Public Safety committee  I'd be pleased to. I want to step back, though. I hope that the committee does look at this document from the International Centre for Prison Studies, which shows that the prison populations are going up in 71% of the countries around the world, so Canada is certainly not an ou

Public Safety committee  Yes. By the way, on the capital costs, I don't have data, and I would love to have data, because I'm a data person. I am certain your costs will go down. Your cost of running a new prison that is under 20 years old is going to be far cheaper, I hypothesize, than running a 100-yea

Public Safety committee  Point two: I'm not using overall crime rates. I'm only using violent crime rates. Point three: Mr. Piché talked about the prison population; that's not normalized data. Over time, the population grows. If you're going to quote crimes per 100,00, violent crimes, you have to norma

Public Safety committee  I want to respond. I have three quick points. First off, it wasn't my theory. I was quoting Steven Levitt at the University of Chicago as well as Kessler at Stanford. This answers an earlier question: What is the research on deterrents? That was one of the two leading articles,

Public Safety committee  Right. The reason I focused on that was I use normalized data all the time. We talk about the number of new business start-ups per 100,000, the birth rate per 100,000, the death rate per 100,000, so it not only allows you to compare over time in your own country but also, very im

Public Safety committee  I'll be very quick and to the point. It seems to me we can cut through all of these disputes by making a very strong distinction between violent crime and non-violent crime or property crime. My own sense--and I picked this up over the years from talking to many people, includi

Public Safety committee  I would just say the following. I'm a citizen, I'm not an employee of the Parliament of Canada, and under the Official Languages Act, I thought I had the right to present in English.

Public Safety committee  My disclosure is that I don't accept consulting contracts of any kind from anybody, anywhere in the world—not in crime, not in banking, not in financial services—and I have no investment income of any kind from anywhere in the world, except teaching at Carleton University and tea

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much for inviting me. I received the invitation on Monday afternoon, and I submitted my powerpoint presentation yesterday morning, about 36 hours later. Unfortunately, it was too late to be translated. I did photocopy them, and everyone has a copy in front of the

Bill C-27 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you. I'll respond to that. You are right, Monsieur Bélanger. The incarceration rate right now for aboriginals in Canada is approximately 17% of our prison population, and they are only 2.5% of the Canadian population. This is something that has been looked at very seriou

Bill C-27 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you. That's why I emphasized at the beginning that I'm not a lawyer qualified to speak on the technical issues. But there are some important policy issues here, and I think that in the discussions or the debates I've read over the past several years dealing with criminal j

Bill C-27 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today and to testify today. I just want to bring to your attention that I'm not a lawyer; I'm not trained as a lawyer. I'm a professor at Carleton University in the business school. However, I did my doctorate in political scien

Justice committee  I agree completely with you. I teach on five continents around the world, and 48 hours from now I'm flying to Iran. Iran is a very different place from Canada. I've also taught in the United States. I also teach in China. The point of this is that the differences between Canada

Justice committee  Somewhat. Let me qualify your qualification, if I can. I want to step back, because there have been several comments today saying there's no research that proves it works. I want to make this broad comment, because this is what's been—

Justice committee  No, I won't. I'll keep it really short. There are two broad research trends. There's the research you've been introduced to by many criminologists, who have said it doesn't work--incarceration doesn't work, minimum mandatories don't work. I'm not denying the existence of that