How media coverage can distort ideas about crime
750 words; 4 minutes to read This post is drawn from a single graphic produced by the wonderful web site Our World in Data. That site provides brilliant analyses of large amounts of data, often over long periods of time,...
Read MorePosts worth a second look
600 words; 3 minutes to read. The introductory post for this blog was in early September of 2017, just over two years ago. Since then we have posted well over 100 items on various aspects of criminal justice. Many...
Read MoreElection issue 3 – Virtually no discussion of criminal justice so far
850 words; 4 minutes to read With only about 10 days to go until election day, there has been very little discussion of anything to do with criminal justice in this campaign. The issue did not come up in the...
Read MoreIs crime about the individual or the society?
1000 words; 4 minutes to read. Many of the debates in criminal justice eventually come down to the question of how we understand wrongful behaviour. For most of human history, we have seen wrongdoing as lying in the individual who...
Read MorePrisoner’s Stories – Breakfast at Timmie’s – Final Part
This post is about 1000 words and can be read in about 4 minutes. This is the final part of a four part story sent to us by a prisoner at a Quebec federal prison, describing a visit to an...
Read MoreInternet info on people and crime is damaging and often inaccurate: Lageson
530 words; 2 minutes to read The internet has made it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible for anyone charged with a crime ever to get past that event. Whether people are arrested and not charged, or have charges dropped, or...
Read MoreElection issue 2 – Why ‘tough on bail’ is bad policy
940 words; 4 minutes to read Several political leaders have recently made statements calling for making it harder, if not impossible, for people charged with certain kinds of offencss to get bail. The Conservative Party platform specifically calls for no...
Read MoreElection issue 1 – Crime in Canada is decreasing
This post is 740 words. 3 minutes to read. A person who only paid attention to the media, whether newspapers or TV or radio, would get the impression that crime in Canada was running amok, virtually unchecked. It is the...
Read MoreCriminal justice and the federal election
This post is about 700 words; 3 minutes to read. Crime and the response to it is often a major issue in elections in Canada. The reasons for this have little to do with actual levels of crime and much...
Read MoreCreating more criminal law is not the answer
This post is about 1000 words and can be read in 5 minutes. One of the major problems in criminal law that rarely gets enough attention is the question of what should count as a crime in the first place. ...
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