Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it.

"Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it" is how one resident described today's discovery of eight bodies in a farm field near Shedden, a tiny community in south-western Ontario. Was it a psychopathic mass murder or just another example of what sometimes passes for justice under a dark rural sky? Either way, this tragedy will provide further ammunition to Canadian and American politicians who want to tighten borders, build more jails, and generally spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the citizenry.

But what if crime rates are actually falling? What if there is a disconnect between what is really happening in our neighbourhoods and what is reported? Such a disconnect was evident in the Toronto Star's reportage of this event. The Star included background on several other "grisly" Canadian mass murders and duly noted that "the scale of the [the Shedden murders] is unprecedented in modern Ontario history." No doubt the "if it bleeds, it leads" approach to journalism sold a few papers today.

But, what the Star failed to note as part of this story is the fact that crime rates in Canada have been falling steadily since 1991. And, despite a growing population, Ontario, Canada's largest province, still has the lowest crime rate in the entire country.

I don't know why those eight people in Shedden died, but the circumstances in which they were found sound like the drug-deal-gone-bad scene in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. It's a depressing episode that may have more to do with our Draconian drugs laws -- laws which have served to foster a thriving underworld economy -- than a societal meltdown.

After all, when you look at crime rates in America, you see a similar trend. All forms of crime have been falling for several decades -- all except drug-related crime. The U.S. answer to the drug problem -- the infamous War on Drugs -- has resulted in a record number of black and Hispanic men being thrown in jail.

The ugly, dirty little secret (which is really not a secret at all) is that all crime committed for the purpose of turning a profit requires both producers and consumers. The Christian right, and various conservative movements prefer to target the producers of crime while ignoring the fact that it is primarily mainstream (dare I say white?) Americans and Canadians who consume it. We see evidence of this consumption every time a celebrity is "busted" for drug use or a politician is ousted for corruption or a TV evangelist is revealed to have a predilection for young prostitutes. When things go wrong for "mainstream" consumers of drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution, they are often embarrassed (while the rest of us are sometimes entertained). When things go wrong for the marginal, unacknowledged producers of illegal goods and services, it can often lead to something more tragic -- like eight dead bodies slumped in a farm field.

* Graphs from Statistics Canada 2004 Crime Statistics Bulletin