ARE CRIMINALS 'VICTIMS' TOO?

They tell me the victim scoring system is being worked on. If they make an app hopefully they don't let defence department manage it. The ArriveCan app bump from $84k to $54 million still stings.

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A Canadian judge, Russell Wood, recently gave a five-and-a-half-month sentence to a multiple offender, a Punjabi man named Manpreet Gill. Gill should never have been allowed in Canada and, after multiple offences, should never have been allowed to stay.

Manpreet Gill was an illiterate Punjabi student. His lack of language skills should have denied him entry to Canada, but no matter—his money was golden, and they let him in. He had already registered multiple convictions, but each time, he was put back on the street.

After robbing an LCBO, Gill and his fellow criminal led police on a chase in the wrong direction on a major highway. They collided with a car, setting off a multiple-car pile-up and left three dead, and two injured. His fellow criminal died also.

Even with Gill’s actions leading to four deaths, including an infant and grandmother, Judge Wood’s priority was to keep Gill’s sentence under six months so as not to hurt Gill’s immigration standing.

The immigration standing of the dead is, of course, now moot.

Such judicial decisions give off an unpleasant odour, a whiff of the acrid smell when rotten wood is tossed on the fire.

The stink comes from the new idea that the judge’s role is to arbitrate between victims—the victim of the crime and the criminal as a victim.

Canadian Department of Justice Research shows that regular Canadians are not buying into the duelling victim theory.

Academics, though, claim it is not that simple. They focus on understanding the socio-economic and psychological factors contributing to criminal behaviour rather than excusing it.

Judges like Judge Wood dismiss us prols who never went to law school; they are sure they can make the granting of bail and allocation of sentences fairer without creating a new victim class out of criminals. Their philosophy fits nicely with modern identity politics and easy victimisation.

The problem is that it is an ethical version of junk food.

It is tasty, easy and immediately satisfying, but it hurts health and productivity in the long term.

In Gill’s case, four people are dead, but the judge’s priority was not to interfere with the criminal’s immigration pathway.

The irony is rich: Most people would say that any non-citizen convicted of a crime has already forfeited their right to stay in Canada after serving their sentence.

Does Judge Wood’s leniency neglect crime victims, prioritising rehabilitation and systemic blame over accountability?

We already allow IRCA statements, Impact of Race and Culture Assessments, which are like an automatic prepaid jail time card given to anyone of colour or to anyone who can convince a judge that their skin colour, ethnicity and crappy childhood made them do bad things.

IRCA reeks of the racism of low expectations and moves us one step closer to adding a new class to our pantheon of identity victims: the criminal.

For some today, the twin tyrannies of genetics and societal influence comfortably excuse every misstep, failure, and calamity. The individual is nothing more than a marionette, strings pulled by heredity on one side and the clamour of culture on the other.

Living in a world where nobody is responsible for anything is grand, and accountability is a quaint relic of an unenlightened past.

If women can have penis’ can we say confidently say that criminals will not one day be assigned a unique class of victimhood, and to deny them their victimhood status means you end up before a human rights tribunal?

Twenty years ago, the former idea would have been laughed at. Today, at the New York Times, the former pinnacle of journalistic excellence, biological women are officially tagged as “non-transgender women.” Times change.

Is ‘the criminal as the victim’ the latest new woke toy?

The ultimate measure of the efficacy of a philosophical shift in judicial reform in sentencing and bail conditions is the effect on crime.

In Canada, it’s getting worse.

We have a 30 percent increase in violent crime over the past decade, with rates soaring from 1,095 per 100,000 people in 2013 to 1,427 in 2023¹.

According to a 2023 Leger survey, 78 percent of Canadians believe the justice system is too lenient, and a staggering 79 percent are concerned about violent offenders being granted bail—a fear not unfounded, as nearly one-third of homicides in 2022 were committed by individuals on release.

However, society's cohesion is not primarily maintained through the enforcement of laws but through the moral fabric of its individuals.

Most people act virtuously not out of fear of punishment but because of deeply held personal convictions and an intrinsic sense of right and wrong.

Without these shared moral values, even the most draconian legal systems would fail to prevent societal collapse. We would have to create a police state. Laws are necessary to address egregious violations, but they serve as a backstop, not the primary mechanism by which a community thrives.

In Ottawa in 2011, around 40 youths entered a Quickie convenience store and swiftly departed with around $800 worth of merchandise. This event is Canada's first "flash robbery”, describing coordinated, non-violent mass thefts.

In the US, such thefts are up 24% from 2023. Of course, there are enforcement solutions, but the core of the problem is not rooted in prevention and punishment; it is the unwillingness of the offenders to say, “No, I’m not going to steal because it’s wrong. I don’t care if I can get away with it.”

One of Russia's greatest literary minds, Fyodor Dostoevsky, offers a profound insight into this dynamic in The Brothers Karamazov. In it, Dostoevsky implies, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” 

This is the moral problem Ivan Karamazov faces. It is also not a literal argument about theism but rather a philosophical statement about the role of internal moral belief systems. 

Dostoevsky suggests that laws alone cannot restrain humanity's baser instincts without a guiding inner religious or secular framework. Morality governs daily interactions, instils trust, and ensures cooperation among people.

While crime demands justice, how we enforce it profoundly impacts both victim and offender.

Perhaps the worst crime of all is to rob individuals of their agency.

When we treat offenders solely as victims of circumstance, we do them no kindness. Writer Viktor Frankl argued,

"When we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."²

To deny someone responsibility strips them of the transformative potential of accountability.

As violent crime escalates, Canada faces a choice: to continue down a path of leniency disguised as compassion or to reaffirm the dignity of personal agency through justice that restores rather than excuses. It’s a zero-sum game.

George Eliot once wrote, "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."³

In the case of Manpreet Gill, should the court have asked him to run flowers by the funeral home as a bail condition?

No, doing that would not serve the true victim.

Perhaps we should be allowed to fill in a predisposition scorecard? Perhaps every citizen should fill in one of these to be used if they are momentarily inconvenienced by incarceration?

In his book Free Will, Sam Harris explores the concept of free will and determinism.

He suggests that underlying neurochemical processes and social conditioning influence our sense of making choices. He states, "You can do what you decide—but you cannot decide what you will do.⁴

If the brain is but a biochemical puppet, how could anyone ever be blamed for its inevitable pirouettes? A thief is not a thief but a victim of dopamine dysregulation. A murderer? Simply the tragic result of a prefrontal cortex in disrepair.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault examines how societal institutions impose norms and values upon individuals, shaping their identities and behaviours. He discusses the pervasive influence of disciplinary mechanisms in modern society, where various authorities—such as teachers, doctors, and social workers—act as judges, enforcing conformity to societal standards. Foucault states:

"We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements."⁵

Foucault says that morality is a social construct. For example, a child who builds a Lego fire truck and puts it on his shelf could easily build a community centre or a monster.

I was spanked as a child. Indeed, in grade five at Crane School in Fort Garry, Winnipeg, they brought back a punishment that hadn’t been used in many years. I was a special child.

They brought back the strap. If Goliath had a belt and was morbidly obese, it would have worked for him: six feet long, three inches wide, a strip of thick brown leather.

I had thrown a mud ball, and Principal Smith brought all his years of schoolteacher bitterness down upon my small grade five hand (they lined everyone up for school pictures, the shortest at the end, and I was always at the end).

But now I know it wasn’t my fault that I threw that mud ball (it could have had a rock inside and taken out an eye, said my teacher Mr White) - it was my genetics, social conditioning and profoundly affected by our practice of seeing how fast our spit would freeze on the bike rack.

Yes, I’m sure that combo made that mud ball an inevitable outcome, I think I am owed a negative strap.

I’m not sure what that would be.

It is a classic slippery slope. Once we cross the summit and start descending, it becomes dangerous, and we can quickly end up at the bottom of the mountain. After all, how could a person possibly be held responsible for the confluence of chromosomes and the culture of their postcode? It’s unfair.

If human beings are but the sum of their influences, and those influences are beyond their control, then surely our entire system of justice is nothing short of barbaric.

Punishment? For what? For the crimes committed by the misaligned stars of genetics and society?

That’s as absurd as chastising a hurricane for blowing down a house or screaming at the clouds the morning after they have left three feet of snow on my driveway, and everyone else has to go to work or suddenly has a bad back.

How indeed? The bank robber’s upbringing was fraught with poverty. The embezzler was reared in the glittering shallows of late-stage capitalism. And the murderer? He was probably just hungry. Or lonely. Or both. Who are we to judge?

Haven’t you read Jean Valjean? Or at least watched Les Miserables?

Thus, we arrive at the inevitable consequence of this worldview: a society in which everyone is a victim. It’s not a huge reach. I am always amazed when I read how both Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey see themselves as victims of a racist society; they haven’t been shy about it.

The successful? Victims of a system rigged in their favour. The unsuccessful? Victims of a system rigged against them.

Criminals are victims of their biology, their upbringing, and their environment. Even the judge is a victim—of the inescapable burden of sitting in judgment over others.

With such a philosophy firmly entrenched, moral agency withers like an unwatered household plant - or any plant I have tried to care for.

Agency, after all, is a heavy burden. Far better to be the hapless product of forces beyond your control, drifting along the currents of life like an abandoned raft. Who needs accountability when you have excuses?