Wente wrote that Toronto City Councillor Michael Thompson remembers growing up as a black kid in a tough neighbourhood but says, “There’s a drug culture that’s developing in the city of Toronto. And I don’t want to support it. I have pictures in my desk of the young boys who’ve been murdered.”
Vancouver has the worst drug problem in North America and, now that Amsterdam is cleaning itself up (according to the Washington Post, July 18, 2005), probably the worst drug problem in the Western world.
You will see more panhandlers and street people in downtown Ottawa and Toronto today than you will see in New York.
Fifty-one of us from the Ottawa area were astonished this past spring during a trip to several European cities to discover that the streets of Dublin, Cork, Paris, and London were devoid of panhandlers and, aside from one man sleeping off a drunk in a Dublin doorway, we could see no evidence of the homeless problem that plagues major Canadian cities. In fact, some of the street people we see in Canada may very well be from New York or London. I mean, after all, in many of our cities, Toronto and Ottawa included, we not only provide the street people and druggies with free needles for “shoot ‘em ups,” but free crack pipe equipment, free condoms, and pretty well free rein to set up housekeeping wherever they choose, including in front of Ottawa and Toronto City Halls, which by the way are far from free!
SEVEN
The California Miracle
It began with two tragedies. In June 1992, beautiful 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds was murdered near her California home by two felons with long prison records. She and her friend Greg Calderson had just finished dessert at a popular Fresno restaurant, The Daily Planet, when two men, riding a stolen motorcycle, grabbed her purse and then shot and killed her. She would have been 19 in four months.
Several months later, October 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klass was kidnapped at her home in Petaluma, California. A countrywide search was launched that ended when her brutalized body was found several months later. Once again the murderer, in this case a man named Richard Allen Davis, was a repeat violent offender. Both cases were widely publicized, and exacerbated by an almost out-of-control crime rate in the state, California residents began to demand, just as in New York, that “somebody do something!” (Strangely, the name of Polly Klass surfaced again recently when police searched Davis’s jail cell for any correspondence he might have received from John Mark Karr after Karr claimed he had murdered six-year-old JonBenet Ramsay. No correspondence was found, but Polly’s father complained bitterly about the subsequent and unwelcome publicity.)
New York had Rudy Giuliani to clean things up. In California it was Kimber Reynold’s father, Mike Reynolds, a wedding photographer, who launched what has become known as the “three strikes you’re out law.” In fact, Mike tells me, the “three strikes” bill was actually drafted in his backyard only three months after his daughter’s violent death.
Despite tremendous opposition from California’s powerful left wing, including much of the Democratic Party’s political machinery, Proposition 184, as the “three strikes” initiative is called, was placed on the November 1993 referendum ballot and approved with a substantial majority. Proposition 184 substantially lengthened prison sentences for persons who had previously been convicted of a violent or serious crime. Specifically, a person who had been convicted of a prior violent or serious offence and who committed any new felony could receive twice the normal prison sentence for the new crime (the “second strike”).
A person who committed two or more prior violent or serious offences and then committed a third new felony would automatically receive 25 years to life in prison (the “third strike”).
Proposition 184 was introduced in the California State Legislature in March 1994 and passed into law the following November. The predictions from the “thug-hugging” lobby were many and dire.
Professors from Berkeley University and many of those in the criminal justice system claimed that the state’s prisons would be overflowing and the costs would skyrocket. It wasn’t fair, they said, it wasn’t democratic, but most of all, Californians were assured by the “experts” that it just wouldn’t work. Punishment is an archaic concept that is not a deterrent was the mantra of the day.
Well, here we are more than ten years later. What happened in California? Were the thug huggers correct in their claims that punishment is no deterrent? You be the judge.
The following are figures obtained directly from the California Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Information Service. They compare crime statistics over a tenyear period from 1992, some two years prior to the passage of the “three strikes” law until 2002, some eight years after the law was passed. The easiest to understand and the ones that are the most meaningful are those that compare the rate of various crime categories per 100,000 population:
•Total crimes dropped from 3,491.5 in 1992 to 1,890.1 in 2002—a reduction of 45.9 percent;
•Total violent crime, down from 1,103.9 in 1992 to
•589.2 in 2002, a reduction of 46.6 percent;
•Murder, dropped from 12.5 in 1992 to 8.8 in 2002, a reduction of 45.6 percent;
•Rape, down from 40.7 in 1992 to 28.8 in 2002, a reduction of 29.2 percent;
•Robbery, down from 418.1 in 1992 to 183.6 in 2002, a reduction of 56.1 percent;
•Assault, down from 1,300.9 in 1992 to 632.6 in 2002, a reduction of 45.5 percent;
•Burglary, down from 1,365.2 in 1992 to 672.6 in 2002, a reduction of 50.7 percent;
•Auto theft, down from 1,022.4 in 1992 to 628.3 in 2002, a reduction of 38.5 percent.
An examination of all the statistics reveals that never in history has California seen as dramatic a reduction in every crime category during a comparable time span. Amazingly enough, in 2002, California’s overall crime rates had fallen back to the levels seen in 1967. While concrete figures since 2003 are not available, preliminary studies indicate the crime rate continues to follow the same trend—downward.
As for predictions that California would have to build 20 new prisons to accommodate a doubling of the prison population as a result of the “three strikes” law, here are the facts:
California’s prison population ten years after the “three strikes” law had increased 25.5 percent, roughly mirroring the increase in the state’s population. Furthermore, the prison population stabilized at about 160,000 six years after passage of the law and remained that way for the next four years. Ten years prior to the “three strikes” law, California had to build 19 new prisons. During the ten years after passage of the law, no new prisons had to be built.
According to the California Department of Justice, in the ten years following the “three strikes” law, estimated financial savings to taxpayers of the state was $28.5 billion. Only two states, New York and Massachusetts, have better records of reducing crime over the same period. In both cases it was as a result of more police, more enforcement, tougher laws, and longer sentencing.
Despite the obvious overwhelming success of “three strikes” in California, some residents continue to attack the law, claiming, among other things, it is racist. Proposition 66, an initiative to soften “three strikes,” was presented in a referendum in 2004 but voted down. The bleeding hearts, the “experts,” and the thug huggers, it seems, just cannot accept the fact that their vision of the world doesn’t jibe with reality. The ordinary citizens of California, however, just as in New York, are not blinded by ideology and obviously know a good thing when they see it.
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