The federal criminal sentencing are rules that federal judges are required to consider when sentencing someone who has been convicted of a crime. no aspect of criminal law gets as little attention as sentencing. And no aspect is as important. After all, almost 90% of all criminal cases end with a sentencing. Yet it’s the verdict that everyone usually focuses on. But this year may be different. The Conservative Government’s Bill C-10 has drawn a lot of attention to this area. With minimum sentences for some crimes and mandatory jail time for others, it brings a failed American philosophy into Canada, amidst much controversy. The goals of sentencing are inherently contradictory and always involve a balancing of competing goals. These three goals are deterrence, denunciation, and rehabilitation. By fining or jailing someone we try to show everyone what this sort of conduct leads to, and we try to show this particular accused the too-high price he (and with increasing frequency, she) must pay for having done this act. So, there are two processes at work here: general deterrence to the public, and specific deterrence to the criminal.
The second goal of sentencing is denunciation: that the judge speaks for all of us and proclaims our common values when punishing criminals and thereby denounces their conduct. It reminds the public of values we all hold dear, as expressed in the various prohibitions of the criminal code.
The third goal of sentencing is supposed to be rehabilitation, giving criminals a “time-out” to realize the error of their ways. The original idea was that this rehabilitation would occur within the criminals’ own minds as they silently reflected in their lonely cells on the error of their ways and where it has now brought them.
This has been altered to reform of their conduct and values through the intervention and assistance of the various helping professions who will counsel offenders via various “programs” and one-on-one lectures, presumably of the Socratic type, so they come to realize how shallow and wrong their values are. Often this helps just by babysitting a younger offender as his mind and body complete the inevitable maturing process.
Revenge for the victim or the victim’s family is not supposed to be a goal of sentencing but some say it has now become a fourth principle, and even the dominant one. Along with these competing goals, the tension between sentencing the crime and sentencing the criminal permeates every case.
What is certain is that more people are going to jail and more people will be going to jail. What they will be like when they get out, and who will pay for the prisons and guards to imprison them, has yet to dominate the debate. But some people are already pointing out that, younger people being powerfully influenced by their peer groups and most criminals being under 30, “tough on crime” really means “tough on criminals” as well as “producing more future crime.” And some provincial