Rose Cesario’s final words about victims of crime were, deliberately or not, an appropriate cue for Martha Kesler. She was a grey-haired woman with dark pouches under her eyes, so physically slight as to look somewhat lost in her shiny wheelchair. The mention of her name, however, elicited a broad smile from her. Two rows of even teeth shone as brightly as her Indian cotton white blouse. Her voice was clear and strong, and she spoke perhaps half as fast as her predecessor, the emphatic deliberation of her delivery sounding every bit as confident as Cesario’s rapid fire.
“As you may know, someone’s finger on the trigger of an unlicensed firearm put me in this chair. As a crime victim, I’m very grateful for that heartfelt sympathy Rose spoke of. Anyone that expects me to second her call for tougher sentences, however, will be disappointed. I’m much more inclined to the opinion of Oscar Wilde, who wrote, ‘A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime’.”
Drop the word “infinitely”, Ted thought, and the nineteenth century wit could pass for a twenty-first century criminologist.
“Believe me,” Martha Kesler went on, “I know where those punitive thoughts come from. Four years ago, I was crossing a mall parking lot when I found myself on the ground with a bullet in my spine and that dumb tunnel of light everyone talks about opening up in front of me. Well, I had an eight-year-old daughter at the time, and I can tell you I wasn’t ready to get sucked up any tunnel of light. Coming back, though, was no picnic. Pain wasn’t the worst of it. I was prey to flashbacks, and I had what they call a ‘hyperactive startle reflex’, when what I needed to deal with a preteen daughter was two good legs and nerves of steel. Violent crime leaves you feeling powerless. Would I have changed places with my attacker—who probably never was my attacker, just a hit man with a poor aim? Would I have taken from him the use of his legs—even if I couldn’t have had back the use of mine? I’m not proud to admit it, but I surely would.
“Before long, however, I knew that my appetite for power was much bigger than that, and wouldn’t be satisfied by such a small and pointless result. If I wanted to feel strong, I had to do something beneficial. That’s how I came to train as a grief counsellor. And that’s how I became involved through my church in the Restorative Justice movement. Tyler, stand up, please.”
The young man who had manoeuvred Ms. Kesler’s wheelchair onto the dais rose awkwardly from a seat in the front row. He turned slowly to let all audience members get a look at him. A look at everything, Ted noticed, except for his large hands, which were balled into fists and hidden behind his back where they were visible to the panel alone. Ted surmised what was coming next.
“Tyler,” said Martha Kesler, “has bravely given me permission to tell you that he is serving a conditional sentence for burglarizing parked cars. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a conditional sentence is one served ‘in the community’—there’s that phrase again that Ms. Cesario so dislikes. Really, though, it’s not so scary. To be eligible for such a sentence, an offender must satisfy a judge that he will not threaten anyone’s safety and that he will comply with rules and conditions imposed by the judge. It has been my pleasure and honour to give Tyler the opportunity to earn the means to compensate the people whose stereos he stole. To get tough on crime by putting him behind bars would do nothing to repair the damage he’s caused.”
Ted thanked her.
“Just one more thing, Mr. Moderator, if I may,” said Martha Kesler. “I need to make it absolutely crystal clear that Tyler had nothing to do with shooting me. That party has never been found. And this is the point: Canada is not so much soft on crime as clueless. I say find the criminals so we can help them not to be criminals.”
The clapping was louder than for the first speaker, accompanied by a few whistles from the younger spectators at the back. The crowd was warming up.
“May I go next?” the man immediately to Ted’s left asked him as soon as he was confident of being heard.
Lionel Kerr, a Maritimer if Ted remembered correctly, wore cowboy boots and a blue cowboy shirt with silver buttons, presumably out of loyalty to his present employer, the University of Calgary. He’d been a criminological institution for longer than Ted could remember, and Ted remembered when Lionel’s straight, silver hair had been golden yellow to the last strand.
“A propos of what Martha Kesler has been saying, my friends,” he began, “let’s try an informal survey right here in this hall. How many of you believe that harsher sentences will deter violent criminals from reoffending? Don’t be shy. Stick up those hands if you believe more jail time will cut down on recidivism rates.”
A minority of hands shot up.
“Come on now,” Kerr coaxed. “There must be more of you than that.”
Encouraged by his broad and welcoming grin, more of those seated closer to the stage raised their hands hesitantly, and a sprinkling of those behind followed their lead until there was a bare majority indicating they favoured tougher sentences.
“That’s more what I’d expect,” said Kerr. “Well, you’re wrong. Studies in both Canada and the U.S. show time after time that people contemplating violent crime don’t think about punishments because they don’t expect to be caught. And they’re ninety-six per cent right. According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, in the year 1996, for every one hundred offences reported to police, only four offenders were sentenced. In other words, so few criminals are actually sentenced that from a deterrent point of view it doesn’t matter what penalties the law applies. And it’s not as if we have to keep convicted murderers locked up to prevent their killing again. Whatever you may think, my friends, that’s not something most murderers do. Unlike break and enter artists, for most murderers, once seems to be enough.”
Ted heard a heavy exhalation from his right, and out of the corner of his eye saw that Rose Cesario was close to boiling point.
“Now let me ask you another question,” Lionel Kerr was saying. “Suppose, what I take to be the case, none of you lives with or knows any murderers. What risk do you think you run in this country of being killed by a stranger as you go about your business? Come on now, let’s hear some numbers. One in a hundred? One in a thousand? What happened to Martha here is dreadful. She could have been killed if that bullet had gone through her heart. Thinking about that, will you feel less safe as you cross the mall parking lot? What are the chances of being killed by a stranger in Canada? Yes, sir, top row, what do you say?”
A boy wearing a No Fear T-shirt and sprawling across three seats at the back called out, “One in a hundred thousand.”
“Half that,” said Kerr. “Since 2000, Canada’s murder rate has been hovering below two per hundred thousand, but in nearly half the cases the killer is a member of the victim’s family; in nearly a third, it’s a friend or acquaintance that’ll off you; and less than a quarter of all murder victims are killed by strangers. The plain truth is that people that worry about crime are as irrational as people that buy lottery tickets. Your odds of being a crime victim are as long as your odds of winning the jackpot.”
“Dr. Kerr,” Rose Cesario erupted, “I have before me a publication of the Correctional Service that claims, and I quote, ‘In 2000, only seventeen per cent of solved homicides were committed by strangers.’ I underline that word solved. When the killer is not known to the victim, that killer is much harder to catch, and so the statistics give a skewed idea of the frequency of stranger killings. We don’t have far to look to put a human face on this fact. Martha Kesler has just told us that her assailant has never been apprehended. If his bullet had killed her, her killing wouldn’t have been taken account of in the statistics.”
“My