Community Chaplain: Stockwell Day

Former Prisoners Dept: The short, compact, turbo-charged man with a beaming face directing operations was Reverend Harry Nigh, a former Mennonite minister in Hamilton and current Community Chaplain for the Correctional Services of Canada who is one of the founders of the Dismas Fellowship, a bi-monthly meeting designed to provide assistance and community to individuals who have recently been released from prison. Among the people helping set up for dinner were principals of Dismas, volunteers that ranged from young graduate students to retired prison psychologists, and people who had served time in prison for virtually every type offence, including the molestation of children, according to The Star. Whatever one thinks of Treasury Board President Stockwell Day's confusing remark that statistics showing that crime is declining in Canada are inaccurate because of an alarming rise in unreported crime, both the experience of the U.S. and recent studies indicate that longer prison terms have little effect on the overall crime rate, and may even increasing the likelihood of reoffending. And filling up all of those new jail cells will unquestionably exacerbate a separate problem that Canada is ill-prepared to address: how to reintegrate former prisoners back into the community. For all the talk of getting tough on crime and building new prisons, there has been little mention of providing additional funds to support individuals once they have been released and it was a Friday evening in late summer in front of an old stone church on a tree-lined street in the heart of the Annex, and the building looked empty. But walking along the laneway to the back, one could see that its basement teemed with activity. There, a rag-tag assembly of men and women, young and old, neatly put together and disheveled, were busy arranging tables and chairs, bringing containers of hot food out from the kitchen, and handing out nametags to the steady stream of people entering in through the rear door. With the Truth in Sentencing Act, or Bill C-25, Canada is on course to incarcerate more people for longer than ever before and will spend billions expanding existing prisons and building new ones to do so. As reported in the news.
@t correctional services of canada, unreported crime