OTTAWA — Restricting house arrest is going to cost the provinces and territories almost $140 million a year, produce fewer convictions and reduce the time offenders are under government supervision, according to a report from the independent parliamentary budget officer.
The 97-page study is a detailed and devastating deconstruction of just one small aspect of the massive Conservative omnibus crime bill that is currently before the Senate.
Using 2008-09 data from Statistics Canada and the public prosecutors office, the budget officer provided a minutely detailed account of the impact of proposed restrictions to house arrest and other conditional sentences.
Not only does the report predict a significant, unreported cost to provincial and territorial treasuries, it raises troubling questions about the policy’s effectiveness.
“In effect, fewer offenders will be punished for shorter amounts of time, at greater expense, but in provincial correctional facilities rather than the community,” says the study, which took two researchers five months to complete.
Conditional sentences are only available to offenders facing less than two years jail time — sentences that by definition are served in provincial jails. Currently, judges cannot grant a conditional sentence to anyone who is considered a danger to the community, or to a criminal convicted of a serious, personal injury offence.
The new law will increase the number of offences for which conditional sentences cannot be granted, and the PBO report says it would have affected about a third of all conditional sentences in 2008-09.
Kevin Page, the independent budgetary watchdog appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, suggested the government doesn’t actually have any firm research as a counter argument to the report.
Neither Correctional Service Canada nor the parole board provided data for the study, said Page.
And when Page’s researchers went to Statistics Canada and the provinces for data, “we didn’t get any sense that federal bureaucrats or the government actually had done the costing.”
“We were going to the original source of the data and finding we were the first people asking these questions.”
The report concludes that about 3,800 additional offenders would face jail time under Criminal Code changes to conditional sentences in Bill C-10, but that 650 would simply walk free after opting for trials they won.
And the cost per offender to Canadian taxpayers would increase to $41,000 from the current $2,600 — a 16-fold increase.
The researchers involved in the study repeatedly stressed that their estimates erred on the side of caution. The report states that its projections are “likely underestimates” and do not include the cost of building more prisons.