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 science in Canadian public policy and my minor field was political philosophy. So I'm much more interested in the logic of the public policy and the underlying values expressed in that. That's the level at which I am focusing.
What I'm presenting today is based on an article that's being published August 1, in just over a month. It's the annual edition of How Ottawa Spends, published through McGill-Queen's University Press. My article is entitled “Righting Wrongs: Tory Reforms to Crime and Punishment—Locking Them Up Without Losing the Key?” The article really focuses on Bill C-9, Bill C-10, and Bill C-27.
One of the premises of the article is that Bill C-27 contemplates incapacitating violators of human rights—that is, repeat, violent, dangerous offenders—because I make the assumption in the article, following the late Dean Lederman from Queen's Law School, that criminal justice concerns human rights and that, as in his famous phrase, the most fundamental human right is the right to be left alone in peace. So violence against a human being is a violation against their human rights. That's the premise that drives through the entire article.
I have some background information in front of you. Some of it you'll be familiar with. I have the principles of sentencing reproduced from the Canadian Sentencing Commission because I think it's clear that the second-last, the incapacitation, is the basis for Bill C-27. I testified last fall before the justice committee, and there was some debate about the amount government spends on prisons, so I put that in the slide, showing that the government spends a very small amount—it's about $1.7 billion annually. I also have the crime funnel there, just as background, and we can talk about that later.
However, one thing I did want to bring out before I talk about the California example as a case study—essentially three strikes and you're out—is I did provide data from Statistics Canada and I called it “the industry of crime”. I have the data there, showing that—this is 2003 data—the annual data cost of crime is about $80 billion and the victims carry the burden of about 65%, so about two-thirds. This is something that is quite serious and people don't always focus on that.
I also have the stats, again from Statistics Canada—and I'll come back to this—showing that the majority of victims of violent crime are under 30 years old, while most of the people who analyze crime, such as academics, criminologists, and parliamentarians who pass the laws, tend to be middle-aged, affluent, middle-class people who aren't bearing the price. They have the lowest levels of victimization. There's something that I want to bring up later on that issue.
I have some stats in there about the average offence, the average length of sentence, and the changing profile of the federal offender. Of all offenders now in a federal penitentiary, 75% are there for violent crimes. I noticed that in the previous debate you were debating what the number of annual designations were under dangerous offender, and I have the chart on slide 18 showing that it was a low of eight in the last 20 years, and peaking at 29 in 2001. So there's a very small number of people designated under the dangerous offenders. Of course I have the overall incident rate of violent crime per 100,000.
I'm very aware of the fact that I only have a few minutes, so I just want to pick up on a couple of things dealing with rehabilitation and recidivism and then deal with California, and then I guess we'll go to questions.
I do have some interesting data from the Correctional Service Canada showing the rehabilitation metrics for the last five years, and these are the number of offenders in our federal prisons who are completing their rehabilitation programs. It's only about 60%, which means four out of ten—40%, almost half—of all offenders are not even completing their rehabilitation programs. I did discuss this more extensively in the article, because it points to some serious problems. In terms of the recidivism, my colleague here suggested that there aren't stats. CSC, in the 2005 report, estimated that 36% of all federal offenders will be convicted with a new crime within two years of being released from a federal penitentiary. So that's there.
I'll just finish up now on California, because I know this subject has been debated in the media. I think your committee has discussed it, and I would like to suggest to you that there's an enormous amount of misinformation and disinformation about the California three-strikes laws.
I think I read that one member of Parliament said someone could go to jail for stealing pizza three times in California. This is false. This is absolutely false. Jennifer Walsh was a district attorney in California, in Los Angeles. She went back to school, to Claremont College, got her PhD, and wrote her thesis on this. She has the data in there. There's an amazing set of empirical data.
There are two things about the California law. Two of the strikes must be for a designated serious felony, a violent act. The third crime that can trigger the life sentence can be any felony, but she actually wrote an article called “In the Furtherance of Justice”, because the California law has a sentence saying that the judge or the DA cannot count the third offence if it was not a violent offence.
As it turns out, in her thesis she found that 98% of all the people being convicted under California's three-strikes law are in fact going to jail for really violent, vicious acts—murder, attempted murder, rape, and so forth. They are not going to prison for life for stealing bubble gum. That's a great urban myth in our country. It feeds into, I suppose, the anti-Americanism in Canada that I talk about in my classes.
So I really want to put that on the table, into the debate today. You have the data from California showing the impact of ten years of three-strikes. Regarding violent crime only, it collapsed; it went down by half. This wasn't a mistake. This has been studied over and over. Jennifer Walsh has done, I think, the most empirical research on that. So the data is there.
Finally, I just want to conclude, because I'm probably going to be out of time any minute. I'm arguing, and I argued in my article in “How Ottawa Spends”, that if Bill C-27 passes, it will incarcerate the worst human rights violators in our country, those who violate the human rights of the most vulnerable members of our society. Those are defined by Statistics Canada as people who are young, female, and with low income. If we're not concerned about that, then maybe this bill isn't such an important bill. But if we are concerned with the rights of the most vulnerable members of our society, it's something we have to take heed of.
I just want to close by reminding everyone that the late Prime Minister Trudeau, who was a political scientist, by the way, did say that societies are judged by the way they treat their most vulnerable members. When we don't incarcerate these violent people who are preying on young, female, low-income, vulnerable people, we are not looking after those people.
Thank you.