Toronto Sun via Hogtown Front:
Officials in the federal justice and public safety departments misled the government by suggesting there’s no evidence linking longer prison sentences with cuts in violent crime, an Ottawa academic will tell MPs at a parliamentary committee tomorrow.
The trouble is that one could only take such a study credibility when, as the Romans would have said, ceteris paribus, that is, all other factors are equal. Or in the case of causation research, controlled factors.
The reason that the “sample” of the whole of Canadian society does not meet ceteris paribus is that with each passing year, and thanks to liberal immigration policies, Canada becomes regressively more non-white. Therefore, making the assumption that increased prison terms does deter crime, the crime rate will still increase due to non-white immigration.
A similar flawed study on this side of the border several years back demonstrated that capital punishment was not a deterrent to first-degree murder. The study compared murder rates in states with and without the death penalty. The first big error is that just because a state has the death penalty doesn’t mean they use it that often, if at all. But the other big flaw was that states that don’t have and/or don’t use the death penalty tend to have lower percentages of racial minorities, and therefore would have a lower murder rate anyway. A good study would have compared states with similar racial compositions that have varying degrees of the use of the death penalty.
