City council has expressed support for a bid to reduce crime in the city by bolstering social services and focusing more on the prevention of criminal activity than on punishment.
The community and protective services committee passed a motion earlier this month highlighting its intention to work with local criminal justice agencies on prevention efforts to curb crime and social problems in Ottawa.
The motion was passed after an advocacy group presented councillors with a report raising concerns about court delays in Ottawa and their negative implications for area social services.
The report noted that Ottawa’s courts are so backlogged that, based on guidelines from the Supreme Court of Canada, about one-third of all cases pending as of March 2009 were hovering close to automatic “termination of prosecution.”
Sheila Arthurs, a founding member of the advocacy group that calls itself Informed Opinions, says the organization’s primary goal was to inform council of the poor use of tax money in the federal justice system.
“Tax money has been misused through ineffective legislation,” says Arthurs. “We are advocating for tax money to move away from punishment and towards prevention.”
The group is pushing for an increase in funding from senior levels of government for Ottawa’s social services. Informed Opinions claims that the estimated 80 individuals discharged from the criminal justice system into area homeless shelters each month are too many for the city to handle.
“If tax money is spent more wisely and more strategically, we can stop crime before it happens,” says Arthurs. “Better resources should be going to social services, not detention centres.”
The report was supported with statistics from the Community Foundation of Ottawa, which promotes local philanthropy to address social issues. It lists examples of how court delays have negative consequences for the community.
One example in the report was that “it costs $153.38 a day for the average prisoner at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, yet it would have cost $3.29 per day to supervise each of these individuals in the community.”
Bay Coun. Alex Cullen says that the report was an eye-opener for councillors.
“Frontline city workers were probably aware of inefficiencies in the justice system like court delays, but this was a revelation for us,” says Cullen. “We are clearly interested in working with local agencies to combat these problems.”
An Ottawa Police Services spokesperson said the force supported council’s motion.
“Prevention is worth a lot,” said Insp. Joan McKenna. “It is a better long-term method for crime prevention.”
Although McKenna said she did not agree with all of the report’s findings, she supported its overall message.
“In some cases, we must go to a trial, but increased prevention is a very good strategy,” she says.
As noted in the report, Ottawa Police Chief Vern White recently said that up to 80 per cent of incidents requiring intervention by police would be addressed more effectively through referral to social or mental health resources, not criminal courts.
Arthurs has spent more than 40 years working for justice agencies, and says that awareness is the most important aspect of solving inefficiencies in the system.
“We must give a profile to these issues. This is how we can start solving Ottawa’s crime problems.”