Tough-on-crime policies don't work, study finds

Research at odds with Tories' crime agenda

OTTAWA–The federal Justice Department pays to help publicize leading criminal justice research that frequently discredits the Conservative government's "tough-on-crime" agenda.

The most recent issue of Criminological Highlights, published last month, with federal assistance, by the University of Toronto's Centre of Criminology, blows gaping holes in several of Justice Minister Rob Nicholson's most cherished anti-crime measures.

It also provides a very timely reminder of why Canada's ongoing move toward more mandatory minimum sentences can lead to the kind of plea bargain arrangement that's created a storm of public outrage around former Conservative stalwart Rahim Jaffer.

Mandatory penalties, says the research digest, "undermine the legitimacy of the prosecution process by fostering circumventions that are wilful and subterranean. They undermine ... equality before the law when they cause comparably culpable offenders to be treated radically differently."

Read on...

John Ll. Edwards Lecture

Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname”

January 25, 2010 at 4:30 pm Reception to Follow

Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto 14 Queen's Park Crescent West Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K9 Event Contact: Brendan Heath: crim.grad@utoronto.ca

Natalie Zemon Davis
Professor Emerita of History at Princeton University
Adjunct Professor of History and Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the world’s most influential historians. Her work has profoundly shaped how scholars use legal and other sources to shed light on power and inequality in everyday life. Her 1975 book Society and Culture in Early Modern France pioneered the study of ‘everyday life’, and took the then radical step of considering gender as a central analytical category. The 1983 book The return of Martin Guerre, released at the same time as the film, was a case study about an impostor whose identity came under legal scrutiny. How identity is constructed, in part through legal proceedings, was also the focus of a highly influential work, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (1987), and of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). In recent years Prof. Davis has expanded the scope of her research to include the slave trade, focusing especially on Suriname. In this year’s John Ll. Edwards lecture, cosponsored by the Centre of Criminology, the Faculty of Law, and Woodsworth College, Prof. Davis will share her ongoing research in a talk by the title of, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice In Colonial Suriname”.