Thank you, Mr. Moore.
I've talked to victims both as a serving police officer and also in the six years I spent at the Office for Victims of Crime, where we managed complicated cases in which victims were being run off the rails by constituent members of the justice system. There is also, of course, my work at the Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness. These victims were frustrated.
There are a large number of people who don't see the proportionality in staying at home. They are not just crime victims and survivors and front-line criminal justice professionals, but average, hard-working folks, the kind of people with whom I communicate on a regular basis because I'm with this organization. When you tell these people this is actually a sentence of imprisonment, they don't get it; they don't understand it, because it doesn't make any sense to them. Quite frankly, to average people, average folks, hard-working Canadians, it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't make any sense to me, and I'm somebody who has been in the justice system for 30-plus years. I know some of you think I come at this with a sledgehammer, but I understand the nuances of the system.
I'll go back and repeat myself at the risk of doing that. Judges do a great job of being triers of fact, but I think that generally speaking, in this country, they've lost their way in terms of responding to the needs of the community, the needs of crime victims, and the needs of Canadians in terms of justice and enhanced public safety.
Ms. Schurman mentioned about prison being a failure. Prison's a failure because the way we sentence in this country doesn't work. It's a failure because you're guaranteed automatic parole at one-sixth. It tells you nothing; it tells you nothing about learning and responsibility. You're guaranteed automatic parole at two-thirds, even for the most serious, violent crimes. It's statutory release; you get out of jail no matter what, even if you have 200 institutional violations, so in other words, even if you've been a really bad boy in prison, we are letting you out. It's as simple as that.
You wouldn't do that with your son or daughter when they've run off the rails. You wouldn't say, “You've been really bad for the last two weeks. That punishment I gave you of three weeks? I'm going to cut it off now, because you've been really bad.” That's what we do in this country. It's no surprise that prison has been a disaster.
In the United States of America it's equally no surprise--and I understand there's a lot wrong with what happens south of the border, and we could all have a wonderful debate about that for hours on end--that when they identified the small group of offenders who commit a disproportionate amount of crime and locked them up, the crime rate dropped in the country, and it dropped precipitously.
I think if we took some of those lessons and put them in play in this country and in Bill C-9 in conditional sentencing, and a variety of other parole and sentencing issues that our Martin's Hope report speaks to, we could actually bring down the crime rate, enhance public safety, and--because it's not incompatible--assist with habilitation or rehabilitation of offenders.