It’s hard to read the RCMP report on Page 10A of this week’s Barrhead Leader and not feel a little frustration at the ineffectiveness of the justice system.
According to the report, a man living in the County of Barrhead was arrested on Canada Day after some kind of altercation with his common-law spouse which netted a raft of serious charges. (The details are kept deliberately vague, as he hasn’t even entered a plea yet.)
What’s galling about this situation are the details shared in the RCMP report about the suspect’s prior criminal record. This individual was not only on probation at the time of his arrest, but was apparently subject to two different court orders: a conditional sentence order and a peace bond.
Peace bonds in particular are supposed to net extremely serious consequences if they are broken, as it’s essentially an agreement with the court to not cause any further trouble in exchange for dodging criminal charges. Our reporters have been on hand for hearings where the judge handed down dire warnings to defendants who entered into a peace bond.
On top of these court orders, this man also apparently had a warrant out for his arrest for a previous offence. But despite having what must be a grocery list’s worth of charges, he was released following a Judicial Interim Release hearing.
Staff Sgt. Bob Dodds expressed some frustration with this case and others like it when he appeared before the County of Barrhead council meeting on July 2 to deliver a quarterly crime statistics report. (You can read more about that on Page 2A.)
Right now, the system favours releasing offenders from custody as soon as possible while they’re awaiting a trial. And that objectively makes sense for a couple of reasons, the first being the credits that defendants receive for pre-trial custody.
As well, if you have a defendant who probably doesn’t belong in jail, then you’ve made them rot in a cell for days, weeks or months for no reason.
But then you have situations like this, where a repeat offender is seemingly given a revolving door in and out of the system. Heaping on court orders is having little effect.
If an individual is driven to commit crimes because of addiction or mental health issues, then arresting and releasing that individual over and over while instructing them to stay out of trouble is just perpetuating a cycle.
One county councillor characterized the role of the RCMP as futile, but that’s going too far. The RCMP still serve a valuable role.
As Dodds put it, there has to be a middle ground where the rights of the accused are respected but the public is shielded from repeat offenders. How we get to that point, however, is beyond the ability of a small community newspaper to answer.
