Right in the centre - Let's just cut the crap!

Details

Published on Thursday, January 23, 2025

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

If anyone is offended by that headline, toughen up and hang on.

A couple of weeks ago Winnipeg (and Manitoba) was subjected to yet another notice to the public. It was one of many and likely won’t be the last. A picture was posted in various media of a man who had a criminal record as long as your arm, a violent sexual re-offender and murderer who was, as they often note, “was likely to re-offend and would be dangerous to women and children.” The man in question re-offended in a few days and ended up back in jail. That’s likely good news but I have a few questions.

Why, with his 30 year record, was he ever allowed out of jail? What if during the four to five days of freedom, he had beat upon or killed another woman or child? How can the public interest be served by allowing this type of criminal to ever see the outside of a jail-ever? This particular notice was one of many that are posted every year.

Just last week, an individual, known to the police and who had an active arrest warrant at the time of a car crash. It was with a stolen vehicle and the crash killed a young woman near Portage la Prairie.

Why do we even have to tolerate this over and over again? Put them in jail, and yes, leave them there. It would save lives, maybe sometimes even the offender’s life, save a lot of police time chasing around and hunting for people who seem intent on doing as much harm as possible to others and themselves.

I recently had a discussion with a wise man and we came to some poignant conclusions. We don’t believe in capital punishment. The death penalty didn’t seem to be an effective deterrent, many times there have been wrongful convictions and it can be argued that someone who commits murder should have to live with the consequences.

So what about the jail time. There comes a point in a criminal’s life that jail, long term, forever jail is the only logical answer. When in jail, or an institution, if you like, they could be gainfully occupied in educational upgrades or working. We both agreed that closing down the federal prison farms was a big mistake. In the prison farm system, many prisoners improved their lives greatly, working with  livestock was a great learning and living experience. Many prisoners helped themselves, helped other prisoners and were gainfully occupied raising food for the prison. 

My wise man said let prisoners become authors, artists, teachers, skilled workers, basically anything they want but with one clear limitation. They will always be in jail.

So more jails, institutions, prison farms or even prison factories will cost money. But how do you put a price on saved police costs, efforts and even police lives. How do you put a price on the safety of dead kids and adults. Or damaged and abused kids and adults. It seemed to us that we need major changes and we believe those changes would bring benefit to everybody.

The defenders of capital punishment, of the death sentence, will say that it eliminates repeat offenders. Executed criminals don’t re-offend. That’s true, but as noted above, what about wrongful convictions, there’s been many?

And, there are many criminals out and about that committed crimes where today’s courts would never get a death sentence but they are very dangerous to the public, to the police and even to themselves.

We need to expand our institutions and keep dangerous people off the street. Our population deserves much better protection than we have been offered. Put repeat violent offenders in jail and keep them there!

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the newspaper staff.