Konservative, Liberale sparen sich über konkurrierende Visionen der Kaution -Reform

What Larry Krasner did in Philadelphia was bail reform. Whatever the grits and tories come up with will be some reactionary attempt to deny bail access to broad swaths of Canadians who do not deserve to be jailed without trial. These are not the same.

Using bail denial as a punishment in itself breeds a broken dysfunctional system.

Any time people want to talk about bill C-75 its a pretty good tell that they aren’t at all familiar with the criminal justice system as it actual practices, rather than reported on in the papers (I frankly would put most political leadership in that category, but the CPC gets it most frequently from me because they want to talk about the subject). C-75 didn’t do bugger all, we hold the same amount of people bail denied before as after the legislation and as of the most recent reported year we essentially hold more people pre-trial than we have ever before. On top of that. Remand Centers are generally speaking, full to bursting. Put more inside of one category means less of another category at this point, or a major investment in expansion.

Police frustration on arrest and release – Overwhelmingly when they’re talking about this its about people who are persisted nuisances. I.e. they repeatedly commit relatively minor offenses over and over again because that’s their lifestyle. Quite often they in turn get released because their charges aren’t serious enough to justify prison for the amount of time until a trial so its an ongoing cycle until they either develop enough of a record that they start getting serious time for minor offenses or they quit the life cycle.

There’s a natural inclination to ask, well why not lock them up awaiting trial anyway? You probably could, but that also conflicts with another issue, that the Remand centers are already full to the gills. We hold more people bail denied right now than we have ever before and there’s no room left. Not releasing the nuisance cases at this point probably means releasing the more releasable violent cases.

Escalating sentencing: I think there would be plenty of merit to address societal concerns with repeat violent offenders by increasing their sentences a lot more but 3 strikes isn’t a particularly intelligent way of going about that, and the CPC’s obsession with unconstitutional bail denial methods isn’t helping either. It also doesn’t help that they use the term violent offenses far too broadly, what they’re envisioning for assault simpliciter should be for assault bodily or assault aggravated.

If Parliament was looking to take sentencing really seriously, I’d suggest they could look at establishing a system to produce sentencing guidelines like they do in the UK. Contrary to popular and too frequently learned opinion on the subject, the courts aren’t inherently hostile to Parliamentary guidance on sentences, they just really dislike mandatory minimums.

Making DV a specific charge under the criminal code: Utterly pointless and useless, we have everything we need on this already, and frankly DV charges are an area that tends to be already pointlessly cluttered with unnecessary rules.