A lawyer, legal educator, and author, James C. Morton has written more than twenty-five legal texts as well as numerous papers and articles. He is past president of the Ontario Bar Association and a long-time human rights and community activist. Hes served as a governor for the Canadian International Peace Project, counsel for the Canadian Somali Congress, and legal counsel (pro bono) for Artists Against Racism, a registered charity fighting racial and religious prejudice. In this piece, published in the Ottawa Citizen on October 13, 2008, Morton argues that tough punishment is not the solution to the common problem of chronic offences in the area of petty theft.

• 1

In a season of tough talk on crime, I would like to propose a challenge to our political leaders. In this country, one group of criminals commits a disproportionate number of crimes that we could easily reduce with more coercive sentencing. However, our usual form of coercionimprisonmentdoesnt work for them. They need a different kind of sentence. But to make that happenand to significantly reduce the number of crimes they commitwould require a degree of will and wisdom that our legislators cant seem to muster.

iQoncept/Shutterstock

• 2

The legal system refers to these menthey are almost all menas chronic offenders. What everyone knowsbut the justice system doesnt acknowledgeis that they are also drug addicts, hooked on heroin or crack cocaine. They steal not for gain but to support their addiction, to pay for their next fix.

• 3

This has nothing to do with getting high. For an addict, the point is to avoid the effects of withdrawalin the case of heroin, including cramps and muscle spasms, fever, cold sweats and goose bumps (hence the phrase cold turkey), insomnia, vomiting, diarrhea and a condition called itchy blood, which can cause compulsive scratching so severe that it leads to open sores. For addicts, drug use is not a lifestyle choice thats easy to change. Many have been addicted for their entire adult lives, and as a result have spent half their lives behind bars, serving dozens of sentences for minor crimes. These are the revolving door criminals that some critics point toarrested, tried, sentenced to a few weeks or months, then dumped back out on the street, only to be arrested, tried and convicted again a few weeks later.

• 4

Canada has hundreds of criminals like that, mainly in the larger cities. Vancouver alone recently identified 379. According to a report by the Vancouver Police Department, the vast majority were addicted to drugs or alcohol. Many also suffer from a mental disorder, generally untreated. In the five years between 2001 and 2006, Vancouvers few hundred chronic offenders, as a group, were responsible for 26,755 police contactsmore 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 monthper month! There has to be a better way.

• 5

Punishment alone is not it, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, the idea of punishing criminals is based at least partly on the concept of specific deterrence. You steal, we lock you up. Applied most strongly to property crimeswhich is what these offenders mainly commitspecific deterrence assumes that the criminal is a rational actor who will consider: Is it worth it? And in fact, specific deterrence often works; many offenders really do stop committing crimes after fairly short jail sentences. But not addicts.

• 6

The problem is the presumption of a rational actor. That is exactly what we do not have with drug addicts, who do notusually cannotstop to consider the likely punishment for a crime they are about to commit. They see only the escape from the more immediate and dire punishments of drug deprivation. By comparison, the threat of being caught and thrown in jail is nothing.

• 7

As well, because chronic offenders tend to commit minor crimes and draw short sentencessay, 30 to 90 days for thefttheir lives shift constantly between jail and the streets.

• 8

We could use longer sentences to warehouse chronic offendersthe American three strikes and youre out approach. But long-term imprisonment would be a very high-cost way to deal with what is really a public health issue.

• 9

And theres the crux of the problem. The criminal justice system is not designed to treat addicts. While prisons do provide some drug treatment, it is almost always short-term and underfunded. And these offenders, with their short sentences, rarely get even that. The voluntary drug treatment programs offered by the public health system seldom work for them either, because kicking an addiction is extremely unpleasant and requires willpower and usually some money, neither of which street addicts have.

• 10

Clearly, Canadians need more protection from chronic offenders than we are now getting. While their crimes may be petty, their victims number in the thousands. And 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 criminal justice system. But blaming that system, as many do, misses the pointwhich is our failure as a society to deal with severe drug and alcohol addiction.

• 11

With chronic offenders, the first step is to recognize that what we have is an issue of both criminal law and public health. The next step is to require addicted offenders to undergo serious, long-term drug treatment.

• 12

Canadas experience with mandatory drug treatment is quite limited. In the late 1970s, British Columbia passed legislation under which heroin addicts could be compelled to take part in an intensive government-funded treatment program. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the statute but the provincial legislature ultimately repealed it, concerned about civil liberties. (This was the time of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.)

• 13

These days, Vancouvers Downtown Community Court tackles street crime by taking guilty pleas and moving the accused into treatment as part of their sentencing, but only with their consent, which misses the point.

• 14

Were less constrained with juvenile offenders. Since 1996, Alberta law has required minors with an apparent alcohol or drug addiction to participate, with or without their consent, in an assessment and treatment program. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have similar legislation and even allow parents of drug-addicted children to ask a court to require treatment, whether or not the child is in trouble with the law.

• 15

Although the research is scant, mandatory treatment does appear to have about the same success rate as voluntary treatment. A 1970s American study looked at the effectiveness of methadone maintenance treatment for those who entered the program under high, moderate or no coercion and found no significant difference in outcomes for the three groups.

• 16

Given the costs of incarcerationnot counting the costs to future victimspaying for mandatory drug treatment for them hardly seems an issue, even if it only works some of the time. As for whether mandatory treatment is somehow inhumane, how humane is it to sentence these addicts to punishments we know dont work and then dump them back on the street no better than before?

• 17

More than costs or moral qualms, though, the main obstacle to mandatory drug treatment for addicted offenders is probably institutional. Both the justice system and the health system have entrenched groups with turf to protect: prisons, parole boards, hospitals. Collaboration would mean breaching walls; even with good intentions, a mandatory treatment program would raise irksome issues such as which ministry pays, health or justice, and which is responsible. But dont we elect our leaders to solve such problems?

• 18

The question is not whether we will be soft on crime but whether we can be smart about crime. Crime in the real world is not an exciting TV show. Crime has real costs and victims. Politics aside, Canadians generallyand victims of crime specificallydeserve evidence-based criminal justice policies that actually reduce crime. Our challenge is to make the tough choices that move beyond tough on crime rhetoric and produce real change.

Please answer following questions

1. Main idea
2. Subordinate ideas
3. Meaning
4. Organization
5. Purpose
6. Audience
7. tone
8. style