What I would like to see is a serious debate about how to make society safer so that you can invest in lots of things. The police would say that in certain kinds of circumstances we need more police resources. Schools would say that we need.... The fact is we're releasing thousands of people every day onto the streets with inadequate resources to try to reintegrate them into society. There are a wide range of things that have been shown to be effective. What we're doing, I'm afraid, is focusing on specific aspects of the Criminal Code for which there's no problem that's being corrected.
One of the most interesting things, sitting here on the dangerous offender legislation, is that people are talking about the solution, but nobody has actually suggested that there's a problem. So what we're doing here is wasting resources on increasing imprisonment, where what we could be doing for each person who is being put in a federal penitentiary for a year is taking that $94,000 and saying let's have a serious debate about whether that should be used for reintegration, whether that should be used for early experience, or whatever. That debate doesn't seem to be happening anywhere in Parliament.