Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
8.4. Public Policy Debates on Crime
The sociological study of crime, deviance, and social control is especially important with respect to public policy debates. In 2012 the Conservative government passed the Safe Streets and Communities Act, a controversial piece of legislation because it introduced mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug or sex related offenses, restricted the use of conditional sentencing (i.e., non-prison punishments), imposed harsher sentences on certain categories of young offender, reduced the ability for Canadians with a criminal record to receive a pardon, and made it more difficult for Canadians imprisoned abroad to transfer back to a Canadian prison to be near family and support networks. The legislation imposed a mandatory six-month sentence for cultivating six marijuana plants, for example.
Noting that the mandatory minimum sentencing disproportionately affected Indigenous and Black Canadians, the Liberal government passed Bill C-22 in 2021, which repealed mandatory minimum sentencing for 14 offenses in the criminal code, including all 6 provisions that applied to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (Department of Justice Canada, 2021). Approximately 39 per cent of Black inmates and 20 per cent of Indigenous prisoners in federal prisons were serving sentences dictated by mandatory minimums. Supreme court rulings had already struck down two mandatory minimums for firearm offenses in 2015, declaring them “cruel,” and drug-related minimums in 2016, on the grounds that they violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the Bill C-22 reform leaves 52 offenses with mandatory minimums in place.
Government policy shifts back and forth between a punitive approach to crime control and preventive strategies such as drug rehabilitation, prison diversion, and social reintegration programs. Why? Part of the reason has to do with the discourses surrounding crime. Despite the evidence that rates of serious and violent crime have been falling in Canada, in 2011 Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said, “Unlike the Opposition, we do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals. As far as our Government is concerned, one victim of crime is still one too many” (Galloway, 2011). What accounts for the appeal of “getting tough on criminals” policies at a time when rates of crime, and violent crime in particular, are falling and in 2012 were at their lowest level since 1972 (Perreault, 2013)? Crime rates have since risen but remain lower than they were in 2009 (Moreau, Jaffray and Armstrong, 2020).
One reason is that violent crime is a form of deviance that lends itself to spectacular media coverage that distorts its actual threat to the public. Television news broadcasts frequently begin with chaos news — crime, accidents, natural disasters — that present an image of society as a dangerous and unpredictable place. However, the image of crime presented in the headlin