Satisfying Justice: A compendium of Initiatives, programs and legislative neasures: Introduction

Canadians are facing a crisis in the justice system. Prison populations are soaring. The costs are no longer affordable. Yet people are feeling less safe and secure. What Canadians want and need is "satisfying justice" - a response to crime that takes victims seriously and helps them heal, a response that calls offenders to account and deals with them effectively, a response that "gets tough" on the causes of crime and does something about them. It is clear that filling our jails has just not been working.

In fact, a top level document has put government leaders on notice:

At the Church Council on Justice and Corrections, we have been asking this question: what can be done instead of jail to meet the many demands of justice?

Of course, we all want protection from violent behaviour. But when we are told in this same report that, from the best available knowledge:

... punitive imprisonment does very little, if anything, to reduce our overall risks and that other, less expensive means may be as effective, or more so;

... and when we are told that 84 per cent of admissions of provincial inmates and 37 per cent of the federal penitentiary offender population are in prison for non-violent offences;

... and when we are told that Canada incarcerates individuals at a higher rate than any other western democracy except the United States;

... that we use custody as a response to youth crime considerably more than the national average in other comparable countries;

... and that our adult prisons are filled to overcapacity so that we will soon have to build more, at great expense, if we don't change our way of going about the business of doing justice;

... and when we are told that rates and length of incarceration not only fail to reduce recidivism and the overall crime rate, they sometimes increase them;

... and when we are told that the annual cost of our adult correctional systems was about $2 billion in 1992/93, that it costs $52,953 a year to keep an offender in penitentiary instead of $10,951 for supervision in the community, and that the federal prison population is growing at a rate which suggests a 50 per cent increase over the next 10 years if we continue to do business in the same way; then we feel a need to stop and ask ourselves:

Why are we doing this?

Couldn't all that money be put to better use to make us secure?

How can we get SMARTER about getting tough?

What can we do instead?

1984-1995
Rate of Incarceration for Federal Institutions in Canada

Correctional Services Canada - Information Management System - Year End Count

Many government jurisdictions here in Canada and elsewhere have been asking similar questions. They want to decrease the size and costs of their prison populations. In Canada, however, all the governments' efforts to date to provide alternatives to imprisonment have failed to halt in any significant way these mounting numbers, already high by international standards. These escalating rates of increase in prison population are no longer sustainable, either fiscally or socially. The traditional average yearly increase of 2.5 per cent has jumped in recent years to over 4 per cent, a trend which is expected to worsen, leaving less money for other essential programs in the field of health or education and, as the Rethinking Corrections paper noted, "grim implications for the quality and values of society generally".

Yet, the truth is that effective community measures do exist in Canada and elsewhere. Some jurisdictions around the world have succeeded in reducing their use of prisons.

Therefore, we set out to track down and describe a range of the best examples we could find. We wanted to illustrate to victims of crime, to justice decision-makers, to members of the public what can be done that would bring about satisfying justice while reducing our country's reliance on incarceration, wherever the evidence shows this to be ill-founded and counter-productive. While we recognize that long-term crime prevention initiatives remain the best path to safe communities, this compendium deals exclusively with initiatives, programs and legislative measures responding to crime which has already occurred. We wanted to identify safe community options that attempt to repair harm from crime and reduce the use or length of imprisonment.

We found that many voluntary agencies have recognized for years the futility and destructiveness of prison sentences vis-à-vis the crime problem. They recognized the need to ensure that the response to crime is social as well as legal. Many have sponsored community-based measures which are safe, and sometimes satisfying for victims, to which the criminal justice system can refer, in order to reduce the use or length of imprisonment.

We also found that, in some communities, individuals or groups have spontaneously rallied in the aftermath of a tragic crime to struggle together and to work out some real solutions for community protection and satisfying justice beyond mere incarceration.

Most importantly, we found that in pockets of the world, including examples in Canada, some communities as a whole are trying to forge an entirely different kind of partnership with their local justice officials. Some are aboriginal communities drawing on their own traditions. Others are urban groups of citizens who want more ownership for their own justice work to ensure the safety and well-being of their neighbourhoods, schools and communities.

Out of this latter movement, as average citizens wrestle with the real problems, there is beginning to emerge a call for a fundamentally different approach to justice. People who know the facts about individual situations want lasting solutions to the problems they are uncovering; and they often want healing for both victims and offenders, and for the community's overall sense of trust and well-being. From this perspective, they are shedding a whole new light on the role of incarceration. It has very little positive contribution to make to what matters most to them about crime. And theirs are the initiatives we have found that stand to make the greatest inroads into forging new models for the "satisfying justice" we all ultimately seek, and by the same token reduce wasteful expenditures on imprisonment.

In this compendium, we present a selection of "a hundred and one things we can do instead of putting or keeping someone in jail". It is based on information that individuals and organizations forwarded to us after hearing about our search. They do not by any means provide an exhaustive listing of all the valuable programs and services that are currently available. We hope they do provide a balanced representation of the most creative, innovative and satisfying types of initiatives that came to our attention. Where we found several initiatives of a similar nature, we chose to use an example and a story that we thought could most vividly illustrate how it works and how it feels. Our aim is to spark innovative thinking about justice and generate enthusiasm for experimenting responsibly with new solutions to an old problem. For every entry selected, we have listed a contact person who can provide further details about each initiative's strengths, limitations and potential difficulties. As well, some information will be useful in finding out where other comparable programs already exist and where some guidance might be obtained before undertaking a similar initiative.

There is some tremendously good news about all the initiatives featured here. For the individuals benefitting from them, they do in fact avoid the use of imprisonment altogether, or frequently reduce, to varying degrees, its length. The heartening finding is that the most conclusive evidence gathered to date reveals that this has not increased rates of recidivism or overall crime in the community (see for example Ekland-Olson et al., 1992; Lin Song, 1993; Julian Roberts, 1995).

The bad news is, however, that in many jurisdictions, including all of Canada's, the use of these more cost-effective justice options has failed to reduce the overall use of imprisonment as a sentence. They have failed to halt the continuing increases in prison populations and costs. They have even failed in some instances to halt the continuing escalation of population overcapacity. According to the government document, "Rethinking Corrections", in federal penitentiaries this overcapacity recently doubled in the span of only one year and concern about this situation has been publicly expressed by the Auditor General. All jurisdictions in Canada are presently operating institutions at close to full capacity or in excess. Nor is this likely to change as things stand now. Meanwhile, community options are sometimes not funded on the basis that they increase overall criminal justice costs. Yet, on their own they would be more cost-effective, especially if dollars spent on prisons are reallocated to dollars spent on community programs. What is the problem? Some of the factors behind it are discussed in the section of this compendium entitled Conclusion.

But of equal concern is our finding that some of these alternatives and community measures, while remaining safe to use without increasing recidivism or crime rates, are not providing victims or communities with what we are calling "satisfying justice". And this may also partly explain why they are not reducing the calls for incarceration and why governments have not been inclined to take the actions that would more effectively decrease its use.

In addition, the manner in which many of these measures are presently structured does not contribute significantly to a perception that sentences other than incarceration are a more appropriate, effective or desirable response to criminal behaviour. Prison remains the cornerstone of criminal policy in the mindset of the public and of judicial decision-makers. Its symbolic hold on our collective psyche overpowers all rational evidence to the contrary. Yet on a practical level prisons fail to provide satisfying justice to victims and communities and are often harmful to those who live and work in them, with devastating and long-lasting effects on the children of prisoners (Council of Europe, 1991; Roberts, 1995). As a mere symbol, it is one we can no longer afford.

We need to call our decision-makers to account for this. We need to call for responses to crime and sentences that protect us effectively when that is required, and that spend our money in the ways that will be the most satisfying for our real justice needs and in the long-term best interests of our communities.

In presenting this compendium of justice options that could help to reduce the use of imprisonment in Canada, we have chosen, therefore, to particularly highlight the initiatives that meet this criterion, while providing "satisfying justice" to victims and communities. And we have asked of all entries the following kinds of questions:

• what are the ways in which this initiative does or does not provide "satisfying justice"? .
• does it protect us enough?
• could it be used in more serious cases?
• if a period in prison was still a component of the sentence in this initiative, what was the purpose for which it was used? Was it really necessary? Or is there another means for achieving this purpose that could have been used instead that could have been as effective or more so, less harmful, less costly?

As a preamble to the description and listing of the entries, we begin by providing a framework for reflecting on this newly coined phrase, "satisfying justice". There are a number of ways in which prison itself does not provide it and can work against the effectiveness of some of the accompanying measures that occasionally attempt to compensate for that. This leads us to a logical question: then why has Canada continued to use imprisonment so much? In the conclusion, we list a number of uses that the prison sentence and prison institutions serve in our society and the importance of finding strategies to more cost-effectively fulfil all of these functions. Strategies to limit the costs of incarceration, as the government has tried to do up to now, by addressing only one of these purposes, i.e., protection from violent crime, or by providing alternate ways of fulfilling only one of these functions i.e., to more cost-effectively punish low-risk, non-violent and primarily property offenders, without questioning fundamental premises, are bound to be neutralized by the other "uses" of imprisonment. Other means are needed.

As we will see in the concluding chapter, a few other countries have assembled the political will to develop these means.

It is our hope that this compendium will provide some helpful ideas, tools and inspiration to help Canada as well take some significant further steps in this much needed direction.