800 words; 4 minutes to read Just a year ago, in May, 2019, federal Justice Minister David Lametti released a report called “State of the Criminal Justice System”. Issued in the last few months of the government’s first mandate, it...
Read More960 words; 4 minutes to read The right to a fair trial is perhaps the most central aspect of criminal justice. Yet, as shown in a recent report by Fair Trials, an international organization committed to human rights in criminal...
Read More830 words; 4 minutes to read Our criminal justice system goes back well before the advent of the social sciences and the development of reliable knowledge about human behaviour. But because it is so firmly based on precedents and past...
Read More1250 words; 5 minutes to read By Anonymous (Work sent to us by a former prisoner who does not wish to be identified) Part 1 can be found here. If you are sentenced in Canada to more than two years...
Read More900 words; 4 minutes to read The annual reports by Canada’s Correctional Investigator (CI) provide a unique lens into conditions in Canada’s federal prisons. Both the current Investigator, Ivan Zinger, and his predecessor, Howard Sapers, along with their staff, have...
Read More850 words; 4 minutes to read The previous post discussed white collar crime generally; this one focuses on Canada. We lack good information about the extent of white collar crime and prosecution in Canada. Still, according to federal Criminal Intelligence...
Read More750 words; about 3 minutes to read Previous posts on this blog have discussed the issue of what counts as a crime. Prof. Melissa Hamilton wrote about how some criminal laws are about whether an action harms another person, but...
Read MoreJohn Howard Canada is creating a series of podcasts in which former prisoners talk about their experience in prison and re-entering the community. “Voices Inside and Out” talks with people who’ve actually walked through those gates; their personal stories and...
Read More900 words; 4 minutes to read Most of us think about ‘criminals’ as being a small subset of the Canadian population – people who are dangerous and need to be punished, locked up or kept away from the rest of...
Read More680 words; 3 minutes to read Part of the response of the criminal justice system to COVID 19 has been to release people from prison since jails and prisons are hotbeds for disease given crowded conditions. Some provincial governments in...
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