Crime in Canada

The Canadian judicial system continues to baffle taxpayers with it’s exorbitant costs. According to the Crime & Punishment section of the Toronto Star, it costs an estimated $255 a day to house federal inmates and $160 a day to house provincial inmates.
With federal penitentiaries housing inmates who are in for at least two years plus a day, the minimum cost comes out at over 186 thousand dollars per inmate. That kind of cost, when combined with the Harper government’s “Tough on Crime” policies, looks to inflate the cost to taxpayers over the next few years.
While we’ve seen crime figures drop in Canada over the last number of years, successive governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have pledged to crack down on criminals, often resulting in excessive costs being directed at marginal problems. Misdirected resources further inflate police budgets and the drain on the taxpayers.
This money could easily be directed to early-resource programs at schools, or adult-education programs in high-risk areas, curbing the probability of future crimes. There are programs out there right now that have been proven to work, and yet we keep throwing money at the symptoms of crime, not the causes.