interesting comment article in the paper today...
»www.lfpress.com/comment/2012/07/···116.html

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City councillor Adam Vaughan had this to say: "It ain't football coaching that's going to get us out of this mess, it's youth workers..."

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But the 19-year-old allegedly “fell in with the wrong crowd” after obtaining Canadian citizenship, officers of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said.

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TORONTO - An accused gunman charged with firing a weapon at a Scarborough barbeque where two people were killed and 23 others wounded arrived in Canada as a refugee from Somalia seeking a better life, border officials say.

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But the 19-year-old allegedly “fell in with the wrong crowd” after obtaining Canadian citizenship, officers of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) said.

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Sports programs are a *huge* benefit to the community and are an excellent way of keeping at-risk youth out of trouble for a whole slew of reasons - teamwork, having something to do, working for a cause greater than oneself, etc. The article is bang on. Even the non-competitive systems that they're setting up for younger kids now is a great way to keep them out of trouble and give them the foundation for staying out of trouble.

Sports programs are a *huge* benefit to the community and are an excellent way of keeping at-risk youth out of trouble for a whole slew of reasons - teamwork, having something to do, working for a cause greater than oneself, etc.

Agreed. A lot of young men need a positive male role model which they may not be getting at home.

meh, crime is at its lowest rate in 40 years...why bother doing anything...shootings like this just aren't worth the money to spend on prisons and keeping thugs in jail...obviously the status quo is working just fine.

»www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/201···?cmp=rss

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But while the number of some offences such as attempted murders, assaults and break-ins were down from 2010, there was an increase in other serious crimes in 2011, including:

Homicide (seven per cent increase).
Criminal harassment (one per cent increase).
Sexual violations against children (three per cent increase).
Child pornography (40 per cent increase).
Impaired driving (two per cent increase).
According to the CCJS, the increase in the national homicide rate was driven by murders in Alberta and Quebec last year.

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Don't you think Ian, Gone and others are already discussing mandatory sentencing to death and now you want to drag me into the foray?

However if you insist on a reply, I would say my opinion is quite close to Ian's on the matter...

There are few high school educated police officers these days. To be hired as a police officer in Ontario requires at the very least a diploma in Police Foundations (2 year) and many have 3 year university degrees.

Stop debating with yourself :p

And yes, cops are wildly overpaid. Beat-cop constables with a high-school education in my city can (and do) pull in over $100K a year with a little overtime (which they pad to no end).

You seem to believe that I'm advocating extreme measures. I'm not. And yes, cops are wildly overpaid. Beat-cop constables with a high-school education in my city can (and do) pull in over $100K a year with a little overtime (which they pad to no end). But being more aggressive with prison unions and outsourcing certain activities would be at least a good start to contain costs.

I will assume that you also believe police officers are overpaid, since they're paid far more than similar jobs in the private sector but serve a similar role in society as correction officers do, right? Is it your contention that we should turn prisons into a profit industry like in the United States? Perhaps we should also outsource law enforcement to private entities that pay employees $16/hour too?

Well...we're opening up a really complex set of issues. Yes, it's expensive to incarcerate someone. But does it really need to be as expensive as it is? One of the reasons why it is so expensive is the stranglehold powerful unions have on the industry. We're paying prison workers FAR more than similar jobs in the private sector.

As I said earlier, mandatory minimum sentences is not a fiscally conservative way of dealing with the problem. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It's a reminder of the overzealous political correctness decade of the 90's, when everyone was oversensitive, men were encouraged to embrace their inner femininity, people used terms like "metrosexual" and anything that could affect the sensitivities of an oversensitive person with too much time that isn't even remotely connected to a non-offensive issue was disrupted.

Well? Do you want violent crime like Scarborough shootings to drop more, or not? I just think that things that actually might work, such as putting violent thugs behind bars, away from society, might actually help; whereas further restricting lawful handguns.....likely won't.

"One of the most widely accepted explanations is also one of the most politically and socially sensitive – that the imposition of sharply stiffer prison sentences since the early 1980s, which has resulted in the US having the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world, has kept large numbers of criminals off the streets." But as I said, impossible to really "know" why things are the way that they are.

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Far more interesting from our perspective is the possibility
that abortion has a disproportionate effect on the births of those
who are most at risk of engaging in criminal behavior. To the
extent that abortion is more frequent among those parents who
are least willing or able to provide a nurturing home environment,
as a large and growing body of evidence suggests, the
impact of legalized abortion on crimemight be far greater than its
effect on fertility rates.

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If anyone can explain to me what bullshit like this accomplishes, I'm all hears.

Hopefully someone higher up than whoever sent the email will reverse this knee-jerk decision. If some posters here had their way though, it'd all be banned anyway. All guns = bad.

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Toronto disinvites elite youth target shooters from city sports event.

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Still, when one looks at the cost vs. benefit of such policies, are they worth the money? It is worth putting yourself into debt for limited reductions in crime? I suppose that depends on who you ask, but it certainly isn't a very fiscally conservative way of looking at things.

That said, serious crime in the US, where there are tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws is at a 48 year low.

As for the recent Canadian move toward mandatory minimums, you're in no more of a position to say it will work than someone who says it won't, because we haven't had MMSes long enough for anyone to determine their impact to any sort of statistically accurate level.

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Toronto disinvites elite youth target shooters from city sports event.

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The American example, as I will now say for a third time, runs counter to this very example you cited here.

i think IamGimli's point (which if i understand him correctly, i agree with), is 3 years in a Canadian jail for mandatory sentencing, where he can get rehab is far more effective than 10 years in a US prison where he rots in his cell

No one said anything about the rehabilitation programs in jail and prisons, and those are ultimately irrelevant to the topic of mandatory minimums.