We live at a time when our national government is transfixed with
“tough on crime” policies. We also live at a time when crime rates are
the lowest in decades.
Take British Columbia, which, until the
late 1990s, had the highest rate of Criminal Code offences of the four
western provinces. Today, its rate (third lowest of the four) is about
where it was in 1970; it has been dropping for the past 10 years, with
youth crime falling faster than overall crime. And yet, less crime has
not translated into lower court costs. Crime is down 33 per cent in the
past six years, but criminal justice costs are up 35 per cent in the
same period.
Smacked in the face by these results, the B.C. government has been
conducting internal reviews; it also issued a green paper on modernizing
the justice system and appointed lawyer Geoffrey Cowper to study the
problem. His findings, reported last month, were disturbing. In fact, if
you took the words “lawyers,” “judges” and “justice system” out of the
report, an innocent could imagine he was describing the health-care
system.
To wit, these observations from Mr. Cowper:
“The system fails to meet the public’s reasonable expectations of timeliness.”
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