Putting crime prevention funding behind bars

With Bill C-10 – more commonly known as the omnibus crime bill – expected to become law in mid-March, crime prevention experts are worried escalating prison and police costs will cut in to their program budgets.

Bill C-10 is still at second reading in the Senate.

There have traditionally been two ways to address crime in Canada: law enforcement, which relies on policing and punishment, and crime prevention.

The latter approach is favoured by 63 per cent of Canadians, according to a recent Environics Research Group study.

The Highlights Report on Crime and Justice says that’s the highest level of support since 1994 - up five percentage points since last year.

Crime prevention targets some of the root social and economic causes of crime such as family instability, poverty and lack of education. The approach first came onto the public’s radar in the 1990s and prompted the federal government to create the National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC) in 1998.

The NCPC receives federal money but experts speculate the added $1-billion cost of the omnibus crime bill may result in less funding for the centre.

“If they’re going to ratchet up the money being spent on prisons and law enforcement, that money has to come from somewhere,” says Ross Hastings, former chair of the NCPC’s predecessor, the National Crime Prevention Council of Canada. “I think crime prevention is very vulnerable.”

Until the 2012 federal budget is unveiled this March, a reduction in crime prevention funding remains a possibility, says Irvin Waller.

Waller is the Ottawa-based author of Less Law, More Order and an advocate of crime victim’s rights. In an attempt to ensure crime prevention is considered in Bill C-10, he is lobbying the House of Commons justice committee to add a section that would create a crime reduction board and fill what he calls a “huge missing piece” in the proposed legislation.

He says a dual enforcement-prevention system would be ideal for Canada.

“The Environics poll suggests that the majority of people like C-10, but that they also like prevention more than enforcement,” he says. “I don’t know how much the federal government is driven by polls, but I think it would be logical for them to try and find a balance between the two.”

Programming that works

Roberta Della-Picca knows first hand about the effectiveness of crime prevention at a local level. As a newly divorced mother of two, she moved into Ottawa Community Housing in the city’s west end only to discover her new home was in the middle of notorious gang territory.

In the 2007-2008 fiscal year, the NCPC received $39.2 million but spent only $19.2 million.

Unsure of how to protect her two sons, she became a member of United Neighbours, a project to increase safety and prevent crime in Ottawa’s Pinecrest-Queensway neighbourhood. The project primarily deals with youth crime prevention, one of the NCPC's areas of focus.

United Neighbours is funded by Crime Prevention Ottawa and the Pinecrest-Queensway Community Health Centre, but Della-Picca says projects like this should get some government funding.

“Either put the money in for youth diversion now, or you’ll be putting money in the justice system to incarcerate them later,” she says. “It’s really a short-term gain to cut funding for these programs.”

Meanwhile, millions of dollars from the crime prevention budget go unspent each year, says Waller.

Until this internal issue is resolved, it is more difficult for community groups like United Neighbours to get funding, he says.

In the 2007-2008 fiscal year, the NCPC received $39.2 million but spent only $19.2 million.

Four similar discrepancies have occurred since the NCPC became part of Public Safety Canada in 2004, totalling more than $70 million in unspent money.

Waller blames government bureaucracy for the unspent dollars.

“They (the NCPC) have a very complicated process for giving out money, and they have not done anything significant to teach communities to do effective crime prevention,” he says. “If they had, that money would have been shooting out the door.”

Public Safety Canada says the money went unspent because the National Crime Prevention Strategy was up for renewal.

The NCPC oversees the National Crime Prevention Strategy, which implements crime prevention policy at all three levels of Canadian government.

“Pending the outcome of that review, Public Safety was unable to develop multi-year projects … until funding was renewed in June 2008,” wrote Jessica Slack, a media relations officer for Public Safety Canada, in an e-mail.

Crime prevention: A cost-benefit analysis

Not only has money gone unspent but funding for the NCPC has fluctuated over the last few years. It reached a peak in the 2009-2010 fiscal year at $48.7 million. The lowest amount budgeted was $30.5 million in 2005-2006.

Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel (left) and Waller meet at a community outreach program in Edmonton.

These inconsistencies make it nearly impossible to sustain existing programs and build on current successes, Hastings says.

“It’s literally a drop in the bucket,” Hastings says of the funding, adding that more money should be going into both researching and implementing new crime prevention programs. These could include expanding existing pilot programs likes those targeting youth gangs and high-risk offenders.

The NCPC has 134 active projects costing $44.9 million in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, says Slack.

Criminal justice spending reached $31.4 billion in 2008, according to the Costs of Crime in Canada report published by the Department of Justice.

This means the federal government is spending less than one per cent of its annual crime budget on prevention, not all of which goes to the NCPC.

“I think if you could move crime prevention funding up to five per cent of total justice spending at a billion dollars a year, then you could do some really serious work,” Hastings says.

Waller agrees.

“Even if the federal government matches what they’re giving to the RCMP and corrections service with money for prevention, that alone would bring crime rates down by probably about 40 to 50 per cent within the next five years,” he says.

When it comes to criminal justice, Waller says the government would be wise to increase crime prevention spending.

While no research has been done in Canada, he says U.S. researchers have demonstrated the benefits of such an approach.

“They estimate that every dollar invested in prevention will deliver the same as $7 paid for additional prison capacity,” he says. “Today we have a plethora of knowledge that crime prevention actually works and is cost effective, so the federal government should be doing a lot more.”

Crime prevention goes local

The heart of crime prevention funding is at the community level. Capital News spoke with Nancy Worsfold, executive director of Crime Prevention Ottawa, and Robynn Collins, program director at United Neighbours, about local crime prevention programs.