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Howard Anglin: Canada’s criminal justice system will not be fixed by stale progressive tropes

Commentary

Lindsay Souvannarath was sentenced in April after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in a plan that would have seen two shooters open fire at the Halifax Shopping Centre food court in 2015. Souvannarath arrives at provincial court for a preliminary hearing in Halifax on Wednesday, July 8, 2015. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press.

It has become common for the fussier sort of journalist to complain about politicians, especially conservative politicians, who belittle the advice of academics and experts. But if law professor Ben Perrin’s latest book, Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial, is what passes for academic expertise these days, then those politicians should double-down on their disdain.

It is a difficult work to classify: too casual for scholarship, too dull for beach reading, it belongs to that peculiarly Canadian genre of subsidised, orthodox non-fiction. You know the type: a glowing endorsement from an admirable Canadian (in this case, Jody Wilson-Raybould); a Big Idea backed by anecdotal vignettes; and every few pages a sentence that begins “There is a saying that …” At the end of the book, Perrin provides the contact number for Canada suicide prevention services, which is thoughtful but unnecessary. The book is bad, but not that bad.

Perrin’s thesis is that Canada’s criminal justice system is inundated by criminals suffering from trauma—racial trauma, historical trauma, settler-colonial trauma, incarceration trauma, intergenerational trauma—and that unless we upend the entire system and remake it from top to bottom, it will continue to fail them and us. There’s no point in objecting that, although there is some obvious truth in the diagnosis, the prescription is delusive, because this isn’t intended to be a piece of thoughtful and balanced academic work (at least I hope it isn’t)—it’s a manifesto.

Perrin introduces his case through a series of personal stories drawn from dozens of interviews with putatively illustrative victims of the justice system. No doubt this is intended to make the argument more approachable. Unfortunately, his clumsy attempts to launder ideology through anecdotes end up sounding manipulative and feeling exploitative. By telling his subjects’ stories in their own voices, Perrin tries to give them agencyHow much agency, of course, we don’t know, as the stories feel heavily edited., but by constantly minimising their culpability he takes it right back.

Consider “Lana,” who was the “victim” of engaging in a high speed police chase with her boyfriend and a friend of his they picked up beside the road, who just happened to be armed. When the police finally caught up with them and arrested her boyfriend less tenderly than she would have liked, Lana was indignant: “We complied to their demands of us getting out of the vehicle in a timely manner.” As though after leading a multi-car chase that endangered her passengers, the police, and the public, that’s the real concern.

Perrin takes up her story: “As a result of the incident, Lana developed severe PTSD, including vivid flashbacks,” he writes. “Before she was eager to try and work with the police to help the missing and murdered. But now, she says ‘I don’t want anything to do with the police.’ And all because she just stopped to give someone a ride.” Well, that’s not exactly “all” that happened now is it, counsellor. There was a little more to the story than that.

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