It has been nearly two years since the federal government eliminated the practice of giving inmates extra credit for time they served before being sentenced.
Yet the expected drop of remand inmates and an influx of inmates from the provincial system into the federal network has not happened.
It is another example of the difficulty facing governments and corrections officials as new laws come into effect without any proficient models to predict what impact they will have on prisons and jails, which in some regions are already bursting at the seams.
There never was an actual policy or law dictating inmates should be given extra credit for time served in remand while awaiting trial.
However, the poor state of remand facilities and long periods of time awaiting trial led judges to start offering double-time credit for pre-trial custody. It became almost a standard.
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“Yet the expected drop of remand inmates and an influx of inmates from the provincial system into the federal network has not happened.”
The ‘hug a thug’ crowd on the left and their media enablers have to just calm down and give it time to work. But then, they don’t want it to work. Given Canada’s backlogged practically disfunctional court system 2 years is virtually ‘overnight’. For one thing the remand system is still jammed full of those charged before the changes were made and defence lawyers (on behalf of their naturally eager clients) you can bet are still working the old system for all it is worth. These same defence lawyers, for whom the removal of the time served also severly depletes their personal bank accounts, are going to do everything in their power to try and show that this Conservative initiative is a failure. So anxious to trash a Conservative initiative there are. Trumpeting the alleged failure of the ending of the time served issue is all about money and politics and nothing else.