VANCOUVER — Canada is a much safer place than 20 years ago but policing, legal, judicial and correctional costs have gone through the roof, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute.
The crime rate fell 27% in the past decade, with the number of crimes, their severity and the pain and suffering they caused all decreasing. But justice costs rose by 35%, according to the report from the public policy think-tank.
Written by Stephen Easton, Hilary Furness and Paul Brantingham, The Cost of Crime in Canada report revealed that policing expenses, the biggest single driver — $388 per capita in 2012 — rose 44%, corrections expenses were up by 33% and court expenses jumped 21%.
The amount every Canadian pays increased over the past decade to $580 from $480.
The 116-page study says that in 1998, crime cost Canada $42.4-billion, but now costs $85-billion, almost $40-billion of which is public-sector spending.
The figures include the costs of police, courts, prisons, rehabilitation and education, expenses incurred by victims, and such tangible losses as stolen or damaged property, as well as the more ineffable costs of anger, frustration and fear.
The three authors crunched numbers from police departments, Statistics Canada, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics and other data sources.
The Simon Fraser University academics put the bulk of the blame for the cost hikes on the Supreme Court of Canada, which "has imposed a set of evolving requirements on the police and prosecution that makes it manifestly more expensive to capture and prosecute."
They point to three decisions as the culprits: Rowbotham, Askov and Stinchcombe — rulings that respectively supported the rights of an accused to a state-funded lawyer, a speedy trial and full disclosure of Crown evidence.
"Not to put too fine a point on it," the study says, "the cost per conviction has risen sharply as a result of court reinterpretation of police and prosecutorial practices even without changes by Parliament to the law."
"The most embarrassing lacunae in Canadian data," the report adds, is the lack of useful information about the court system. "We have no systemic way of assessing whether the courts are getting more or less effective in dealing with the cases that they see, let alone understanding how much as a society we are paying. For a developed nation, this is disappointing to say the least."
'The cost per conviction has risen sharply as a result of court reinterpretation of police and prosecutorial practices'
Our prisoner population has managed to stay constant.
First Nations represent about four per cent of the population but more and more of them are being imprisoned — from 13% of the offenders in custody in 1998 to 20% a decade later. In Saskatchewan, 80% of inmates are native. In Manitoba it's 70%, and in Alberta 40%.
In those three provinces, aboriginal people also are least likely to be given probation or conditional sentences.
In 15 years, the proportion of criminal cases taking more than a year to complete doubled to 16% from eight per cent, and the percentage of homicide cases that take more than a year rose to 49% from 10%.
The cost per crime reported to police increased from $6,245 in 2002 to $10,122 in 2012 — a 62% increase.
The researchers say that although crime already costs more than five per cent of the country's gross national product, that doesn't include an accounting of private security, business losses, medical costs, lost productivity or a number of other factors that would pump it up even higher.
"Unfortunately crime is a fact of life, but to understand whether we spend too little or too much on fighting crime, we need to understand the full costs," said Mr. Easton, a Fraser Institute senior fellow, economics professor and lead author of the study.
"When making spending decisions on crime prevention, prosecution and punishment, governments across Canada need to clearly understand the potential effect of those decisions, for the sake of taxpayers, crime victims and their families."
Postmedia News
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