Bill C-10

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein

 I feel that this very nearly sums up bill c-10, passed by the Stephen Harper led Conservative government. This is an omnibus bill, that is to say a bill that contains several smaller bills, that covers things from "violent offenses," to Internet crime, to sex offenders. In my opinion though, the new laws proposed in this bill are blanket laws that will increase the amounts of criminals going to jail, and not really doing anything about them.This seems to be, from the Conservative party's standpoint, a good thing, dangerous people being taken off the streets, apparently for good. 

This seems like a good idea in theory, but there are several problems with it:

• The first problem is that as a general rule, you will get more people who will become criminals even with tougher laws in place, and good people will make stupid mistakes. Both of those groups of people will be caught up in this system and be added to the soon to be growing overall criminal population.
  
• Second problem is that we had a system that was proven to be effective, our crime rates were at their lowest in years, the system we are adopting part of is proven to be ineffective by the government of the United States. Take Texas for example, you probably know what their system was like, and they were having too many criminals for the system to handle, so they tried doing what we used to do in Canada, with rehabilitation programs, and they were actually able to close some prisons as they were no longer needed.
• Third, is money. Lets face it, keeping people in jail is reasonably expensive, about $200per prisoner per day, not only that but it is taxpayers money going towards paying for the continued upkeep of a huge building filled with people who did bad things. This also means that you have to take funds away from other areas, potentially including healthcare, education, government funded rehabilitation programs, etc. The loss of which could cause negative repercussions, or they would have to increase taxes, which would make things difficult for many people.
• Rehabilitation costs about a tenth of the cost of imprisonment, not only that, but it does reduce amount of crime as a notable amount of time they will in fact be capable of becoming contributing members of society again.

 That is not to say that this is entirely bad, as some criminals cannot be rehabilitated and this would take some risk out of the system, but I do disagree with what the government has done. I do hope that this was actually a wise decision. Only time will tell.