Yet another example of the Harper government ignoring fact and pushing policies that make no sense – their obsession with building superprisons. Texas conservatives reject Harpers crime plan – Politics – CBC News. First they got rid of the long-form census, which the US tried and then had to reinstate because they realized the short-form census was useless; now Texans in government are telling us that their policy of building huge prisons has failed and isn’t the solution to the crime problem, especially because crime is actually DROPPING in both Texas and Canada. Indeed, it costs 10 times as much to pay for the prisons and the inmates than to pay for rehabilitation…
When will the population of Canada wake up to the fact that Stephen Harper and his fellow conservatives are hell bent on spending money on policies that make no sense, and wasting hard-earned taxpayer dollars?
From the article:
“As recently as 2004, Texas had the highest incarceration rate in the world, with fully one in 20 of its adult residents behind bars or on parole or probation. The Lone Star state still has the death penalty, with more than 300 prisoners on death row today. But for three decades, as crime rates fell all over the U.S., the rate in Texas fell at only half the national average.
That didn’t change the policy — but its cost did.
Faced with a budget crisis in 2005, the Texas statehouse was handed an estimate of $2 billion to build new prisons for a predicted influx of new prisoners.
They told Rep. Madden to find a way out. He and his committee dug into the facts. Did all those new prisoners really need to go to jail? And did all of those already behind bars really need to be there?
‘We can’t ignore the fact that our “tough on crime” stance that puts a person in prison and assumes that their drug problem will somehow magically disappear while they’re incarcerated and they’ll never get out again and offend, is ridiculous!’—Dr. Teresa May-Williams, forensic psychologist
Madden’s answer was, no. He found that Texas had diverted money from treatment and probation services to building prisons. But sending people to prison was costing 10 times as much as putting them on probation, on parole, or in treatment.”