Media Clipping — Saturday April 17,1999, The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax

To some, crime really does pay

By Ralph Surette

Crime and punishment in Nova Scotia. It could be a novel. After the Donald Marshall affair, the Westray affair, and more affairs in the administration of justice than you can shake a stick at, there's been some redemption after all.

Nova Scotia has a "restorative justice" program—people doing community service and restitution instead of going to jail for minor crimes—that is leading the country. We send fewer people to jail per capita than other provinces and thus spend far less on jails and their trappings.

We might even call this "genuine progress."

How we might call it that is behind a new study on the cost of crime in Nova Scotia released this week and which, as a pilot project in Canada, is measuring costs and values of social and economic indicators like crime, environmental degradation and voluntary work according to a Genuine Progress Index (GPI).

Although it might sound perfectly logical to you and me to say that lower costs of crime and indeed less crime, is a good thing, you'll be surprised to learn that in the prevailing way of counting things up—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) —more crime is actually better.

This is because crime actually adds to economic growth, at least in the short term. Crime stimulates prison construction, the surveillance and security sectors and others. The campaign of prisonbuilding in the U.S., where one out of every 150 citizens is in jail (compared to one out of 1,600 in Nova Scotia and one out of 900 for Canada) is one of the sinister drivers of the American economic boom, says the report by GPI Atlantic, a Halifaxbased nonprofit firm that has support from a variety of government and private agencies, including Statistics Canada.

The move to create a GPI is worldwide. And although how to count up economic activity sounds like an abstract academic exercise, it's important to do if only to neutralize the political cheerleading that goes with GDP, which too often measures the wrong kind of "growth."

Where a province is in the growth figures—or where Canada is compared to other countries—it causes either bragging by governments or attack by the opposition. In that connection the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies has just released a study pointing out that New Brunswick has bypassed Nova Scotia in GDP growth for the first time. I think we're meant to be alarmed. But what is it that's actually being measured? The fact that New Brunswick has more forest to wipe out?

So, what is "progress?" How should we measure our general wellbeing, both individually and collectively? By the amount of money we have, or by the strength of our relationships, the integrity of our community, a sound environment or low crime rates? The, question often comes in practical form in Atlantic

Canada, whenever someone is faced with the choice of living modestly or poorly in these parts or hitting the road for Ontario or Alberta.

With regard to crime, the point the report makes is that under the GPI measurement— as is obvious to common sense, but not to the GDP—having people out of jail is more valuable and less costly to society than having them in. And so Nova Scotia must be commended and encouraged to keep to its course, and keep looking for socially benign and less costly ways to deal with crime.

This is necessary, the report says, because the other part of the equation is not so bright. Although crime rates in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada have declined somewhat from a peak in the early '90s and are still below national averages, they have risen drastically since the 1960s and are closing in on rising national levels, even if the uncertainties of crime reporting are taken into account.

This erosion leads the authors to ask a deeper question. "In material terms we are much 'richer' than our parents, with more cars, VCRs, appliances and conveniences and a higher GDP per capita. But are we really richer if we are less peaceful and harmonious, if our community strength is ebbing, if the quality of our environment is deteriorating, and if we are continually timestressed? We are so attuned to a pervasive materialist measure of progress that we have forgotten to balance the joys of consumerism against other values."

Copyright © 1999, Ralph Surette