US Republican congressman Asa Hutchinson is warning Canada to rethink the new "Tough on Crime" laws the conservatives are introducing. 

These polices have been responsible for a huge incarceration rate in the states. The costs of incarceration are staggering, at 50,000 per year per inmate in California according to the Economist.

At the moment, the Tories are officially "tough on crime". The government claims that the crime rate is going up in Canada, even though experts are skeptical. According to some commentators the crime rates have actually been going down.

Though it should be said that Hamburglary rates are rising.

Maybe in an effort to be tough on the remaining crime, they are bringing in tougher minimum sentences for various violent and introducing mandatory minimum sentences for non violent crimes.

Recently the government proposed bill S-10 which would apply harsher minimum sentences for people caught with a small quantity of pot plants. This would be Canada's first mandatory minimum sentence applied to a non-violent crime.

Also part of the "Tough on Crime" policy Hutchinson is warning us against, they are building new prisons. Many new prisons. Last year, the feds announced that they would build new prisons in Ontario and Quebec to the tune of $155.5 million.

Are they making an industry of imprisonment? In an editorial published last year in the Globe and Mail, Margaret Atwood expressed concerns about the creation of prisons on an industrial scale.  

"... When prisons are seen as an industry, prisoners become the raw material, and must be constantly supplied. The methods for creating criminals are well known; they include poverty, lack of employment and education, dehumanized prisons where novice criminals may learn from experts, and the criminalization of petty offenses."

The expansion of the prison system may have unintended consequences: this one article in the Globe says that inmates at one BC prison are in the final stages of becoming a labour union. Called ConFederation, this would be the first all-convict union in Canada.