CANADA'S JUDICIAL & CORRECTIONAL SYSTEMS ARE FAILING

Today's Waterloo Region Record has an excellent opinion piece by Community Editorial Board member, Janice Lee. It is titled "Canada's judicial, corrections systems failing to serve justice". She is referencing two deaths in custody namely Ashley Smith and more recently Kinew James. The John Howard Society advises that 63% of prisoners in Ontario are those who did not make bail and only the remaining 37% have been convicted and sentenced. Recently released from the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton is Mandy Hiscocks who served almost a year there. She was one of the activists involved with protesting the G20 conference in Toronto in June 2010. She believes that the state creates "...this population of people that are constantly in and out of jail, which is very convenient for people who need the jails to be full.". She describes numerous unnecessarily nasty conditions in jail which only tend to increase disrespect for the whole system.

Janice Lee states "The authorities are trying hard to keep the public eye out of prisons. More public pressure could call, at the very least, for an inquest into all the deaths of Canadian prisoners while in custody, if not major prison reform. Until then, our so-called justice system will continue to fail in serving justice.".

If we the public have learned nothing else to date from the inquest into Ashley Smith's death, it is that the state are totally incompetent at the top and totally unaccountable.