This afternoon, Julian Falconer gave a talk at the Empire Club of Canada titled “The Politics of Punishment: Depoliticizing Justice Reform.” He focused primarily on the Harper government’s “tough on crime” agenda, and made some most interesting observations.

Canada spends $3.5 billion per year on crime. It costs $108,000 per year to incarcerate one inmate. Stephen Harper is proposing $5 billion in “tough on crime” spending, with none of the increase earmarked for crime prevention.

There is a systemic dilemma: in politics, proponents of judicial reform are forcibly grouped into one of two camps; Falconer referred to this division as “hug-a-thug vs. Law and Order.” If a politician questions the “tough on crime” approach, they are instantly categorized as weak, as someone who would embrace the criminal threatening your family.

Falconer compared Harper’s agenda to similar “tough on crime” agendas implemented decades ago in both California and New York State (largely part of the War on Drugs). Incarceration rates were dramatically increased, and today California houses 170,000 prisoners.

The American experiment has failed. While incarceration rates increased dramatically in the US compared to Canada, the crime rates of both countries remained similar. The US now has a financially unsustainable prison population, and nothing to show for it. Arnold Schwarzenegger has abandoned the “tough on crime” approach in favour of funding schools.

Studies have shown that incarceration raises an individual’s disposition toward crime. Incarceration disproportionately affects native communities, the poor, the mentally ill, and other disadvantaged groups. Yet instead of seeking to remedy the causes of crime, instead of seeking to ameliorate the conditions of these groups, we have the newly-minted Senator Bob Runciman crowing,

“For too long, the Ignatieff Liberals have abused their majority in the Senate by obstructing law-and-order bills that are urgently needed and strongly supported by Canadians. Today, this abuse comes to an end.”

This despite the fact that crime rates have been dropping for years. This despite empirical evidence that tough-on-crime has failed in the US. The politicization of dialogue creates the false illusion of irreconcilable extremes. The reality should not be “hug-a-thug vs. Law and Order” – there is a solution that rests without the extremes.