Tag Archive: media

Do Victim Impact Statements contribute to justice?

March 11, 2023

Post #212 950 words; 4 minutes to read.   Summary: Work by US scholar Susan Bandes raises important issues about the place of victim impact statements in criminal justice.   Victim impact statements (VIS) have become a fixture in the criminal...

Read More

Crime continues to decline in Canada

April 30, 2022

Post #190 950 words; 4 minutes to read One of the main regular sources of data on criminal justice in Canada is the annual ‘Police Reported Crime’ report.  The most recent report was released in the summer of 2021, and...

Read More

Presumption of innocence is often a myth

March 16, 2020

830 words; 4 minutes to read We are told, and believe, that the presumption of innocence is a core concept in Canadian law.  Nobody is or should be presumed guilty until they plead guilty or are convicted in a court...

Read More

Michael Bryant, CCLA and criminal justice

December 11, 2019

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is a champion for civil rights in all areas of Canadian life. Criminal justice is one of its focus areas.  The organization has been very active in mounting court challenges around some of the...

Read More

Why we like punishment

November 2, 2019 | , , , , , , , ,

675 words; 3 minutes One of the great myths about the criminal justice system is that one of its major purposes is rehabilitation, helping people who did something wrong improve themselves so they will no longer commit crimes. But when...

Read More

How media coverage can distort ideas about crime

October 25, 2019

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 More

Election issue 1 – Crime in Canada is decreasing

September 6, 2019

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 More