One of the things that the United States is seeing--and I agree with my colleague here who spoke about it--is that they are pulling back from mandatory minimum sentences in several states because they have come to the conclusion that they cost a fortune and don't work. The cost-benefit analysis doesn't check out.
One of the things they talk about in the U.S. now is costs related to aging prison populations, in which people are jailed for indeterminate periods of time, and costs related to people being incarcerated when they're younger. Often the young people being incarcerated are men between 18 and 35 years old. Often they are fathers. There is a huge societal cost to the incarceration of parents. Children suffer from emotional and economic problems. There have been studies done by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center in Michigan indicating that the social cost to the children of people incarcerated, because of the incidence of depression and dysfunction, is huge. These are some of the things they are seeing in the United States.
Also, there is the fact that the fraction of money spent on prisons, as I mentioned earlier, can be more helpful in other areas in terms of reducing crime.
The 18- to 35-year-old male example is a good one because anybody who works in the justice system knows that there are many, many instances of people who, for four, five, or six years, have a period of delinquency and then turn out to be very fine, law-abiding citizens.
Now under this law, with the combination of the mandatory minimum sentences, we might catch some of those people in this net, even though your colleagues on the other side of the table say all they want to catch are the most exceptional criminals. The fear is that we'll catch those people, and it's far more than what we're really aiming for.