"Cowardice asks the question...is it safe? Expediency asks the question...is it politic? Vanity asks the question...is it popular? But conscience asks the question...is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because it is right." ~Dr. Martin Luther King

Wednesday 19 September 2012

Numbers Are Easy To FInd

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "No Points Scored":
Possibly I wasn't trying to win points.

What I was doing is suggesting that Mr. Baker is dumb and should not express a very specific opinion about something that he obviously knows nothing. Possibly he is not an idiot, merely ignorant. Far too often politicians speak before they think.

A case in point is the Republican candidate for the US presidency. Mr. Romney seems to be a one-man wrecking crew with respect to his own campaign; the latest video relating to the 47% of Americans who survive solely on the basis of federal government largesse and who are beyond redemption.

M.P.'s are grossly overpaid for what they do. Bev Oda's pension, to which she is, I believe, immediately entitled, amounts to something on the order of $55,000 per annum. For how many years was she an M.P.? How long would a Ford assembly line worker or a primary school teacher have to work to receive this? Would they ever?

Our education system is completely broken. The provincial Minister fights with the Boards of Education
who fight with the teachers unions and with the teachers themselves. Parents use the school system as a baby-sitting service and refuse to become involved with the system that seems to be failing that most precious of commodities, our children. These are the hope for the future.

Yet no one seems to approach education with any sense of responsibility when all have important roles to play in its design and implementation. To see what can be accomplished study the German and Scandinavian systems. They produce young people who are well educated in broad terms and also specifically to meet the jobs requirements of their countries.

I will pass on the crime subject for now


************
So that means I have to look it up myself.
Statistics are for the years 2005/2006. There are federal. provincial and territorial facilities. 
Numbers  are complicated . Easy to read. Not so easy to interpret. . 
In that period,  131 per 100,000 population were in jail. 
232,800  people were admitted in 2005/2006.
On any given day 33,440 people are in custody. Half have not been sentenced.
Cost of incarceration is $259.05 a day for a male in federal prison. 
Cost in a provincial facility is $141,78.
There's more, tons more stuff. It's all depressing.
Guy Paul Moin was one of the statistics for seven years and he didn't commit the  crime  I think he was twenty-two when they charged  him and found him guilty.
I remember the day they arrested him. I met Dick Illingworth coming out of a building I was going into. 
We stopped for a minute 
." See they arrested somebody" he  said.
"By God. I hope they're right"  I said. 
"You and me both" he  said.
 Neither of us thought so.
 It was too quick. Too easy.
We were right
His family went through that nightmare. He spent seven years in jail for raping and murdering a child. 
The person who did it, was never apprehended.
Statistics don't mention how many people in jail can't read or write. 
Or whether  literacy  classes  are taught.
Aboriginal people, for their percentage of population. far  outnumber others in the jail population.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Canada has made more than one of those dreadful errors. Three of their names began with ' M' so that you can form a mantra when someone starts to howl about why we should have a death penalty. If you get just one wrong, the entire country foots the blame. That seems to have been forgotten whenever a monster- maybe- gets arrested. The hatred on the major media blogs is really scary.

Anonymous said...

Typo I think Evelyn. Not possible for 130,000 for every 100,000 people to be in jail. Did you mean 13,000?

The link below suggests that the number is 117 for every 100,000, as of 2008.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2008/12/09/prison-stats.html

KA-NON

Anonymous said...

No Ka-Non... this is an example of how the "Innocent until proven guilty" right has been taken away.