Obviously I like this piece, because I wrote it. That said, the Vancouver Police Department report on chronic criminals is worth a read:

http://vancouver.ca/police/media/2008/ChronicsSentencing.pdf

• 7 Aug 2008
• National Post
• JAMES MORTON

Beyond crime and punishment

William M. lives in Vancouver, but his world is so different from that of ordinary Canadians that he might as well live on another planet. Born in 1961, he began compiling an adult criminal record in Ontario as soon as he became of age, committing dozens of property crimes, violent crimes and minor offences such as breaching bail.

In 1991, William moved west and began offending in the Lower B.C. Mainland, most often in Vancouver, but also in Surrey and Port Coquitlam. Now 46, he has been arrested hundreds of times since 1979, with an astonishing 148 convictions. The vast majority of his offenses have been property related, driven by the need to get money for drugs.

William is not alone. In cities across Canada there are hundreds of chronic offenders like him. Vancouver alone has 379. According to a recent report by the Vancouver Police Department, the vast majority are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Many also suffer from a mental disorder, generally untreated. As a group, those few hundred chronic offenders were responsible for 26,755 police contacts between 2001 and 2006 — more than 5,000 contacts per year, 14 a day. The costs are staggering. Arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations end up costing some $20,000 per criminal per month. There has to be a better way, and there is.

A trial program in the Australian state of New South Wales targets 100 repeat male offenders with long-term illicit drug dependency and an associated life of crime and constant imprisonment. The program combines a term of incarceration with mandatory treatment and a slow reintegration into society — jail followed by custody in the community with ongoing supervision. Initial results seem positive.

Money is not an issue. By contrast with the $20,000 cost per criminal per month of the current system — and that doesn’t include the costs to victims — the cost of keeping a prisoner in a provincial institution is about $4,250 per month, with reintegration into the community adding no more than another $1,500. On that financial basis alone, a program integrating the criminal justice system and the mental health system makes sense. Working together, the two systems can at least begin to address the problem, but either system by itself is doomed to failure.

Because chronic offenders tend to commit minor crimes, drawing fairly short sentences, their lives shift rapidly between jail and the neighbourhoods where they find their drugs — in Vancouver, for example, the Downtown Eastside. William’s sentences, most often for theft, generally range from 30 to 90 days. Then he’s back on the street.

Petty as their crimes may be, collectively William and his fellow chronic offenders cause enormous hardship. Their victims number in the thousands. Those victims are left not only with a monetary loss, but also with a lingering fear that affects their sense of personal safety and their trust in the justice system.

We clearly need protection from chronic offenders, and we are clearly not getting it. But blaming the criminal justice system, as many do, misses the real problem — our failure as a society to deal with severe drug and alcohol addiction.

Punishment alone doesn’t work for a simple reason. The idea of punishing criminals for their crimes is premised at least partly on the concept of specific deterrence. Applied most strongly to property crimes, specific deterrence assumes that the criminal is a rational actor who will consider: Is it worth it? In fact, specific deterrence often works; many offenders actually do swear off crime after fairly short jail sentences.

The problem is that specific deterrence presumes a rational actor, which is exactly what we do not have with offenders like those of the Downtown Eastside, who are drug addicted and often mentally ill. They do not pause to consider the possible punishment for the crime they are about to commit. As a result, punishment acts as little or no deterrent to them.

We could use longer sentences to “warehouse” those too dangerous to allow on the streets, but that would be using a very high-cost mechanism to deal with what is really a public health issue. The criminal justice system is not designed to treat addicts; while prisons provide some treatment, it is almost always short-term and under-funded. By the same token, voluntary drug treatment, as available from the public health system, seldom works either, because kicking an addiction is extremely unpleasant and demands willpower and money, both seldom found in criminal street addicts.

The first step is to recognize that the issue is one of both public health and criminal law. The next step is to include compulsory drug treatment, as that trial program in New South Wales is doing.

In principle, it seems unfair and arguably unjust for a court to impose mandatory drug withdrawal and psychiatric treatment. Most people do not want to be treated against their will, even for a serious illness. Canadians feel strongly about the right to choose what to do with their own bodies, and that is usually appropriate. But our moral intuitions can fail us when it comes to the few hard cases, which include chronic offenders.

We have to move on from the “war on crime” to an approach that will protect society while rehabilitating those who can be rehabilitated. This means making some tough choices. But these choices can be avoided no longer.