Ganging Up on Chain Gangs

Tim Hudak's proposal put inmates to work lands with a resounding thud across the commentariat spectrum.

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak says he'll put provincial prisoners to work cleaning parks, streets, and graffiti if elected. The Globe and Mail's Adam Radwanski nails why Hudak is pitching the left-field policy proposal: “None of this is really about making the province safer; even the Tories all but acknowledge that they’re proposing punishment for punishment’s sake,” he writes. “Rather, it’s about appealing to a sense of right and wrong that they think Premier Dalton McGuinty, who is more about nuance, tends to neglect.” Ontario has clearly voted rightward recently (to wit: Rob Ford in Toronto, the federal Tory majority), and Hudak seems to hope that by focusing on crime, despite it barely being a provincial responsibility, he'll ride that same wave to power.

Whereas former Tory premier Mike Harris picked a fight with welfare recipients, Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star suggests Hudak is scapegoating criminals, the lowest of hanging fruits, for cheap political points. “The idea of forcing every provincial inmate to clean up highways or scrub down graffiti is potentially a political winner,” says Walkom. “Most people have little sympathy for convicted criminals. In hard times, those who work for a living doubly resent anyone who doesn’t or can’t do the same.” Putting inmates to work during their sentences is a fine idea, but as Walkom points out, “That's why Ontario judges already sentence some criminals to perform community service. That’s why Ontario inmates still manufacture licence plates (albeit safely inside prison walls).”

While chain gangs are clearly a ploy to ensure law-and-order types vote come October, the National Post's Matt Gurney trashes it as an insult to right-leaning voters. “Symbolic, poorly conceived tough-on-crime gestures to the conservative base do nothing but offer the desperate McGuinty Liberals ammunition with which to accuse Hudak and the Tories of being out of touch and driven by ideological, mean-spirited motives, rather than sound policy,” writes Gurney after enumerating why it's a terrible idea. People are already employed to clean parks and streets, it won't win any new voters, and it opens the possibility of dangerous inmates lashing out in public. Here's hoping this weekend's PC convention is capable of drumming up better policy than something that went out of fashion in the 1930s.