Reading Time: 5 minutes Publicly available social media influences criminal investigations, with costs and benefits to both society and police services. Social media has introduced new ways of both committing and solving crimes into our increasingly digitized world. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram create opportunities for criminal activity. They also allow police services to scour publicly generated user […]
CRIMINAL | The State is in Your Home: Courts punish poor parenting
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the middle of a pandemic, are our children really safe? Two Ontario courts recently punished poor parenting: the Ontario Superior Court in R v CO et al and the Ontario Court of Appeal in R v Lis. Both of these decisions were released during the pandemic and after the Crown had appealed the prior […]
Comparing Canada’s Corrections to Europe, the United States and Aboriginal Communities
Reading Time: 6 minutes How a society responds to and deals with its members who break or fail to follow its most basic rules is often rooted in its history and cultural values. Canada’s background is intimately tied to British traditions and practices in light of our history as a colony from the 1760’s up to the 20th century. […]
The Many Faces of ‘Corrections’: A call for universal reform
Reading Time: 6 minutes It is perhaps time (if not long overdue) to re-evaluate what we mean by justice and corrections. In my study of our court and prison methods, I found… a great wastage of human lives – a failure to reclaim and utilize them. E.N. Foss, 1914 Perhaps the least understood part of our criminal justice system […]
How Inmates in Canadian Prisons Suffer
Reading Time: 8 minutes Mental health crises for which there are few resources COVID-19 lockdowns Overuse of solitary confinement A racialized justice system that criminalizes Indigenous Peoples and Black Canadians A lack of preparation for re-entry into society These are the tip-of-the-iceberg issues faced by inmates in Canada’s federal and provincial prisons. And according to advocates for better inmate […]
Transgender Inmates in Canada
Reading Time: 6 minutes How do federal, provincial and territorial laws or policies protect transgender inmates? Individuals may identify with a gender that goes along with their sex given at birth, they may identify with a gender that is different from their sex given at birth, or they may identify with a non-traditional notion of gender. “Transgender” characterizes those […]
