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August 08, 2006
A third way?
According to an editorial last week (not online anymore, possibly because of a publication ban), the National Post is "[o]rdinarily… skeptical of laws made in the immediate wake of a sensational crime." They are willing to make an exception in the case of Peter Whitmore, however, and they approve of fast-tracking changes to the dangerous offender designation.
Clearly something needs to be done in the near term to neutralize the threat posed by habitual, apparently incurable offenders like Whitmore, but the Post was right the first time. As a catalyst for hyperactive, flawed legislative change Whitmore is no better than Martin Bryant or Thomas Hamilton, or any other freak of nature. (Whitmore never killed anyone, of course, though the Canadian media did seem shocked to find his two latest victims alive and more or less well.)
Already the Whitmore case has renewed calls for a publicly accessible sex offender registry, but it's just as good an argument against it. Police knew almost instantly who they were after, because they had been in regular contact with Whitmore since his last release. He was complying with the regulations imposed on him. One of the notable differences between the American registry and the British one, which is only accessible to police, is the latter's 97 percent compliance rate. According to Clive Coleman in the Times, fully 20 percent of registered offenders in the US are currently unaccounted for. The four Maine residents who were terminally deregistered in April, thanks to a gun-toting loony and a government website, won't bring that number down any.
There doesn't seem to be much support for a public registry in Canada, but it's tough to put anything past our current Justice Minister. Dan Gardner, among others, has been banging his head against a wall asking why the Conservative government is pursuing a mandatory sentence-based approach to criminal justice that demonstrably doesn't work. It's not too far a reach to fear this government might make it too easy (however you define that) to designate someone a dangerous offender simply because it would be politically expedient. Might be a nice tonic for a disappointing poll, for instance.
We need to take a breath. A good dangerous offender law — i.e., a law that will survive the inevitable challenges against it — is a delicate balance between a citizen's right to security and a citizen's right to go free once he's paid his debt to society. Hysterical voices are most unhelpful in striking such a balance, but it's at times like these that they're loudest. On cue, here's Licia Corbella:
There used to be a time in this country when our children were free to roam the streets and perverts were locked up. Now we must lock up our children because we release the perverts.
Well, the first part's right — parents certainly give their kids less freedom than they used to. But the rates of child abductions and murders are not generally on the rise. In 1984 the murder rate for children under 12 was 46 percent higher than it was in 2004; the rate of children under 14 being abducted was 60 percent higher (source: Statscan).
The names of Holly Jones and Cecilia Zhang are more familiar than those of Allison Parrott or Sharin Keenan because their tragedies are more recent, not because murdering children is a modern pursuit. And the corners of Canadian history are inhabited by all too many child ghosts. Lynne Harper might be the most famous, but a quick web search yields decades of unanswered questions: Jeffrey Dupres, missing from Slave Lake, Alberta since 1980; Cheryl Hanson, missing from Aurora, Ontario since 1974; John McCormick, missing from Caledon, Ontario since 1981; Ingrid Bauer, missing from Kleinburg, Ontario since 1972.
Take the last case, for example. 14-year-old Bauer disappeared in August 1972 while hitchhiking near Kleinburg. The Globe and Mail's first piece on the subject ran on August 23. On October 11, on page 10, there was a report of an increased reward. On November 2, Scott Young mentioned her (in the shaded part) more or less in passing in an opinion piece. On May 2, 1973 (in the shaded part), the mother of another murdered young woman mentioned the Bauer family. On May 8, 1973, she was mentioned briefly in an article about unclaimed rewards.
And that's it. I'm not even going to bother comparing that to the pages of newsprint the Globe devoted to the search for Holly Jones, for instance, and my point's not that one case was underreported or the other overreported. It's simply this: considering the massive increase in coverage, it's not surprising that society's fear of abductors and molesters and murderers increases even as the crimes themselves stay the same or decrease. That fear, and the righteous fury it engenders, are now a form of entertainment — Nancy Grace's continuing presence on television is evidence enough of that.
Corbella's also right that children, especially urban children, end up the victims: streetproofed, lockdown-drilled, cellphone-equipped, possibly even microchipped, shuttled from one impeccably organized activity to the next in government-approved booster seats, or else just holed up in the basement playing video games by the soft light of the carbon monoxide detector. Can you imagine if their parents knew a statutory rapist lived down the end of their block? Volvo would be offering gun turrets on its SUVs.
When it comes to preying on children, Peter Whitmore clearly cannot help himself. Whether or not the boffins would agree, surely this is for all intents and purposes a kind of mental illness. He should go to prison for what he's done, but it says here he shouldn't stay there for the rest of his life for what he is. The choice right now is framed as either letting him loose in the community or keeping him in general population. I think long-term incarceration on the grounds of an unacceptably high potential to reoffend needs to be separated, both conceptually and physically, from incarceration for crimes actually committed.
After he's served his sentence, Whitmore could face a different kind of secure institutionalization that's as free and productive as possible and as secure as necessary, where he can pursue whatever prospects for rehabilitation he has. This achieves the balance between security and liberty that's so difficult to find when lifetime imprisonment is the only option for people like Whitmore, and there should be other benefits too. There are 300-odd dangerous offenders in Canada right now. Surely the study of criminal behaviour would benefit from having them all in one place.
"Locking up our children because we release the perverts" is a separate issue. Licia Corbella looks back on her idealized childhood and assumes society must have been safer, but there's no evidence of that. There's evidence to the contrary, in fact. Were previous generations negligent in their parenting? It's heresy even to suggest it. Is my generation overprotective in its parenting? Almost certainly, but the current state of urban childhood isn't primarily born of danger.
It's born mostly of parental ambition for their children, just like advanced placement courses, four-year secondary schooling, summer school for kids who don't need it, agents for pre-teen hockey players, and so on. Peter Whitmore and his ilk make fine scapegoats, but if Canadian parents fear they're micromanaging their children's lives to the point of insanity they need to look in the mirror, not at the perverts. Canadian streets are as safe as they've ever been.
Posted by Chris Selley at August 8, 2006 10:30 PM
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Comments
That was a great article. Well-reasoned.
Posted by: wsam at August 9, 2006 12:07 PM