Justice committee  I see. I will try to answer your question, but I am not sure I understood perfectly, Mr. Petit. Your comments are in the context of a justice system that tailors sentences to individuals. In one case, the person who commits the crime is a member of a gang, and the other, the per

Justice committee  Very good. I would make two quick points. You have asked an interesting and difficult question, and I will try to tell you what I think about it. If I were a victim myself and I had been injured seriously, it would not be very important to me whether I was injured by a member of

Justice committee  The answer is no. I think we should look at a prison as being like a pressure cooker. If you put a lot of things in it to be cooked, the pressure mounts. Either you're going to decrease the pressure through the revolving door and through sending people out on conditional release

Justice committee  Very briefly on denunciation, my number one point, which relates to things that have been said before, is that a lot can be done with the law as it exists. For instance, cop killers and people who kill crop-dusters wouldn't get away with things as the law presently stands. But wi

Justice committee  Very briefly, when I was with the Sentencing Commission, we commissioned some research on the theme of the prison being the university of crime. We asked our researchers to give us quotes in official documents from the birth of Canada up until now. You can look at the report. T

Justice committee  Yes, very briefly. It's this idea that maximum sentences, like minimum sentences, are constraining the discretion of judges. At least this is something that we know a lot about and have studied in the Canadian Sentencing Commission. Even today, the average sentence in Canada is

Justice committee  It has been studied. There's some sort of Nobel prize in criminology that has been awarded for two years. Professor Alfred Blumstein was awarded this prize. He actually studied the phenomenon you are mentioning. What you're saying is something like, let's move out of deterrence

Justice committee  Yes. Well, our time is very limited. Actually, with regard to the mandatory minimum in respect to firearms, you may ask the question of Professor Doob. There was kind of a statistical study. It was basically shown that judges actually were tailoring their sentences to neutraliz

Justice committee  Right. Studies on deterrents or the effect of sentencing are some sort of wasteland. They tend to cancel each other out. You have one that says it's going this way, and another one for that. The point I want to make is that if that is the situation, on the basis of research res

Justice committee  Yes, very briefly, the most excessive example we have had of mandatory sentencing has been at the federal level in the U.S., where you had rules that would direct a judge, if you had a quantity of crack cocaine, for instance, to multiply that quantity by a factor of 100 and then

Justice committee  In my study, I found that people are influenced by detective novels and generally think it takes around 365 pages to solve a murder. Actually, I can only give you examples of crimes. Take the case of an individual who is harassed at work for a long time, gets mad and suddenly ki

Justice committee  The police say they know too, but can't prove it. So there's a bit of a split: on one hand, you have people who act on impulse, who are impervious to the deterrence, and on the other, you have pros who think they've got a good chance of getting away with it. In closing, one of

Justice committee  In terms of information on street gangs, Ms. Mourani—

Justice committee  —recently published a book in Quebec. Yes, I'm aware of that, sir. Don't take it as flattery. The phenomenon, which is attracting a lot of attention, is relatively recent. I'm just going to repeat something I probably went over too quickly in my presentation. Young people who j

Justice committee  Okay, 30 seconds. So if this is true with regard to guidelines, this is overwhelmingly true with regard to minimum sentences, which are the most mandatory form of guidelines. I'll leave it there.