Less Crime, More Inmates - Mission Accomplished, Steve

Only in Conservative Canada. Crime continues to fall but that won't stop the Harpies from slinging more Canadians behind bars. I guess it's all the result of Stevie's "get tough on crime before it's gone" policies. From the Canadian Press:

One analyst suggested judges are growing leery of releasing people on bail in the face of a federal government that's pushing a law-and-order agenda.

"I think, overall, we've seen in recent years concern that's been expressed through the Conservative government about judges supposedly being soft on sentencing," said David MacAlister of the Institute for Studies in Criminal Justice Policy at Simon Fraser University.
"Not that I think they ever were, but I think that's bound to have an impact on judges. They're going to be sentencing people for longer periods of time and holding people they might otherwise have released just because of the pressure."

He said crime rates don't explain the rise: "Crime rates have steadily been coming down. There isn't more crime."

While more adults were in jail, the average number of young people aged 12 to 17 in custody on any given day went down, continuing a decline that began with adoption of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in 2003.

MacAlister said it's "inevitable" that the prison population will rise again if the Tory legislation on minimum sentences passes.

"Once you start instituting mandatory sentencing, your incarceration rate is bound to increase," he said.

Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society, said the government's get-tough agenda is going to require more prisons.

"This is our future," he said of the rising incarceration rate. "I sometimes think this agenda is about building more prisons."