The best example is the whole tough on crime agenda that works so well with the fearful, insulated, woolheaded conservative base. There is no evidence that this works, lots of evidence that it will cost us way more, and further subjugates criminals paving the road to them being just seen as animals.
Take the pre-trial issue. Prior to the Conservatives and their we know better for the sake that we know better ideology, judges award credit of time served for pre-trial. Pre-trial is mostly awful. You sit alone in a cell in a jail. It's way worse than prison where at least there are activities, socialization, and moderate purpose to your time spent there like work and education. In pre-trial you just sit there. Many people, such as immigration defendants sit in pre-trial for up to a year.
Judges and any seasoned professional in the criminal justice system knew that pre-trial was the hardest time. So they routinely gave 2x credit for pre-trial. If you're sentenced to a 3 year term but did a year of pre-trial you were considered to have already served two years of that term. There's a fairly developed criminology literature that pre-trial is a detriment to a person's rehab and it's a good way to alleviate resources in the system.
But the mouth-breathing hordes would have none of that! The Harper Government decided that there should be no credit to pre-trial. Why? Because! That would be a criminal slithering out of the sentence and justice that they so deserved. Judges, those liberal Judges, had no right to show "leniency" and now pre-trial gets no credit.
This goes back to Harper's top prerogative to throw slabs of red meat to this base that wants revenge against criminals instead of the much more socially beneficial rehabilitation. It's just one more data point of why I don't like the guy. They just decided to do this against the better judgement of the experts because screw them, they know better! That's no way to run a country.
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