Getting Dumb on crime

One thing I really like about Conservatives is even when they are totally wrong, they still think they are right and will stick to being wrong. That is until their leader tells them they are wrong, and they flip flop faster then a hipster vegan at a McDonald's restaurant.

I just read a piece in the Globe and Mail this morning, quoting Asa Hutchinson on the mistakes of the American prison system. Hutchinson is an Arkansas Republican who worked for the Bush administration. So he isn't exactly a pinko or a wussy liberal type. Hutchinson believes the American system focuses too much of its costs on housing inmates, and punishing them rather than being a system that works and prevents re offending.

The real beauty part of it is Hutchinson believes mandatory minimums are unfair, and that having longer prison sentences doesn't do anything for a prisoner to prepare for the real world. This is a Southern American conservative basically bashing his own system, and thus also debunking the planned justice bill "Harper's" Government wants to bring in.

So, lets get this straight, these policies don't work at all. For 35 years, the American prison system has been successful at locking people up, creating violent prisons, and raising the level of recidivism. This is what the Conservatives want to do to Canada? This also costs billions of dollars to do.

Is this perhaps one of the worst ideas this government has come up with? Yes.

Is this going to be extremely expensive, and cost the taxpayers money to basically created meaner, strong prisoners? Yes.

Aren't we all hoping the Conservatives have this as their main plank in the next Federal Election? Yes.

Crime is a complex issue, and it doesn't require simple minded solutions, it requires the full force of the state in terms of the social safety net as well as the justice system in reducing crime, and poverty which comes hand in hand. By simplifying this issue, the Conservatives think Canadians aren't smart enough to comprehend this problem, and that we want simple solutions? Are we that much like Americans, in places like Arkansas, and Texas? Do you share those values. Think about it, hard....