A Love Letter ... of sorts ... to Canada

FAMM board member Eric Sterling pleads with Canadians to reject mandatory minimums for as little as 6 marijuana plants in this column in the Ottawa Citizen. The article nicely summarizes some of the best arguments against mandatory minimum sentences, using the United States as an example of what not to do:

As Canadian senators meet this week to vote on comprehensive anti-crime Bill C-10, they need to reflect upon the U.S. experience and reject the bill's entrenchment of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences in Canada. ...

In the U.S., our Congressional Budget Office initially estimated mandatory minimums would increase costs of federal prisons by $55.2 million over the first five years. In fact, over the first five years the added costs totalled $3.216 billion, 58 times our estimates. ...

The U.S. mandatory minimum sentences were tied to metric system quantities unfamiliar to most Americans. Legislators adopted tiny quantities such as five, 10 or 50 grams to trigger long prison terms, naively believing those quantities would lead to organized crime kingpins. Similarly in Canada, the selection of six or 200 marijuana plants in Bill C-10 to "identify" important marijuana criminals are numbers that are ridiculously low. These are quantities that will send the gardeners to prison for the mandatory terms the government intends for organized crime chieftains. These numbers of plants suggest that most federal politicians have no understanding of the structure of the criminal industry they are trying to curb.

What could prompt a policy that costs so much and targets all the wrong people? In a word: politics. But in Sterling's words, "taxpayers can't afford the luxury of expensive and symbolic anti-crime measures." What we do need -- on both sides of the border -- are sentencing policies that are fair, cost-effective, and put sentencing power in the right hands:  those of judges.