Originally Published on Saltwire Network, July 20, 2020 by Stephen Schneider

HALIFAX, N.S. — In recent weeks, calls to “defund” police agencies have grown throughout the U.S. and Canada as disturbing images of police brutality against African-Americans and Indigenous people continue to receive high-profile attention.

The term defund is an ambiguously provocative moniker. Even if it is taken literally, there is little chance that any resulting policies will lead to the abandonment of big-city police agencies or the discarding of traditional law enforcement approaches to crime.

Indeed, most of the immediate reforms contemplated in such cities as New York, Los Angeles and Toronto in recent weeks entail only a modicum of budget cuts to their police agencies.

To be sure, some advocate for the abolition of police forces, in part because of the historical and systemic racism that persists in policing and law enforcement cultures, policies, and programs.

Calls to defund branches of the criminal justice system (CJS) are not limited to police; a prison abolition movement has grown in North America and Europe as critics demand a wholesale move away from state-imposed institutionalization and punishment and toward community-based corrections, rehabilitation, and social reintegration. Solitary confinement has become a lightning rod for prison abolitionists who cite research and high-profile cases exposing how its use constitutes a human rights violation.

Calls to defund and abolish the police and the broader carceral structure of criminal “justice” are the result of an increased understanding of the inherent limitations, misuses, and injustices of the CJS that put the sanctity of the entire system beyond even the most meaningful reforms. The traditional cops, courts, and corrections approach is insufficient to unilaterally control, prevent, or deter acts that threaten public safety; the CJS is unable to cope with the actual quantity of crime, fails to identify most criminal offenders and bring them to justice, fails to rehabilitate offenders, and fails to address the underlying factors that contribute to crime and criminality.

There is scant theoretical justification for the traditional CJS approach to controlling crime. Deterrence theory — which assumes that crime results from a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of criminal activity and therefore potential offenders can be swayed from such behaviour through the threat of punishment — rests on the false premise that altering criminal penalties will alter behaviour. In fact, research and statistics generally conclude that increasing the severity of penalties has only a negligible effect on crime and recidivism, especially among serious and chronic offenders (although this body of knowledge did little to influence the Harper Government’s tough-on-crime agenda).

Critics of the CJS also point to its enormous costs, the high rate of incarceration generally and of nonviolent offenders specifically, and the negative impact that a criminal record and incarceration can have on people.

Perhaps the most damning critique of the CJS is that it is fraught with systemic injustices perpetrated against the innocent, victims, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and those with mental illnesses. The most frequent injustices of the CJS in North America are committed against people of African or Indigenous heritage, who are arrested, punished, incarcerated, abused, and killed by the system at a rate far greater than Caucasian offenders. The criminal justice system in Nova Scotia has long been plagued by racism, the latest evidence of which is documented in a 2019 report on racial profiling by Halifax-area police showing that black people were “carded” at a rate six times higher than that of white people.

Another fundamental criticism of the CJS is that it is almost entirely reactive when addressing crime and disorder issues and, as a result, only addresses the symptoms of much deeper social problems. What makes this particularly troubling is that police and the CJS have increasingly become the main state institution in dealing with a broad range of social problems that have nothing to do with crime, such as family breakdown, mental health illnesses, homelessness, poverty, inequality, and racism.

The intrinsic faults and unfairness of the CJS underscore the importance of the defund and abolition movements. It should be noted, however, that many activists and intellectuals behind the calls for defunding are not endorsing the abolition of law enforcement agencies necessarily; instead, they are arguing that funding and other resources be shifted to policies, programs, agencies, and institutions that can more effectively and fundamentally address the root causes of crime and other social problems while avoiding the abuses and injustices wrought by the CJS.

For years, criminologists such as myself have called for a massive shift in resources away from the CJS towards crime prevention and, more specifically, problem-solving solutions that emphasize social and community development. This alternative approach is inherently proactive in that it focuses on the social (root) causes of criminality by strengthening such institutions as the family, housing, schools, health care, social welfare systems, and local communities and economies.

Central to this philosophy is the belief that many social problems currently being dealt with through the CJS should be treated as public health issues and addressed accordingly. A proactive, preventative, public health approach to crime and violence emphasizes such alternatives to policing, law enforcement and the CJS as social workers (to work with troubled families), outreach workers (for at-risk youth and homeless populations), conflict mediators (to prevent violence), community-based psychiatric nurses (to deal with mental health emergencies), supervised group homes (for those with complex needs), restorative justice (as an alternative to courts), as well as addictions treatment centres and safe injection sites.

The American criminologist Peter Greenwood distinguishes between the ultimate goals of the CJS and that of social problem-solving crime prevention. He asserts that the main role of the CJS in helping to produce a civil and orderly society is the control of individuals and groups. In contrast, crime prevention through social and community development is ultimately geared toward the improved functioning of the individual and society.

While disagreements may exist over the definition and extent of “defunding,” there is a growing need to fundamentally re-think how we deal with crime in society. At the very least, less emphasis should be placed on the use of policing, law enforcement, and the broader CJS as the front-line institutions in dealing with social problems. Concomitantly, resources need to be shifted towards those policies, programs, organizations, and institutions that truly address the root causes of crime through proactive, community development, social welfare, and public health interventions, especially ones that serve those who are most marginalized and discriminated against in our society.

Stephen Schneider, a resident of Wolfville, is a professor with St. Mary’s University’s Department of Criminology.

Some of you may know that Russell Elliot passed away on October 2, 2020. Born in 1917, Russell was a great advocate for social justice and a strong supporter of the NDP. More information on the life and times of Russell can be found in his obituary.

Back in 2013, Carol Harris had the privilege of interviewing Russell, which was published in one of our newsletters (which you can read by clicking on the link below).

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/valley-journal-advertiser/20200211/

In January of this year, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ released its 2019 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia and there is little good news in the report for Nova Scotia or the Annapolis Valley specifically.

The report indicates that 24.2 percent of children in Nova Scotia were living in poverty in 2017 – the highest rate of child poverty in Atlantic Canada and the third-highest rate in Canada as a whole.

In the Annapolis Valley, the child poverty rate was estimated to be even higher - 34 percent! The only region in the province that had a higher rate was Cape Breton at 34.9 percent.

Even in my hometown of Wolfville – with its well-educated and professional population and a vibrant local economy – the child poverty rate is greater than the national and provincial averages.

An equally disconcerting fact is how high the child poverty rate is among Indigenous children; the study says that 75 percent of children in the Sipekne’katik First Nations were living below the poverty line. Seventy-five percent!

The report also notes that 53.1 percent of children in lone-parent families in Nova Scotia were living below the poverty line.
Despite Parliament’s vow to eliminate poverty by the year 2000, the most recent report card demonstrates our abject failure to do so in this province; the proportion of children living below the poverty in Nova Scotia has decreased by a measly 0.82% since 1989, the year this promise was made.

And while the McNeil government inherited the province’s high poverty rate, it has the ignominious record of presiding over the only province that saw its child poverty rate increase between 2015 and 2017.

As a Nova Scotian, and as a social democrat, I am both appalled and saddened by the lack of political will to address poverty at the provincial level.

While Stephen McNeil is quick to congratulate his government for balancing the provincial budget, thousands of children go hungry in this province.

To ignore the plight of children living in poverty is not only heartless, it is bad governance. Poverty is a social evil for moral reasons, but it also contributes to and exacerbates other social ills. Children and young people living in poverty are at greater risk of academic failure, conduct disorders, physical and mental health problems, homelessness, as well as delinquent and criminal behaviour.

By failing to address underlying social problems like poverty, governments must confront a diverse range of other resulting complications that respectively require an array of government agencies, policies, and programs that are costly, reactive, and which only addresses the symptoms of deeper social problems.

Instead of reacting to the consequences of poverty through under-funded government agencies and porous social welfare or criminal justice systems, the provincial government must shift its resources towards more proactive, effective, and cost-effective ways in addressing poverty.

The causes of poverty are complex and multifaceted; as such, resulting policies must be equally comprehensive, while also reflective of the unique situation of different populations and communities that most intensely suffer from this social affliction.

A comprehensive poverty-reduction program for Nova Scotia would include such measures as better early learning and child-care systems, increasing graduation rates and access to post-secondary education, providing more affordable housing, ensuring a livable minimum wage, enhancing income supports, indexing the provincial child tax benefits to inflation, expanding universal health care to cover dental care, mental health care and prescription drugs, addressing racism and discrimination that concentrates poverty in indigenous and African-Nova Scotia communities, committing to reconciliation with and supporting self-determination among First Nations, and empowering women and ensuring equal pay to overcome the feminization of poverty.

We have already seen other provinces undertake much-needed initiatives to address poverty. The NDP government in British Columbia has pledged to increase the minimum wage to more than $15 an hour by 2021. 

The Canada Child Benefit introduced by the federal Liberal government has lifted around 300,000 children out of poverty, according to Statistics Canada. (As columnist Jim  Vibert points out in his scathing indictment of the McNeil government’s record on social welfare, “Nova Scotia is the only province where the three-year-old federal Canada Child Benefit didn’t cut into the child and family poverty rates.”)

A universal basic income – in which all Canadians are guaranteed a livable income – have been touted as an effective way to reduce poverty. The strategy has been endorsed by both the Canadian Medical Association, in part because poverty is a major determinant of ill health and unequal access to health care.

No doubt, we all have a responsibility to help those who are in need and we can always do more in the Valley to address poverty and its repercussions, such as food insecurity, poor health, and inadequate housing.

Raising awareness of the problem is a start. Giving to local charities, including food banks, also helps. Volunteering with local organizations that serve disadvantaged children, such as Big Brothers / Big Sisters, has shown to offset the deleterious effects that poverty has on children.

However, as positive as these local charitable measures may be in checking some of the symptoms of poverty, it is only through the commitment, policies, and programs of government can the various causes of poverty be eradicated. 

The extent to which a government demonstrates the political will to truly eradicate poverty is a moral decision. The McNeil government has refused to effectively deal with the problem, in part because of its neo-conservative orientation that stresses austerity, balanced budgets, and pro-corporate policies (including maintaining one of the lowest minimum wages in the country).

Hopefully, the latest statistics will finally spur this government and future governments to truly tackle this problem through meaningful actions.
 
Stephen Schneider