Crime, part four (sorry, but this cannot be linked):

So why has crime dropped? Excellent question. Theories abound. Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, credits the aging baby boom. "There were twice as many young men in the population in the 1970s as there are now." Young men commit most crimes.

James Hackler of the University of Victoria thinks "the strongest answer to crime rates is equality of income": Countries such as Scandinavia and Japan, where the ratio between CEO pay and worker pay is smaller than it is here, have lower crime rates.

Another theory points to the birth-control pill and even legalized abortion: Fewer unwanted children equals fewer social misfits.

The phrase you hear most from criminologists is "there are no quick answers." Grisly, high-profile crimes and grossly lenient sentencing get attention, but statistically they're rare: Sentences for major assault, drug trafficking and attempted murder have stayed the same or risen in the past 10 years.

"Everybody wants to be safe," University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob observes. "And I think you can't challenge that desire. And it's very comforting to think that Parliament can sit there with a dial and turn it down and automatically lower the crime rate."

But Parliament can't, and has long known it. "Go back 50 years," Dr. Doob says, "there's report after report saying, 'Let's use prison with restraint.'" Again and again – at least 16 times between 1956 and 2003 – knowledgeable and brain-studded parliamentary committees have concluded that where sentences and jail time are concerned, "preference should be given to the least restrictive alternative" (1982) because (1993) "costly repressive measures … fail to deter crime."

"Being in prison doesn't make you a good citizen," Graham Stewart, the retired director of the John Howard Society, a prisoner-rights organization, explains. "It just makes you a good prisoner."

Ed McIsaac, the national director of policy at John Howard, estimates that axing APR alone will add 400 "bed years" to Canada's prisoner load – which at the average daily cost of $322.51 per federal inmate, is $47-million a year. That's about the same amount Mr. Jones stole from his victims over the course of 25 years.

The irony is that these experts' elite outrage may help fuel the public's embrace of the crime bills. The federal Ministry of Justice has dismissed statistics as "an excuse not to get tough on criminals." Ian Brodie, Stephen Harper's former chief of staff, said at a McGill University forum in 2009 that "every time we proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defence lawyers and Liberals attacked us for proposing measures that the evidence apparently showed did not work. Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types."

That's the thing: Tough-on-crime sentiment may be difficult to justify logically, but it is easy to feel. The question is, why has it become seductive to more and more of us?

One reason, of course, is that crime victimizes people, and happens more or less uncontrollably, and always has, and so it scares us – if not personally, then existentially. Crime never, ever disappears. It is our shadow as a society, a source of shame: What if we're responsible for its existence? No one would argue that we shouldn't try to control it, and reduce it whenever and wherever we can, if we can.

But as the evidence shows, crime is also a force unto itself, vast and multi-tentacled, often counter-intuitive. The things that actually reduce crime – sophisticated parole programs, rehabilitation systems, anti-poverty intiatives, education, mental-health centres, retraining (all of which the Tories have supported) – cost money and time, and are not quick or politically easy fixes.

Crime is so vast, worrying and intractable that when someone like Mr. Harper starts to crusade against it, it almost feels brave to join his cause – no matter how cynically or sincerely it's touted.

Whatever the reason, though, our rejection of social civility as a cure is bound to have a profound effect on how we see ourselves as Canadians.

Tom Flanagan, the former Conservative campaign manager who is now a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, once said that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives believe people can't change, that human nature isn't malleable.

For many years, Canada's approach to criminality was, in that sense, liberal – we relied less on prison and more on rehabilitation, on changing people. Now we seem to be headed the other way.

"If you think that people don't change," says Mr. Stewart, of the John Howard Society, "if you punish people for what they are, as opposed to what they do – then all this restraint in punishment [that we've practised before now] makes no sense."

If people are unlikely to change, the bad ones can be locked up. That way the bad people will be in one place, and the good people will be in another place, and we'll never have to be confused as to who is whom.

We think we want to be tough on crime because we're afraid of criminals, but it turns out we're not. We're afraid of ourselves, and who we might turn out to be.

Thankfully, the election – now that Mr. Harper has made crime an issue – gives us a chance to choose.

So the Harper government's stance defies not just evidence but half a century of Canadian intellectual tradition. To many criminologists, that feels like heresy. "Nobody that I know who has any expertise about these things believes in what the Tories are doing," Simon Fraser's Prof. Boyd says.

Still, its iconoclasm helps explain why Mr. Harper and his colleagues find their anti-crime thrust exciting, new and serious – a genuine reformation of the criminal-justice system's priorities. They have also sold it brilliantly. One of the ways they've done so is, as Harold Albrecht, the Conservative MP for Kitchener-Conestoga, says, "by standing up for victims." That's a lot more effective, politically, than standing up for a criminal's future.

Just before the election call, egged on by the victims of Montreal fraudster Earl Jones, Mr. Harper's government eliminated automatic parole review (APR). That will keep Mr. Jones in the slammer a little longer. But it will, much more seriously, affect many young, first-time, non-violent offenders (drug charges, break-ins) who will now serve longer sentences and run greater risks of reoffending when they get out (which APR was meant to prevent).
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