Not Soft on Crime

Someone asked me how I can be so sympathetic to criminals.

The answer is that I have seen what we call justice in Toronto, south of the border, and abroad, and too much of it is humiliation, delay, overcrowding, and public self-congratulation. It is not softness on crime to say that out loud. It is honesty.

I have worked with people who have been arrested, processed, transported, held, screened, bailed, remanded, released, breached, re-arrested, and pushed back through the system so many times that the whole thing begins to feel less like justice than a badly run revolving door. We tell ourselves we are protecting the public. Often what we are really doing is processing human wreckage in a way that almost guarantees more wreckage later.

It starts with arrest. Then the ride.

People who have never been in custody like to imagine arrest as dramatic, decisive, morally clarifying. Usually it is none of those things. Usually it is the beginning of compression. Hands behind the back. Body controlled by strangers. Then transport in a vehicle built for security, not humanity. An Ontario investigative report described prisoner transport compartments with an all-metal interior, locked doors, a perforated screen, and a hard resting area. That is the architecture of control. It is not the architecture of restoration.

Then holding. Waiting. Fluorescent time. Noise. Smell. Fear. The loss of any sense that you are a citizen with a future and not just a problem being moved from one box to another.

Then the hearing. One of the most consequential moments in a person’s life can happen through a screen. Liberty reduced to a video appearance. Human complexity compressed into a few minutes, a few facts, a few risks, a few failures already on paper.

And if bail does not happen, the machine keeps going.

This is where the “hard on crime” crowd usually loses interest. They love the slogan. They do not love the details. They do not want to talk about what pretrial custody actually means. They do not want to talk about the fact that most people in Ontario jails are not serving sentences at all. They are awaiting trial, legally presumed innocent. They do not want to talk about overcrowding, triple-bunking, strip searches, delay, untreated addiction, untreated psychosis, untreated trauma, untreated brain injury, untreated grief.

So let us stop lying.

We are not looking at a clean moral divide between good citizens and convicted monsters. We are looking at a remand-heavy system full of people who have not yet been found guilty, packed into institutions that are regularly overcrowded and increasingly unstable.

Then there is processing. Search. Exposure. The state taking hold of the body. The humiliation of being reduced to risk, property, paperwork, and flesh. We call this procedure, as though renaming degradation could somehow purify it.

And we think this makes people less criminal?

We make bail harder. We make housing harder. We make employment harder. We make treatment harder. We give people records, conditions, instability, stigma, and delay. Then we act shocked when they come out poorer, angrier, less employable, more traumatized, and less trusting than when they went in. That is not public safety. That is institutional stupidity with a moral vocabulary.

I am not soft on crime. I just think the whole performance is a joke.

My clients deserve better. Toronto deserves better.

As a former priest, I prepared hundreds of people for marriage. I baptized a great many. I heard more confessions than I could ever count. I know what human failure sounds like. I know what shame does. I know the difference between accountability and degradation. Those are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing.

Care. Transition. Treatment. Connection. Resources. Permission to fail and begin again.

That is the answer. Not because it is sentimental. Because it is the only thing that works. If you want fewer victims tomorrow, you need fewer broken men coming out of cages with no money, no work, no home, no medication, no hope, and one more story about how the world has already decided what they are.

We are not made better by being hard on crime in the dumbest possible way. We are not nobler because we can punish efficiently and abandon casually. We are just plainer. Plainer about our fear. Plainer about our hypocrisy. Plainer about how little imagination we have left.

And when Jesus spoke about setting prisoners free, he was not speaking only about the innocent ones. He was speaking about a society that would itself be judged by what it did with the guilty, the unwanted, the addict, the liar, the thief, the man everybody else had already given up on.

That is my position.

Not soft on crime.

Hard on lies. Hard on systems that fail in public and call it order. Hard on a city that wants safety without responsibility.

Because until we choose care over theatre, we are not reducing crime.

We are recruiting for its sequel.