Copycat theme focuses on wrong problem, again

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
November 26, 2007

Exploding bladders. That's the phrase that sums up my opposition to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plan for mandatory sentences for drug traffickers. Read on, I will explain it.

Harper thinks illegal drugs are a criminal problem. Others say they're a health problem. But either way, the target should not be drugs in the first place. Instead it should be alcohol, which is far more damaging to the overall social fabric, especially to a new and fashionable group of people: binge drinkers. And that's where the exploding comes in.

A new U.S. report has explained in exquisite detail how the American prison system has failed catastrophically and at huge cost, partly because of the failed War on Drugs and partly because of the debacle of mandatory sentencing.

Just in time for this report, Harper has announced plans to make the Canadian prison system more like the American one, zeroing in on illegal drugs with that same mandatory sentencing.

Compare and contrast

Harper has a perfect right to admire the Republican way. But I am dismayed by his tendency to copy American policies after they have been disgraced: backing the Iraq invasion, concentrating on drugs rather than violent crimes, arrest without trial, and mandatory sentencing. Bandwagons are fun, but being the portly Canadian Shriner in a fez tootling behind the American bandwagon on a pint-sized scooter, that’s embarrassing.

The JFA Institute, which independently evaluates the U.S. prison system for all three levels of government, reports that:

The number of prisoners has risen eight-fold since 1970, no matter what the crime rate or the state of the economy.

• Redefining "felony" makes the U.S. incarcerate more people than does China, hardly a model of decency or sanity.

• Prison sentences for the same crime are three times longer in the U.S. than in Canada.

• Women are now the fastest growing segment of inmates.

In this way, a huge number of citizens are shut out of the possibility of a conventional life.

Think of the spillover from this failed prison policy: destitute children, unemployment, prison-induced drug addiction and many more corrosive effects. American society has suffered — perhaps beyond repair. So why does Harper like the idea?

'Second-best' at best

It's not just that his plan is proven to do more harm than good, it's that he hasn't even defined "drug offences" or why they're worse than rape or pedophilia or gun violence, crimes at which Harper isn't going to throw $64 million of my money.

Harper hasn't specified the length of sentences proposed but he complained to reporters about grow-ops, of all things. Vancouver's harm-reduction schemes (clean needles, methadone, etc.) don't appeal to him.

"It's a second-best strategy at best," he said. "If you remain a drug addict, I don't care how much harm you reduce, you're going to have a short and miserable life."

I do care how much harm is reduced. He's talking about harm to the user. I'm talking about harm to citizens at large. I don't want addicts turning to the Robert Picktons of this world for cash, and I don't want people dying from using dirty needles, but most of all, I don't want to be robbed or killed by a heroin addict needing to feed his habit. Why is demonizing drug use more important than protecting Canadian citizens busy with their daily lives?

Booze bladder

It's a sad fact that heroin, crack and pot aren't the drugs that do the most damage to society. It's alcohol every time, and this is true worldwide.

Alcohol enables terrible things: wife-beating, child abuse in families, brutal street fights over imagined insults, cirrhosis, esophageal cancer, gums and roots that slowly lose their grasp on teeth, and early death. A depressant that makes humans angry, it's dangerous in bulk.

The latest symptom of binge drinking is — and admit it, you were looking forward to this — split bladders. Doctors used to expect ruptured bladders in old alcoholics, but now they see it in otherwise healthy young people, particularly women, who drink so much in an evening that their body sensors go dull and they're too fogged to remember to pee. If you fall down, your bladder gives way.

The British Medical Association is now warning doctors that emergency room patients with unexplained lower abdominal pain may actually have urine leaking into their bodies from a blasted organ.

We don't talk much about alcoholism anymore because it's not flashy like smack or meth or X. It's boring, and it's not my intention to write columns that bore you. But boozing is omnipresent and out of control.

Laura Norder

I look at the harsh prosecution of non-violent crime with the same skepticism as do President Bush (no wonder he pardoned that nice Scooter Libby) and Conrad Black. That is to say, I see it as rewarding in ways we prefer not to contemplate.

Karl Marx was very good on this. "A criminal produces crimes," he wrote. To paraphrase him further: a professor produces papers, a chef, dinners and so on. A crook produces criminal law and all its components, including reports.

A crook produces the police, constables, judges, juries, art and literature. As for the suggestive power of crime, think of the home alarm and lock industry, the ever-advancing state of forgery and the wonderful feeling of indignation aroused in me when a perfectly nice American mother gets eight years in jail for hosting a party for her son and his friends at her house, with beer in a cooler, while Libby scoots free for perjury. And what are Swiss hotel rooms produced for, if not to ease the quiet gifting of $300,000 in cash to politicians with pull?

Law and order (aka Laura Norder as the Brits refer to this grim creature) is said to be a simple thing. You're either for it or against it, Bush and Harper would say. But it is in fact an enormously complicated thing with a scale of rewards and punishments for both the enforcers and the offenders. The rest of us, mere voters, have been left out.