Criminal justice scientists from the USA and Canada will meet in Toronto this week for their annual conference. Special US-Canada panels will focus on crime prevention, victim services, crime victims assistance, and drug courts as well as traditional issues such as policing and corrections. Here are some quick facts to debate.

The participants will face staggering differences between Canada and the USA on criminal justice policies:

• US cities face rates of homicides close to the world average, whereas Canadian cities face rates close to average for advanced nations.  For instance, Chicago had 435 homicides while Toronto had 60 in 2010 – both cities have populations close to 2.7 million.
• The USA is the world´s number one incarcerator per capita – one in four of all prisoners in the world – 750 per 100,000.  Canada is an average incarcerator – rates close to the European and world average – 100 per 100,000 – though its rate for its remand population is climbing above world averages.
• Despite t he levels of incarceration, US citizens buy handguns for self protection.  Canadians buy long guns to shoot game (and often wonder why Americans need so many handguns).
• The USA is still not a signatory to the Rome Statute whereas Canada was a leading government in establishing the International Criminal Court.

Staggering challenges to the Criminal Justice scientists must be faced in both countries:

• Estimates of harm to victims show the extent to which violent crime impacts ordinary citizens. In the USA, this still exceeds $450 billion and in Canada over $70 billion a year.  One of the biggest contributors to this harm are sexual assaults.  Yet, rates of reporting of sexual crimes by victims to the police is under 20% in the USA and even lower in Canada.  (Canadian news stories this week focus on a Toronto police officer and a Manitoba judge still using the ¨rape myth¨).
• Violent crime impacts disproportionately urban blacks in the USA and urban aboriginals in Canada.
• Massive growth in expenditures in the last decade in criminal justice threaten budgets for public health and education.  USA is close to $250 billion per year.  Canada with ten percent of the US population is close to $20 billion.  Most of that difference is in expenditures on incarceration.
• The investments in ¨what works¨ to stop crime remain a small percentage of criminal justice budgets.  Yet networks of major cities such as UNITY in the USA and the National Municipal Network show how crime could be significantly reduced through local diagnosis and programming.