Canada's Ovens of Crime

This may be Harper's signature achievement - transforming Canada's prisons into ovens for baking hardcore criminals.  Steve has a prison fetish and he's got it bad.  Along with his sidekick "Kinky" Toews, they're on a real Law'n Order rampage and it's having the predictable results.   This first paragraph from The Globe & Mail sums it up nicely:

The ombudsman for federal prisoners says the effects of harsher sentencing laws brought in by the Conservative government are being felt in overcrowded prisons, where interaction between staff and inmates is becoming increasingly rare and rehabilitation is undermined.

One thing about prisons is that they're all educational institutions.  You go in there, you learn things, things you'll use later in life when you're back on the streets.  When prisons are vile and overcrowded, it tends to be the inmate population that's doing the teaching and they're not passing along the skillset you and I might prefer.

I Guess We Should All Know Victims of Crime

Statistics Canada has come up with a claim that one out of four Canadians was a victim of crime last year.   I'm sure it's just coincidence that this story emerges as Harper is desperate to find some justification for his prison fetish.

One out of four.  That seems like a lot.  Four.  That's a husband, wife and two kids.   Or two parents and just one set of grandparents.   Or a bowling team? Two couples out for dinner.  A golf foursome?  As many Canadians as I could possibly fit into my car.  Four.

I know quite a few fours.   I know three or four fours on my street and a whole gaggle of twos.   I know a bunch of fours in a batch of towns.  I stay in touch with these people.

Of all the fours and part-fours I know, I don't know any one of them that's been a victim of crime in the past year.   Or the year before that or the one prior to that either.   Come to think of it, I don't know any fours that have been a victim of crime in the past four years.

Now I'm sure if one member of any of those fours had been a victim of crime I might not have heard about it.  But I'm just as sure that if one in four people in all those fours had fallen victim to a crime I would have heard about it from a good many of them.   But I haven't.

Sure I live in a peaceful, positively tranquil little island town but I have friends and family who live in all sorts of places including Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Seattle, Detroit and Chicago.   I keep expecting the friends in Detroit to at least lose a limb but, so far, they're remarkably intact.

One in four, eh?  Well you wouldn't know it by me.