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Effective Crime Prevention in the 1990s

Paper spoken to by David Kilgour, M.P. Edmonton Southeast
at the CAVEAT SafetyNet Conference
Sheraton Hotel, Hamilton
19 September 1994

Canadians have been calling for years for changes that would include an effective crime prevention strategy. According to a recent poll (June, 1994), two-thirds of respondents believe there has been an overall rise in crime in their community in the last five years. Fully one in four Canadians reported they were the victim of a crime during the past two years. While most Canadians cited unemployment and other social factors as the main reason for crime, 82% said they believe our courts are too lenient. Fully 86 per cent favored manual labor as punishment for young offenders.

Violent crime

Polls suggest that the fear of crime is becoming a more significant factor in the quality of life of Canadians, whether or not it is fully justified by the numbers of reported criminal offenses in a given period. Newspaper articles and television reports on sensational crimes create an impression of omnipresent criminals. The growing size of the communities with which we identify gives us the impression that we are more vulnerable to these events.

A study released by criminologist Irwin Waller in 1992 concluded that Canada's violent crime rate is second only to that of the United States among industrialized countries. Some experts blame crime in our society on the glorification of violence in popular culture. A report published by the American Psychological Association says the average child in the U.S. has seen 8,000 deaths and 100,000 other acts of violence on television by the time they leave elementary school. The programs were found to devalue and stereotype social groups, especially Afro-Americans and women, by either excluding them from shows or giving them negative roles. The report, based on a five-year study by nine psychologists, showed that the violence on television influences viewers, particularly children and teenagers, to use violence to resolve conflicts and makes them more accepting of sexual violence and rape.

After forty years of extensive research, the prestigious British medical journal "The Lancet" concluded in its January 15, 1994 issue that "it is clear that television violence can lead to harmful aggressive behaviour." According to the journal’s editors and other leading researchers, the scientific debate over television violence is now over and the link with real violence is established fact.

A consolidated effort by parents, educators and policy makers should aim at stemming the avalanche of violent images broadcast into our homes as well as reducing the time our children watch TV.

Any effort by the media to help eliminate violence is truly commendable; like the "Speak Out Against Violence" campaign, launched last April by private broadcasters in partnership with six federal departments. Over 390 private radio and television stations across the country pledge air time to share and promote activities to help eliminate violence in their communities.

Victims

Under our present legal system, crimes are committed "against the state" when they are in fact mostly done against specific victims. All too often victims are treated as nothing more than another piece of evidence in the state's case against an accused. The interests of the victim must be more fully recognized and protected. Criminal conduct is primarily a violation of the rights and security of the person(s) against whom crimes are committed. Many victims require compassionate treatment and information, explaining each stage of the legal proceedings as well as access to necessary trauma programs, services and compensation.

If the perpetrator of a violent criminal act is apprehended, convicted and sentenced to a term of years in prison, the victim of the crime should feel relatively safe. Often, however, this is not true because violent criminals, sex offenders, and drug pushers can still apply for parole after serving a third of their sentence.

Offenders with a history of parole violations and persons with records of violence should be denied any form of early release. Conditional early releases have often proven a disaster. The protection and safety of Canadians should take priority over the wishes of the convicted offender.

Criminologists have debated the issue of crime for centuries. It is now widely recognized that traditional criminal justice responses are weak deterrents to acts that threaten public safety and security. The "police, courts, and corrections" approach to crime is invoked only after an offense has been committed. Critics maintain, however, that identifying and punishing criminals are ineffective ways to reduce the risk of future crime and promote community safety.

The United States affords a glaring example of the limited impact that criminal justice responses have on crime. In 1991, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee described the U.S. as "the most violent and self-destructive nation on earth." Every hour, approximately 200 Americans become victims of violence, despite the fact that United States' annual expenditures on police, courts and corrections exceed $70 billion and that the United States imprisons its population at a higher rate than any other country for which data on incarceration are available. Thankfully, the Canadian crime situation is not as critical as that of our neighbor but much evidence from the U.S. indicates that repressive measures alone often fail to deter crime.

As Jane Jacobs puts it in her book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, "The first thing to understand is that the public peace ... is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves . ... No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down."

Crime prevention

At the National Symposium on Community Safety and Crime Prevention in March 1993, the then Minister of Justice said that our traditional responses to crime were costing Canadians upwards of $14 billion a year. This includes $8 billion spent on policing, courts and corrections, as well as at least $6 billion more on private security, insurance and other responses and reactions to crime.

Intelligent strategies for effective crime prevention have gained international significance and support. According to one crime prevention promoter (Irwin Waller), "Effective crime prevention has been called for by the United Nations, The Council of Europe, by the European and North American Conference of Mayors, and by the Cordoba Declaration for Latin America. It is time to move from rhetoric to action." The objectives of crime prevention include: to prevent people from becoming crime victims; to curb fear; to make streets safe; and to improve police-community relations. Community policing, reducing opportunities for crime, and altering the conditions that breed crime are program approaches to realizing these objectives.

Community policing in the 1990s.

Research and practical experience have demonstrated clearly that joint participation of police, the community and policy makers is far more conducive to crime prevention and control than the individual efforts of any one group.

There is a growing consensus among police professionals, community representatives, academics and others, that "community policing" is the most appropriate response to the problems of the next decade.

In some communities, there has already been a shift away from traditional law enforcement to a more preventive approach involving public input to the policing process. One outcome of public participation is that police are more accessible to the citizens they serve and more informed about the crimes that are of concern to the local population. Ideally, the community-based policing model fosters partnership between police, other community agencies and citizens.

A recommendation in the draft resolution made to the United Nations Economic and Social Council by the Committee on Crime Prevention and Social Control was for member states to take steps to ensure "...that one of the essential tasks of the police is to prevent crime and that, in order to carry out this task, it must develop prevention initiatives that involve citizens and community organizations."

Opportunity-reduction: watch-type programs

Reducing opportunities for crime requires action by individuals and communities often in cooperation with local police forces to protect themselves from becoming victims of public violence and property crime. In Canada, community-based crime prevention programs were introduced with the establishment of the highly successful Block Parents program in 1972 and the development of Neighborhood Watch by 1980. It is estimated that a third of residences in Canada have now become involved in Neighborhood Watch programs. The very pervasivness of these programs testifies to their success. Neighborhood Watch can serve as the foundation for programs to reduce burglary and robbery, strengthen neighborhoods in transition, prevent arson, reduce fear of crime and make communities more stable. Neighborhood Watch successes are difficult to quantify, but there is no doubt that citizens and local law enforcement strongly support and want to continue these programs. In the final analysis, that may be the most important indication of its effectiveness.

These prevention measures attempt to modify the behaviour of victims or alter physical environments to prevent crime and reduce fear. The focus is on criminal acts, not on offenders. In addition, the YMCA, church groups, schools, park boards, volunteer groups and local governments are all strongly committed to the idea that strengthening community institutions is a sound way to prevent crime. They constantly look for additional ways to alter social conditions that are commonly associated with criminal activity.

They are defensive strategies aimed at reducing public violence and property crimes that are usually done by strangers. It is unlikely, however, that such measures have an inhibiting effect on violence such as wife battering and child abuse that occurs in homes.

Crime prevention through social development

A social development approach involves positive interventions in the lives of the disadvantaged in order to seek a reduction in anti-social tendencies. It assumes measures that do not tend to tackle criminal acts directly; rather, a long-range view is taken, with the elimination of society’s underclass being of paramount importance.

Chronic offenders and their families display a myriad of problems: poverty; poor school performance; low self-esteem; unemployment; drug abuse; violence in the family; inadequate housing. These conditions marginalize people from the community mainstream and weaken their loyalty to its norms of conduct.

Improvements to the quality of lives through effective policies and programs are regarded as essential to compliance with societal rules and deterring a criminal career. The family situation has been found to be a significant factor. Delinquent groups as a whole tend to come from homes that were physically and emotionally less adequate than those of the non-delinquent group. It is also documented that the environment in which delinquents were raised were less likely to produce "healthy, happy and law-abiding children" than those in which the non-delinquent children were raised.

American studies have found that the greatest incidence of delinquency could be found in the inner zones of a city - areas in transition from residential to business and industrial use. A study in Chicago covering eight years showed that in the areas that had been weakened socially by the encroachment of business and industry, and where physical destruction of buildings had taken place, the highest incidence of crime and delinquency occurred. An American sociologist's study of over 1,300 gangs in Chicago found that delinquent gangs existed wherever there were overcrowding, poverty, and slum conditions.

If we expect children to become contributing members of society, we must provide them with the nurturing, love and assistance they need. By supporting children early in their lives, we may be able to identify and deal with certain problems before they become more serious and expensive. Examples of such support include pre-natal care, nutrition, parenting, literacy, job training, and alcohol and drug programs. According to the advocates of crime prevention through social development, such initiatives unblock opportunities, foster a sense of self worth and create safer communities overall.

Canadian youth

In some provinces, the youth unemployment rate is almost 20 per cent. Young people roam our streets aimlessly, often destructively, with no prospects. More than one million Canadian children and youths live in poverty. Some of our cities seem to be falling apart literally at the seams. A walk through any large city will certainly illustrate the urban decay and human misery - the breeding grounds of criminal activity. A large number of young Canadians today as elsewhere in the world are unfortunately failing to learn integrity, personal responsibility, and respect for others’ rights and property.

According to Statistics Canada, the number of youths under the age of 18 who were charged with violent crime nationwide more than doubled from 1986 to 1991, reaching nearly 19,000. Of these, in 1991, 20% involved female youth. This represents a marked increase over a decade previously.

By 1990, five years after the Young Offender Act came into effect, violent crimes by young offenders had increased 30%. The recent rash of brutal and fatal shootings and stabbings by teenagers has pushed public anger to its limit. Equally shocking to many Canadians is the reality that a teenage killer can be released from jail in as little as 12 months; that at least was the sentence served by a 16-year-old Toronto adolescent for a 1992 second-degree murder conviction.

In September 1993, The Globe and Mail reported that "Several violent incidents at Metro Toronto schools since classes began have increased fears that school grounds are becoming battlegrounds and that more and more students are carrying knives, hand guns and other concealed weapons along with their textbooks." In Ontario, one-fifth of teachers said that they felt physically threatened while on the job. In British Columbia, the number was one-tenth. An independent report released by the Solicitor General in August 1994, confirmed that knives are the common weapons in schools and that more girls and younger people are involved in acts of violence than ever before.

The criminal habits being adopted by these young people may stay with them all of their lives at horrendous cost to themselves and society. The rising trend towards criminal involvement by young people must be addressed to prevent both future crime and the unacceptable waste of human potential.

Let me conclude with some strong words from the prize-winning author Carsten Stroud’s recent book, Contempt of Court:

"...the corrections people are out of control; social workers are all over the justice system like a plague of missionaries; the Young Offenders Act is still creating gang violence and feeding new talent into the criminal mainstream. Lawyers are playing asinine games with the Charter.

"...as for the rest of us, we have been sheep. We have given up our streets, we’re nervous in the parks and we’re making cocoons of our houses.

"That’s not good enough for me, it’s not good enough for my children and it shouldn’t be good enough for you....you won’t like (this book), but if I get it right, you may get mad enough to DO something about it. At least, I hope so. Because if you don’t, you’d better get used to staying home Friday nights."

The responsibility for our safety does not lie solely with the police, the judges, the lawmakers - nor should it rest most heavily on their shoulders. Rather, it is a mutual responsibility that we all must bear equally, because, as Edmund Burke put it: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

 

 
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