VANCOUVER – A former high-ranking public servant in Ottawa is ripping into the Conservative government’s tough-on-crime policies, saying they reflect a “deep, visceral nastiness” and actually “do nothing to reduce or address crime.”

Mary Campbell retired in April as director general of the corrections and criminal justice directorate at Public Safety Canada. In her role, she says she met almost weekly with the public safety minister or senior staff, giving advice on public policy, programs and research.

Twenty years ago, Canada was regarded as a “world leader” in the corrections field. Today, it has reached its “lowest point,” Campbell told Postmedia News in Vancouver, where she addressed a criminal justice conference Thursday.

“The current government has an approach that they like to call tough on crime. I say that’s the last thing it is. In fact it’s quite soft on crime because it’s really a lot of slogans and failed policies that do nothing to address crime or victimization.”

Some of the rhetoric, she said, was on display this summer when Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced new legislation for dealing with child-sex offenders.

“The fact is we don’t understand them and we don’t particularly care to. We understand only that they must be dealt with,” Harper said at the time.

Campbell said those remarks are “chilling when we think of them used with other groups of citizens today and in the past.”

“The deeply embedded nastiness of the current governing party is constantly displayed in their actions, whether it be creating even more punitive carceral conditions, erecting barriers to reintegration, never letting the offender be more than the worst thing they have ever done, using victims for political ends – the list is truly endless,” she wrote in her conference speaking notes.

Jean-Christophe de Le Rue, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, said in an email Thursday that the government “unapologetically puts the needs of victims ahead of convicted criminals” and that “we will continue to do so above the objections of prisoner rights advocates.”

“Canada has a modern and humane correctional system,” he added.

Campbell, a public servant for almost 30 years, stressed she’s “not all about blaming the politicians.” In her speech and interview, she implored senior administrators in the criminal justice field to push for more “progressive” policies and evidence-based programs. Many changes do not require legislative changes, she said.

They could start, for instance, by focusing resources on dealing with high-risk offenders.

“We waste a lot of taxpayers’ hard–earned money on low-risk offenders. We know from the research that we shouldn’t do anything with them … Stop sending them automatically into halfway houses on day parole.”

Money instead could go, for instance, towards women offenders with severe mental illness, placing them in hospital treatment centres where they can get intensive psychiatric care, she said.

“So far that has not materialized and I think it’s frustrating to see the slow pace. You start to wonder what more is it going to take to get some of these agreements going? … The suffering and the harm that’s done is really shocking for a country like Canada.”