Mandatory Drug Sentences To Increase Parole Board Workload
A federal bill that would impose mandatory jail time for serious drug
crimes would increase the workload of the parole system, and the government intends to inject more than $23.3 million over five years to ease the burden, according to the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada. Reported by Canwest News Services.
Commissioner Don Head said at a Senate committee hearing Thursday that if the bill is passed, CSC will receive an additional $23.3 million over the next five years to support an expected increase in cases for the National Parole Board.
The parole board supervises both federal offenders who are sentenced to two years or more, and provincial offenders in some provinces.
Under the proposed legislation, mandatory sentences would be handed out to everyone convicted of a serious drug offence, such as trafficking, production, and possession for the purpose of trafficking narcotics. A person who grows five to 200 marijuana plants with intent to sell would get a minimum six-month sentence. An addict selling heroin to fellow addicts near a park could go away for two years.
Head said that while there’s no evidence that federal prison populations will increase with mandatory sentences, provincial institutions likely will be affected by the proposed changes outlined in the Conservative government’s Bill C-15, which is now being debated in the Senate.
“There’s going to be some impact in terms of (provincial) sentence populations and (the provinces) will have to re-visit their approach to providing programs to provincial offenders,” Head said after his testimony. “At this point, the figures that we have don’t allow us to draw definitive conclusions in terms of the impact on the federal institutional population, and we’ll continue to assess that as time goes on.”
Head said CSC continues to invest in prison substance abuse programs and treatment.
Critics of Canada’s proposed mandatory drug sentences compare them to similar failed U.S. policies and say they lead to prison overcrowding and end up punishing street-level dealers, most of whom are drug addicts who need treatment, not jail time, they say.
Furthermore, the bill would imprison people who do not pose an immediate threat to the public, said Neil Boyd, criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in suburban Vancouver.
“Bill C-15 will have the unfortunate consequences of annually jailing thousands of Canadians who do not threaten the social fabric any more than those who produce, in a regulated framework, drugs such as tobacco and alcohol,” Boyd said at Thursday’s hearing.
He asked for an amendment to the bill so that cannabis growers are not treated along the same lines as heroin and cocaine traffickers.
Boyd also said the bill, when applied to the recorded number of British Columbia’s marijuana cultivators, would cost a total of almost $30 million annually for the additional imprisonments.
According to CSC, 80 per cent of offenders have grappled with substance abuse, and for approximately 50 per cent of them, there was a direct link between their crimes and substance abuse.
Head said CSC has an anti-drug strategy to combat illicit substances in prisons, with $122 million in funding announced in August 2008 for the next five years. He acknowledged the difficulty in ensuring that institutions remain drug-free.
The Senate will continue to hear testimony and is expected to go through the bill’s legislation clause-by-clause on Dec. 3.
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