Quote:
Originally Posted by Bownesian
My reason for engaging you in this debate was to make the point that the government's prison-building isn't an accident and isn't the result of some kind of error in arithmetic, as is implied by the falling crime rate argument. [snip]
The observed growth in prison populations is a predicted consequence of the tough-on-crime platform the current government was elected on. Whether it's a lowest common denominator platform or good or bad policy is debatable but that wasn't the point you originally made and isn't the point currently being made by the opposition.
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Your faith in the government is misplaced.
They are the ones who have linked their prison-building policy to the chimera of rising crime, not the opposition and certainly not me:
Quote:
Toews dismissed reports from Statistics Canada that the crime rate is falling. In July, the statistical agency reported that "both the volume and severity of police-reported crime fell in 2009," three per cent from 2008 and 17 per cent from 1999.
"The crime isn't going down," Toews insisted.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/...#ixzz11yugLJJF
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Prior to that it was Stockwell Day who insisted that the drop in crime just meant that the new policy problem was
unreported crime. That was
truly brilliant.
I'll grant that Day isn't exactly a genius, but his comment reveals that the Tories really need this policy problem to be on the front-burner, even if it turns out that it doesn't exist in real life.
You're essentially asking me to ignore the government's stated rationale for this policy and instead ascribe to them one that is less illogical. I'm not prepared to do that; nothing I've heard from Vic Toews or Stockwell Day indicates to me that they have a brain cell between them, let alone a rational, well-thought out criminal justice policy that goes beyond crass voter manipulation.
The rise in prison populations might be a predictable outcome, but it's not a predicted one--at least not according to what these guys are saying.