While cramming a treatise for my last 1L exam, I came across a quote from the Law Reform Commission of Canada. The report titled Our Criminal Law was released in 1976, but it is just as relevant today:

But criminal law is not the only means of bolstering values. Nor is it necessarily always the best means. The fact is, criminal law is a blunt and costly instrument – blunt because it cannot have the human sensitivity of institutions like the family, the school, the church or the community, and costly since it imposes suffering, loss of liberty, and great expense.

So criminal law must be an instrument of last resort. It must be used as little as possible. The message must not be diluted by overkill – too many laws and offences and charges and prison sentences. Society’s ultimate weapon must stay sheathed as long as possible. The watchword is restraint – restraint applying to the scope of the criminal law, to the meaning of criminal guilt, to the use of the criminal trial and to the criminal sentence.

In a time of economic restraint, Prime Minister Harper is planning to increase Corrections Canada’s budget by 27%. While criminologists disagree about what causes crime, nearly all agree that incarceration DOES NOT REDUCE crime. And crime rates have been steadily falling for decades, so it stands to reason that whatever we’ve been doing is working.

Tom Flanagan justifies tough on crime by comparing 2010 to the 1960s, when crime rates were lower. Would that be the same 1960s when a woman could be legally raped by her husband? When the crime of sexual assault didn’t exist? Of course not, because Mr. Flanagan is looking at the world through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia. Those days won’t exist again because they never existed. Even if they could exist, tough on crime is simply not the route there.

Canada’s prison population is composed of a disturbingly disproportionate number of Aboriginal persons, as well as the formerly unemployed, the uneducated, the addicted, the poor. They are at the receiving end of the state’s most terrible weapon against its people. While society will reap no gain, marginalized groups will bear the hugest cost from the politicization of justice reform.

Parliament must not allow Mr. Harper’s tough on crime bills to pass. The opposition Liberals have a duty to refuse this wrongful policy. Political pandering must not trump the best interests of the country. The watchword is restraint.