[PluggyRug]

The perp along with the judge should spend 2 years in the rehab facility known as the Tower of London.

[desertdude]

Public_Domain Public_Domain:

Then tell me when rape or child molestation are permissible?

They aren't.

They hurt others.

Like I said... No minimum time for those crimes. But hurting yourself? Minimum one full year in the slammer with your other drug-addled buddies, while the perverts get out early.[/quote]

Always helps to read the article first.

$1:

n September of last year, the provincial court judge convicted Vancouver resident Joseph Ryan Lloyd on three counts of trafficking two grams of crack cocaine, six grams of methamphetamine and a half gram of heroin.

It wasn't Lloyd's first trafficking offence and under Prime Minister Stephen Harper's new tough-on-crime legislation, the resident of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, should now serve at least a year in jail.

Its far from a dumb kid who got caught with a joint, wasn't just "hurting himself" he was trafficking drugs i.e hurting others and making money off it and not the first time caught doing it either.

Like I said a year behind bars is too easy for this career criminal and even if he does get a year, he'll be back to peddleling drugs in no time.

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[desertdude]

andyt andyt:

Exactly, a lot of crime is done by junkies trying to come up with the $200 a day or more it takes to support their habit. Give this guy drugs, he won't be doing those crimes. Legal drugs will change that demographic

Some how giving out free ( or cheap ) hard drugs by the govt to support junkies just doesn't sit right with me, in an outrageous analogy as is happening in this thread, its like giving out free kiddie porn to child molesters so that they do don't go out and finger some kids. Sort of a two wrongs don't make a right situation for me.

[desertdude]

Public_Domain Public_Domain:

desertdude desertdude:

Always helps to read the article first.

I said earlier that this guy deserves what he gets.

But I also said that just because that's true does not make this a real argument in favour of absolute sentences for drug crime.

Its an absolute sentence only if you have served time before, i.e you've already used up your chance to get clean and went and did it all over again. Nothing wrong with it. IMO 3rd time should be at least 5 yrs mandatory.

[BeaverFever]

$1:

The reason that crime rates are falling has nothing to do with sentencing and everything to do with things like this. http://www.troymedia.com/2013/02/24/are ... y-falling/

Ah, the old 'unreported crime'ploy again, this time by a Conservative party hack who used to be Stockwell Day's assistant.

How about this rebuttal to that article, and the author in general:

$1:

Scott Newark Misleads Canadians about Crime

Posted on May 17, 2013 by John Anderson

Who is Scott Newark? “Scott Newark is a former Alberta Crown prosecutor and executive officer of the Canadian Police Association. He is the author of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s recent study Why Canadian Crime Statistics Don’t Add Up: Not The Whole Truth.” (from the National Post).

Scott Newark gives voice to a selective reading and presentation of crime data which includes, among other things, that crime rates are far more onerous than what Statistics Canada measures in their victimization studies.

Aside from a selective use of information, Newark uses alarmist language to frighten and mislead readers in his public writings. Here’s a sample of his manipulation of crime information:

Newark: “Canadians can be excused for being confused about the amount of crime in their society. Last year produced horrific scenes of people being murdered and their bodies dismembered, several executions in public places in Toronto, and the media reporting that shootings and stabbings in different cities are on the increase.”
■Fact: “In 2009, the vast majority (93%) of Canadians aged 15 years and older living in the provinces said they felt satisfied with their personal safety from crime.”
■Fact: “Most Canadians said they felt safe at night. About 83% of Canadians said that they were not at all worried when home alone in the evening. Of those who walked alone in their neighbourhood at night, 90% said they felt safe doing so.”
■Fact: “Almost two-thirds (62%) of Canadians believed that the amount of crime in their neighbourhood was the same compared to 5 years earlier, while one-quarter (26%) felt that it had increased.”

Source: Statistics Canada Study: Perceptions of personal safety and crime, 2010.
■Fact: In 2011, Canada experienced its lowest rate of firearm homicides in 50 years.

Source: Statistics Canada: Homicide in Canada, 2011

Newark: “Statistics Canada also conducts a survey of whether Canadians were victims of crime. These results for 2009 show a huge discrepancy with the amount of crime reported to police. In 2009, 7.4 million Canadians reported they were victims of at least one of the eight specific crimes covered by the survey, compared with the police count of only two million total crimes.”
■Fact: ““Victims of violent and household crime had reasons for not reporting the incident to the police. The most common reasons were believing that the incident was not important enough (68%), followed by thinking there was nothing the police could do to help (59%). Other reasons included having dealt with the situation in another way (42%) and feeling that the incident was a personal matter (36%).”

Source: Criminal victimization in Canada, 2009

Newark: “The public is increasingly reluctant to report crime to the police, partly out of fear of retribution from criminals and partly out of frustration with falling rates of crime being solved by the police.”
■Fact: Newark has produced no evidence to support this claim.

Newark: “[O]ver the past four decades, the solve rate for murders has fallen from 95 per cent to 75 per cent, and is less than 50 per cent for gang-related killings. This growing reluctance to report crime to police leads to erroneous headlines that “crime is down.” The real headline should read: “Canadians’ reporting of crime hits an all-time low.”
■Fact: “Police are solving more crimes than in the past. The weighted clearance rate rose for the seventh consecutive year to 39.4% in 2010, up from 33.5% in 2003. This measure represents the proportion of reported crimes solved by police, factoring in the seriousness of individual offences.”

Source: Statistics Canada, “Police service clearance rates, 2010”.

For a more journalistic source:

$1:

Crunch the numbers: Crime rates are going down

Everyone wants to reduce crime and use resources effectively. But the Conservative government's "tough on crime" agenda would have you believe that crime is increasing and can only be reduced by using tougher penalties. This assertion is wrong, as is a study by an Ottawa-based think tank that reviewed the 2009 Statistics Canada report on crime.Everyone wants to reduce crime and use resources effectively. But the Conservative government's "tough on crime" agenda would have you believe that crime is increasing and can only be reduced by using tougher penalties. This assertion is wrong, as is a study by an Ottawa-based think tank that reviewed the 2009 Statistics Canada report on crime.

The study, by former Alberta Crown attorney Scott Newark for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, suggests that violent crime is increasing, contrary to the Statscan report and all reasoned examinations of existing data. Mr. Newark's study is filled with problems: It compares figures that can't be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing

Mr. Newark criticizes Statscan for not including crime rates for all criminal offences. This information is available to anyone in the world on Statscan's website. The figures clearly show (see Column 1 of our table) a substantial decrease over time. It's no wonder Mr. Newark only chose to criticize, rather than present the numbers.

The violent crime rates presented in Statscan's report are reproduced in Column 2 of our table. It shows that, since 2000, the violent crime rate went down each and every year. Mr. Newark's study offers only three figures (of numbers of crimes, not rates, thus not correcting for population increases) for 1999 (291,000), 2004 (302,000) and 2009 (443,000). The 2009 figure corresponds to current Statscan data; the 1999 and 2004 figures use a narrower definition of violence.




Mr. Newark's 2009 figure includes an additional set of offences - criminal harassment and uttering threats. These two newcomers to the category of violence constituted 22 per cent of all violent offences. Mr. Newark makes it clear that he's aware of the change in definition, but ignores it in his table and doesn't refer to the data that we have reproduced in Column 2 because it doesn't support his erroneous conclusion.

It's easy to make crime look as though it's going up if one provides numbers that are wrong or misleading. Mr. Newark offers what he calls "youth violent crime" for three years and shows "rates per 100,000" for these years: 956 (for 2001), 1,498 (for 2004) and 1,887 (for 2008). He then concludes there's been a 100-per-cent increase in youth violent crime.

The data from the Statscan report he's critiquing are in Column 3. Mr. Newark's starting point (2001) is clearly wrong; he says in his table that the number is 956 (rather than 1,957, the true number), thereby supporting his erroneous conclusion that there's been a large increase in youth violent crime. Had he reproduced the correct figures for these years in his table, one couldn't conclude that the youth violent crime rate had gone up.

There are other problems. In an attempt to explain away the fact that homicide rates have unambiguously decreased since the mid-1970s, Mr. Newark suggests that "homicides are arguably decreasing because of the increased quality of medical care," presumably turning murders into attempted murders. Although he must know, as a former Crown attorney, that attempted murder doesn't require life-threatening injuries or, indeed, any injury, he still suggests that medical care is a likely cause for the failure of homicide rates to increase. For this to be true, there should be an increase in attempted murder rates. Column 4 shows no overall increase in homicide rates in recent years, and Column 5 shows no consistent trend in attempted murder rates.

It appears that for people such as Mr. Newark, Statistics Canada is never wrong as long as it reports that crime rates are increasing. If it says crime is decreasing, then it's never right. The fact of the matter is that crime rates have nothing to do with tougher laws or harsher sentencing. The fact is that crime rates go up and down. In recent years, they've gone down.

Edward Greenspan is a Toronto criminal lawyer. Anthony Doob is a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-de ... cle567470/

$1:

Study slamming crime data is off-base, Statistics Canada says


OTTAWA — Statistics Canada rebuffed criticisms over crime data methodology levelled in a study released by an Ottawa think tank on Wednesday.


The study, published by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute For Public Policy, concluded that Statistics Canada's annual crime data report, Juristat, suffers from serious flaws because it doesn't take into account unreported crimes and uses flawed methodology for tracking violent crimes.


Scott Newark, a former Crown prosecutor and one-time adviser to Treasury Board President Stockwell Day who wrote the study, concluded that these flaws suggest Juristat needs a "sweeping set of reforms so the report can better fulfil its core, and commendable, purpose" of "giving Canadian policy-makers, opinion-makers, and citizens better information" on crime.


Chief among Newark's concerns is that StatsCan uses only police-reported crimes to determine how many crimes are reported each year, despite another annual StatsCan study released that examines the rate of crimes, typically property-related, that go unreported to police each year.


That study, the General Social Survey, found that "about three times as many crimes are committed as are reported to the police and that the rate of reporting is dropping," said Newark.


"That fewer crimes are being reported to the police does not lead to the conclusion that the volume of crime itself has dropped," said Newark, pointing to the 2009 Juristat's conclusion that crime rates continued their decade-long decline.


Newark said the Crime Severity Index (CSI), which StatsCan introduced in its 2008 report to measure the seriousness of offences by examining sentences handed out by judges, is "an inherently subjective standard, cited without supporting data and unreliable as a metric of serious crime."


If judges hand out shorter sentences, then the severity of the offences committed ought to be lower, the reasoning behind the index goes. And if sentences are getting shorter, than the severity of crime in Canada must be declining.


But Newark said that judges handing out shorter sentences is not necessarily a result of less violent crimes, but instead could result from institutional demands or the whims of judges themselves.


Newark said that switching to the CSI as a main measure of crime "reduced the amount of data readily available to readers to check the conclusions the report offered."


However, the director of StatsCan's Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Julie McAuley, said Newark's concerns over omitted data in Juristat are unfounded, as the yearly publication shouldn't be seen as the final word on crime statistics in Canada, but rather as complementary to the many studies, such as the General Social Survey, the agency releases.


"Taking one Juristat in isolation, while we try to cover as much as possible, the breadth of crime-related issues in that article, just given the length of the publication, it's not always possible for us to cover every single detail," said McAuley.


"We constantly do seek to update a number of our data over time," she said, suggesting that StatsCan has been using "better quality data" in recent years due to better reporting from police services. For example, criminal harassment and uttering threats were only included as violent crimes starting in 2008, making comparisons in the violent crime rate to years before then difficult.


"If you were to go back to before we had more complete data, you might be seeing an increase in violent crime," she said. "But we do have comparative data for the last 10 years that is showing that violent crime is going down. The data that we have now is better quality data because it is more complete and it has more complete coverage from the police services across Canada."


One leading criminologist, University of Ottawa professor Ron Melchers, took issue with Newark's characterization of the Juristat generally and the CSI in particular.


"(Newark) talks about how the Juristat doesn't have enough detailed information," said Melchers, who is also on StatCan's academic advisory committee. "Well, Juristats don't do that. They're written primarily for journalists. We made decisions to make the Juristats much lighter, much more accessible to a general audience, to make them less detailed."


Melchers, who also sat on the oversight committee that led to the CSI's introduction, said pointedly that Newark "doesn't know what the Crime Severity Index is.


"It's not intended to be quantitative or numerical. He criticizes it for being something it's not intended to be, which is kind of bizarre," said Melchers.


The index compensates for the high volume of minor crimes that comprise the bulk of offences committed seen in the crime rate, said Melchers. "You don't want these minor offences, because of the shear size of their number, to drive the crime rate."


McAuley noted that the CSI was developed and reviewed by the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs, provincial and federal justice departments, and the academic community.


Unreported crime has become a political football in recent weeks, as the Conservatives work to shore up support for their tough-on-crime legislative agenda. The Tories' plan to expand prisons alone is estimated by the government to cost $2 billion, while Parliament's budget officer, Kevin Page, has put the tab much higher — at $5 billion, plus another $5 billion at least for costs borne by the provinces.


Day has argued that, while rates of reported crime may be falling, he is deeply concerned about a sharp rise in unreported offences.

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

http://www.canada.com/news/Study+slammi ... story.html

[Public_Domain]

[BeaverFever]

And there are also the not-so-innocent people who have the privelage of not belonging to the class of citizens who get stopped and frisked for such petty activities like riding a bike on the sidewalk.

During my younger days, I was certainly out and about on occasion with petty amounts of drugs in my pocekts, but I'm not from the socio-economic demographic that police would even notice, let alone look for an excuse to conduct a personal search.

Meanwhile, there are others from bottom of the social order whose criminal records are leghtier than they need to be, simply because they're always getting abitrarily seached and then nailed for petty offences that we all commit but get away with.

Send somebody to hard time for an overdue library book often enough, and the end product is not going to be a reformed, upright citizen with a newfound respect for society's rules, but more likely a hardened criminal with stong anti-social tendancies who graduates to more serious offences...not to suggest that is what happened to the perp in the OP, just saying that's what all these "hang'em high, tough justice" regimes really accomplish.

[desertdude]

Im guessing with his extensive and prolonged criminal record, the officers were pretty aware who he was and most probably the reason he got stopped in the 1st first place.

[BeaverFever]

As the OP suggests, this was Vancouver's Lower East side, probably half the residents have "extensive and prolonged criminal records", particularly for petty crimes and possession. Even if the cops didn't know him, they wouldn've known the odds are good that they'd find something given the neighbourhood.

[Newsbot]

Title: 1-year minimum drug sentence 'cruel and unusual': judge despite 21 previous convictions
Category: Political
Posted By: SpecimenYarp
Date: 2014-01-27 07:20:57
Canadian

[uwish]

not sure, you could argue he needed rehab or some other social BS I would have bought...on the first 3 or 4 convictions. 21! WTF

[saturn_656]

current-events-f59/1-year-minimum-drug-sentence-cruel-and-unusual-judge-desp-t107444.html

We're already talking 'bout it.

[desertdude]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

As the OP suggests, this was Vancouver's Lower East side, probably half the residents have "extensive and prolonged criminal records", particularly for petty crimes and possession. Even if the cops didn't know him, they wouldn've known the odds are good that they'd find something given the neighbourhood.

And they did, so really can't fault them for doing their job. Now hopefully the judge will do his now and hand him 3 to 5 at the very least and not try to make a martyr of this career criminal.

[Public_Domain]