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LOOKING INTO THE BLACK MIRROR
This morning I was reading the news from a far-off, little-known country with a brutish right-wing government. One of the local rags gives a hair-raising account of developments in policing as the country faces theft, violence and urban disorder problems like those which are spreading fast in happy, civilized Canada.
The headline is: “Build prisons to fit shoplifters, minister suggests.”
The minister in question is a mere undersecretary for transport, but he came out swinging in a radio interview, warning that his government intends to require mandatory prison sentences for repeat offenders who commit shoplifting, burglary, theft or assault.
These crimes, our rabid authoritarian friend insists, inflict enormous harm if they’re allowed to spiral out of control: “If people are persistently breaking the law, then they should go to jail. And if we need to build more prison places for them, then so be it.”
Chilling words indeed. Our story then turns to the country’s minister responsible for prisons, who is busy with other dystopian law and order measures this week. On Monday, plans were leaked to have police chiefs throughout this country explicitly promise to investigate every property crime for which a reasonable lead exists “after years of overlooking lower-level offences such as criminal damage, shoplifting, car and bike theft.”
Meanwhile, the prisons boss has ordered regional cops to make much heavier use of facial-recognition software — which, in turn, turns out to be pervasively used already in large retail stores, with the approval of the country’s information commissioner. (When a “known” shoplifter is caught on camera in these places, a staff member politely approaches and asks if they need any help. This turns out to reduce not only shoplifting itself, but violence against store employees.)
You’ve probably figured out that this wretched land is none other than the United Kingdom — or, strictly speaking, since we’re mostly talking about criminal justice, England and Wales. The striving, humble local newspaper reporting on murmured ministerial thoughts is the Times of London.
England is the place we imported our entire constitution from, and we did it wholesale, but almost every sentence of the Times story makes you suddenly conscious of our frantic flight toward Scandinavian justice policy and away from our own past.
Could a politician here state flatly that “Persistent lawbreakers should be jailed” without raising howls of outrage? Probably not, but what’s truly uncanny is the assumption by an elected official — transport undersecretary Richard Holden — that criminal sentencing is within his government’s control and can be adjusted to address innovations and changes in crime.
Moreover, he takes the deterrent function of incarceration — an idea that Canadian law has substantially disavowed — for granted. Can these monsters really be our cousins?
Holden does what no Canadian can anymore, as we observed last week: he considers pervasive urban property crime as an economic problem with a “huge impact.” And he seems willing to consider a long rap sheet to be an indication of a convict’s devotion to criminal behaviour, rather than a signal of morally elevating victimhood or eligibility for reparations.
England already has a “two strikes” law for knife crimes, which is something it is hard to imagine passing muster in Canadian courts: indeed, the English judges, as if to remind us of our lingering family connection, are doing their best to ignore it. But they haven’t done what Canadian appellate courts would almost certainly do — devise a hallucinatory pretext to declare the whole law “cruel and unusual” or otherwise contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
One keeps reading the Times piece waiting for someone to swoop in and warn of disproportionate racial impacts from these policies. Even the people who recommend them might be expected to add a little woke boilerplate to their law-and-order snarling, but it doesn’t happen. And while Britain already has a reputation for tolerating high levels of technological surveillance, it doesn’t seem to discourage its leaders from doubling down and embracing the use of automated facial recognition.
Of course this is all coming from a desperate Conservative government facing electoral annihilation, but the politicians aren’t saying these things because they expect the measures and the trial balloons to be unpopular or to generate indignant liberal reaction. They expect them to appeal to the law-abiding working poor who are directly in the line of fire from low-level violence and unchecked criminal predation.
We are, I think, well overdue to have such a political dialogue — but, then again, it is not clear that a Canadian government of any stripe could actually enact any of these measures if it wanted to.
— Colby Cosh
We certainly couldn't enact such measures as long as the Mainstream Press is owned by the Liberals.
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