Getting tough on crime the wrong focus: Weighill

By Andréa Ledding

SASKATOON — A panel of four speakers organized by the Elizabeth Fry Society of Saskatchewan recently spoke on justice to students, faculty and members of the public at the St. Thomas More College auditorium.

“Most people incarcerated are already marginalized,” noted moderator Kearney Healy, a legal aid lawyer active in youth and restorative justice across Canada. “Psychiatric disorders, the poor, unskilled, badly educated — the list goes on — that’s what you find in our prisons.”

Healy noted the increasing criminalization of Aboriginal women and those with mental health issues.

“There’s no easy solution,” noted Saskatoon Police Chief Clive Weighill, another member of the panel. Weighill emphasized that simply locking offenders up doesn’t solve the problem. “True contributors of crime are always the underlying social issues: poverty, drugs, addiction.”

Increasing the police force isn’t a solution, he said, and getting tough on crime is the wrong focus. “We need to get tough on poverty, poor housing, racism — the social issues that lead us down the road to crime.”

Police want to divert the people they’re interacting with into more positive programs that provide assistance, but the programs simply don’t exist. Society is spending neither wisely nor preventatively, he observed, adding that Saskatoon has a distinct racism problem. “I know people want me to say there isn’t any but it’s not true.”

Healy pointed out that about 80 per cent of people in custody are Aboriginal and almost 100 per cent of youth remanded are already an average of two years behind their peers in school.

“Eighty per cent of these youth have a disability, virtually 90 per cent are poor, 75 per cent have a psychological disorder, 60 per cent have a psychiatric disorder, and 50 per cent were in foster care at some point,” he noted. “I do about 400 cases a year and can’t remember the time there was an Aboriginal kid who wasn’t behind in school, didn’t have a disability, and lived with their parents.”

Panel member Graham Stewart, retired executive director of the John Howard Society, compared Canada to the US, saying that recidivism was much lower in Canada because jail was used as a last resort, but Canada is now starting to model their programs on the American methodology.

“We’re being encouraged to think one dimensionally in terms of punishment,” he said. “How can you do something after the fact that is preventative?”

Punitive justice has “been around forever — since humans could talk,” and it has proven ineffective or worse, exacerbating crime and creating better criminals.

Kim Pate, executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Societies, added that those in power are benefiting from the status quo, and society needs individually and collectively to challenge the diminishment of human interests and rights.

“It’s reprehensible, not just abominable,” she said. “I’d urge you to do just one thing — go email your MP and (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper and ask them how they can demonstrate fiduciary responsibility to the Canadians who elected them when they’re passing law and they don’t know what the social, human and economic cost is going to be to taxpayers of these laws.”