I would say first of all that this is an average figure that includes, as I understand it, both probation and conditional sentencing. I think if you were able to break those figures out, you'd find the supervision costs for conditional sentencing are often quite a bit greater. Indeed, the intensity of the supervision is greater. Many are under house arrest; many are on electronic monitoring, which in itself is highly structured—and it's something that can be monitored.
There's no one who will say they have too much money. There's no one who will say they can't enrich their service. Indeed, the prison system, I think, is also feeling that they have a tremendous shortage of resources. I haven't heard the argument that we shouldn't send people to prison because there are inadequate resources there.
Community supervision is inherently much less expensive: we're not feeding people; we're not watching them 24 hours a day; we're not having to engage them in programs. We use community services: people can go to school in the community—we don't have to provide a school, as you do in prisons—you have community health access. You have all these sorts of support services that you have to provide in a prison, which have nothing to do with rehabilitation, nothing to do with changing behaviour but are just the cost of running a prison.
So I think you should reasonably expect that community supervision is much less expensive than prison. Whether $1,700 is the right figure, I don't know. But I don't think that's the basis on which we should be sentencing people.