truth in sentencing

Christie Blatchford is doing an amazing job of describing the social problems in the four-cornered Indian town of Hobbema, Alberta—such an amazing job, indeed, that one is almost lulled into forgetting she is there because of a crime. It was not alcohol, poor governance, or residential schools that shot a five-year-old child in the head while he was sleeping last week. Some specific person, still at large, had to pull the trigger.

The debate over the net costs of the government’s Truth in Sentencing bill is of the kind that makes me want to throw up my hands and whine “Aw, I don’t knowwwww…”. On the one hand, the Parliamentary Budget Office has presented an estimate of the costs that makes the bill seem demented. Kevin Page’s numbers don’t factor in the benefits of any potential deterrence effect; they admittedly rely, at many points, on wild assumptions; and they were assembled with the help of a lot of the sort of “independent” expert who sees prisons as inherently barbarous and would happily blow them all up if someone presented them with a big red button that would do it instantly. But as Page himself has pointed out, this is a fight between questionable evidence and no evidence. The government hasn’t really shown any good-faith sign of a serious effort to cost out the elimination of two-for-one credit for time in remand.