer of the Ontario Court of Justice, in and of themselves and in the circumstances of the fight against terrorism, are not so egregious that his extradition to the U.S. should be blocked.

Judge Speyer says that the sum of the human rights violations was “both shocking and unjustifiable.” Here are the violations he found: under Pakistani law, the 14-month detention of Mr. Khadr, held without access to legal counsel in a secret jail, was illegal; Mr. Khadr was beaten when captured, and later mistreated, though not tortured; the U.S. and Pakistan worked together to delay Mr. Khadr’s access to Canadian consular services for three months; and the U.S. pressured Pakistani intelligence to delay his repatriation because it wasn’t happy to see him released without charge. (Pakistan refused to turn him over to the U.S. without Canadian consent, and Canada wouldn’t consent.)

Judge Speyer argues that extraditing Mr. Khadr to the United States would bring Canadian justice into disrepute. How? Canada’s hands are clean. As for the U.S., it had little choice but to work with Pakistan. That is where a large part of the fight against terrorism is happening. That is where Mr. Khadr went of his own volition. His treatment in custody was not extreme. He was not tortured. He was interrogated for intelligence purposes. He was not subject to rendition. He was not held for years and years. He was released to his home country. Any information he gave U.S. authorities while in Pakistan (or later in Toronto, where the FBI questioned him) isn’t necessary to make the case for extradition.

The case of Abdullah Khadr is very different than that of his younger brother Omar, who is to go to trial before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay next week. Omar Khadr was 15, not an adult, when he was captured by the U.S., and statements he gave without counsel, in a coercive environment, may be part of the case against him.

The power to block an extradition because of an abuse of process “applies to any conduct that reaches into this jurisdiction and undermines the integrity of [the] judicial system here,” Judge Speyer writes, citing an earlier ruling. The integrity of the Canadian judicial system would be better served by extraditing Mr. Khadr to face charges in the U.S.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/this-khadr-is-not-welcome-back/article1665030/