by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

You know cops like you when they tear up your speeding tickets. "I told the officer, ‘I'm sorry to be speeding but I'm going to be late for my radio interview.' The cop says, ‘I saw you on TV last night, it's a great book you've written,'" says Yves Thériault, author of Tout le monde dehors.

Ironically, Thériault's passport to immunity is a scathing literary critique of what he claims is Quebec's tendency to let our miscreants off easy. Thériault's widely discussed book and accompanying TV documentaries have made a major splash, detailing several outrageous cases where our supposed soft-on-crime ways - shorter than average sentences, early parole, temporary absence and early releases due to prison overcrowding - have turned out disastrously.

Thériault, 50, a career journalist, argues that our prisons should take their responsibilities of criminal rehabilitation more seriously.

"In the provincial system the main problem is lack of funding and resources," he says. "They shut down a half dozen jails in the mid '90s and they had some huge budget cuts. There's an overpopulation problem in some of these jails and they have to release inmates sooner to make room for the ones coming in."

Thériault targets a rule that sees many provincial inmates released after serving a mere one-sixth of their sentence. "There's no real serious evaluation of the inmates they release," he says.

But Thériault has his critics. "The title Everybody Out might have been true when those events he described happened, but it's no longer the case," says Johanne Vallée, director of l'Association des services de réhabilitation sociale du Québec. "He gives an impression that everybody is getting out after one-sixth of their sentence, but those temporary absences have been reduced by half over the last few years."

Thériault cites a stat that says that 175 Canadians have been killed over the last 15 years by people out on parole, but Vallée says that parole is a safer option than waiting for a detainee to complete a sentence. "If we put them out after completing their entire sentence, society isn't safer, it's the opposite," she says. "They take the bus home and that's it. Authorities can no longer ask if they're drinking and if they have a job."

Criminologist Jean-Claude Bernheim, who has long defended prisoners as the president of the Office des droits des détenus, considers Thériault's examples "spectacular" and "isolated cases." "There's a lot of people in prison who are not dangerous to society and there are much better ways than using prison to deal with them," he says. "The example I often use is false advertising versus shoplifting. Somebody who steals from a store goes to jail. But if a store steals from customers through false advertising, it results in a fine: two thefts, only one is a crime."

One less contentious claim Thériault makes is that more money is needed to help criminals go straight. He laments that Bill 89, a parole and temporary-absence reform passed three years ago, has been shelved. "They've repeatedly claimed that they don't have the $10-million required to launch it, although recently they were ready to give $10-million for additional funding to Jewish schools," says Thériault. "This law would secure the safety of seven million Quebecers."