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 MorePost # 169 925 words; 4 minutes to read By Martina Arcuri, recent political science graduate After a year of consultation with prisoners and staff, journalist Justin Ling, in an article in Macleans, illustrated many of the problems in the...
Read MorePost #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 MorePost # 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...
Read More450 words; 2 minutes to read Issues of inequality and racism are at the very forefront of the news in Canada. The criminal justice system is often cited as a place where these problems are notable. These issues have been...
Read More760 words; 3 minutes to read One of the alternatives increasingly considered – and used – instead of jailing people is the use of electronic monitors. These can be an alternative for bail; people charged with a crime can return...
Read MoreRecently, TV Ontario aired a documentary called “The Arrest”, about several Canadian cases in which people sued the police for wrongful arrest. The film shows a lot of footage of the actual arrests but also shows the lasting damage to...
Read More800 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 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...
Read More600 words; 3 minutes to read Last year Senator Kim Pate introduced a bill that would provide automatic expungement of criminal records in Canada. Under this bill, criminal records would automatically be sealed after a certain amount of time had...
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