LILLEY: Ontario jail expansion plan slammed by prison abolition advocate
· Toronto Sun
An “academic expert” is warning that the Ford government is doing the wrong thing by building more jails. The problem is this “academic expert” who is often cited in the media doesn’t believe in jails and wants them abolished.
On Tuesday morning, The Canadian Press wire service published a story featuring comments from professor Justin Piché from the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.
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“Ontario planning massive jail expansion, internal government documents show,” the story’s headline read.
Included in the story, carried by multiple news outlets that all subscribe to the CP wire service, were comments from Piché warning that this was the wrong strategy.
“When I saw the numbers, my jaw hit the floor,” Piché told CP. “This is an unprecedented increase in jail capacity.”
He warned that it would be extremely expensive to go down this road and cautioned that it was the wrong direction to go in.
“Imprisonment is the most costly and ineffective way to enhance community well-being and safety,” he said.
Expert or prison abolition activist?
As a professor of criminology, Piché is widely cited in the media as an expert, someone who studies and examines how things work. In reality, Piché is an activist and part of a global movement to abolish jails altogether.
He even wrote a book about the subject called How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment .
“In the most straightforward terms, prison abolitionists reject the idea that imprisonment is an appropriate response to harm,” he wrote in the introduction of the book.
“Prisons also sustain racism and white supremacy. They are a colonial institution that sustains white settler states such as Canada and the United States, whose founding depended on genocidal institutions, policies, and practices — including prisons — to destroy Indigenous cultures and languages and pacify resistance.”
Apparently neither Piché nor his co-author Rachel Herzing are aware that prisons exist in every country on earth. Maybe they are aware that there are Canadians in prisons in Mexico, in China, in Jamaica, in Japan, in Syria, in Iran.
All of these countries also jail their own citizens and yet none of them are “white settler states.”
Views driven by ideology, not neutral analysis
Piché isn’t a dispassionate academic putting forward views based on what research show is best, or what society values and demands. He is an activist with a very specific political world view who is pushing an agenda to eliminate prison worldwide.
He is cited widely in Canadian media as an expert on prison policy and yet, he’s also a member of a group calling itself the Coalition Against Proposed Prisons. Piché comments frequently on how prisons are overcrowded, but his solution isn’t to build more prisons or expand their capacity, it is to let everyone go free.
This isn’t the man who should be commenting on prison policy in Canada unless he is identified as an advocate for abolishing prisons —
which I can tell you wouldn’t be a winning strategy for any politician.
Ontario’s growing population puts pressure on prison capacity
The Ford government has not been shy or secretive about their plans to expand prison capacity. With judges releasing repeat violent offenders on bail because of overcrowded jails or sentences being reduced for the same reason, Premier Doug Ford has an option. He could stick with the status quo or build more prisons.
“Those billions of dollars are well invested to keep our communities safe,” Ford said Tuesday when asked about the cost of the new prisons.
Piché warns that the cost will be too high, but it’s not out of concern for poor taxpayers. This man is a committed leftist, he’s not against expanding government budgets, he just doesn’t want that money spent on prisons, or police for that matter.
Ontario’s population has expanded tremendously with millions added over the last decade and yet while we have built hundreds of new schools, expanded hospitals, we haven’t done the same with prisons. The Ford government’s plan to add 6,000 new prison beds by 2050 is the right move. It might even be too slow.
Either way, it’s a definitely better than abolishing jails which is what Piché wants the government to do.