A bloodthirsty Sun News Network calls for more 19th century punishment for prisoners

Sun News, which is of course “controversially Canadian,” has an editorial online and in its chain of newspapers lamenting the closing of Kingston Penitentiary, announced by the Conservative government last week.

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The penitentiary, open since before Confederation, today houses 410 inmates including Russell Williams, Paul Bernardo and the Shafias. As the Toronto Star’s Jim Coyle has detailed, the prison has a long history of brutality with reports as early as the 1840s showing serious abuse by the authorities. In 1849, for example, an 11-year-old boy was flogged for speaking French. It was  a place for “confining, isolating, punishing and stigmatizing criminals.”

The Sun editorial, however, laments the closure of this institution precisely because of its cruel history.

While Vic Toews, Canada’s favourite walrus and minister of public safety, said rather reasonably that a 19th-century prison shouldn’t house a 21st-century prison population, Sun News disagrees.

“The more 19th-century, the better,” the editorial reads.

Since Sun News is so intent on maintaining 19th-century norms, one can only imagine what a joy it must be working there. Miss a deadline? Get flogged. Belt doesn’t match your shoes? Get flogged. Bring Ezra Levant a slightly cold coffee? Cat o nine tails!

The problem isn’t with wanting prisoners to pay for their crimes; that’s more or less what prisons are there for. The problem is with the bloodthirsty appeal to our basest instincts to not only punish wrongdoers but to also do so in the most severe and dehumanizing way possible. And while retributive justice has long been the norm in the United States, Canada’s justice system has always favoured resorative justice in an attempt to, you know, actually reform people. The “just desserts” theory of justice may be emotionally satisfying but it’s also counterproductive and expensive in the end.

Not that the “tough-on-crime” Conservatives are coddling prisoners anyway; they just want to close an ancient prison that is taking up valuable lakefront property in Kingston.