Alternatives to prison for racialized women
Post # 170 820 words; 4 minutes to read This post has a 30 second audio summary thanks to John Howard volunteer Averi Brailey. Several posts on this blog have provided evidence that prisons are ineffective and expensive ways of...
Read MorePrisons around the world
Post #167 650 words; 3 minutes to read Dr Baz Dreisinger is a professor of writing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. In this work she has been very involved in programs that teach...
Read MoreHolding fewer people on remand does not harm public safety
Post #166 675 words; 3 minutes to read As readers of this blog know, the bulk of people in provincial jails in Canada – more than 60%, or about 15,000 people on any given day – are held despite not...
Read MoreSentencing should take account of the experience of prison – but mostly doesn’t
Post #161 This post is about 1060 words; 5 minutes to read Most discussion of criminal sentencing revolves around only one thing – the length of the sentence. A new paper by US law professor Eve Hanan argues (similar to...
Read MoreAction on Solitary Confinement
Post # 157 For the last two weeks, John Howard Canada has partnered with several other organizations to promote awareness of the problem of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons. Notwithstanding several court decisions and new legislation last year, the problems...
Read MoreUpcoming event on solitary confinement
November 16-30 online spotlight on solitary confinement in Canada. Check back for the link.
Read MoreRethinking violent crime
Post #154 950 words; 4 minutes to read Many discussions of crime treat so-called ‘violent crimes’ as a special subset that deserves a different, and harsher, response. But there are compelling reasons to be dubious about this distinction. Many of...
Read MoreReport: Replacement for segregation in federal prisons does not meet legal standards
A new report on the response of Canadian prisons to court rulings on the illegality of segregation shows that these ‘special intervention units’ (SIU) do not appear to be meeting the minimum standards set by the government. The full report...
Read MoreHarms of remand – evidence from Denmark
Post #153 650 words; 3 minutes to read The majority (about 60%) of people held in provincial jails in Canada have not been found guilty of anything and this pattern has been getting worse in recent years. They are being...
Read MoreCould expungement of criminal records hurt more people than it helps?
Post # 150 About 100 words; 5 minutes to read. This post is adapted with permission from a longer article by the same authors posted by The Niskanen Centre, a US policy organization. This is an issue in which the...
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