We've been spending some time talking about crime and criminal justice policy on The Agenda this week. Last night, we featured four guests who weighed in on the Conservative government's new anti-crime bills, and its plans to spend upwards of $6 billion building new prison spaces.
Tonight, it's crime again, but from a different angle. We'll explore whether new advances in understanding how the brain works helps explain why some crimes happen, and whether that knowledge should influence sentencing.
In other words, if you have a demonstrable brain defect, say a lesion on the brain, that might explain why you committed a murder, should that be taken into account upon sentencing at your murder trial?
The idea for this program came when our producer, Hilary Clark, read a letter to the editor in The National Post. It was from Michael Persinger, a Laurential University professor, who's spent much of his life studying brain activities.
After last night's program, two guests and I were sitting on the set after the program ended when Tony Doob, the U of T criminologist, said: "You know, it costs about $1 million a year to house 10 inmates in prison. What the country really needs to do is debate whether that's the best use of that money to reduce crime."
Immediately, producer Daniel Kitts and I started to think: show idea.
Then Priscilla de Villiers, who's spent 20 years of her life fighting for victims of violence after her daughter Nina was killed, started to think of a list of potential stakeholders who ought to be invited to participate in such a discussion: the police, victims' rights groups, children's aid societies, public health officials, and before you knew it, we had a future program topic and potential guest list figured out.
All of which is to say, our program ideas don't always have to come from the floor of the House of Commons, or a public relations expert, or a major international development.
Sometimes they come from the unlikeliest of places...such as a letter to the editor, or a casual post-show conversation.
