Certainly the constituency that we represent is not clamouring for Bill C-9 to be passed. They're not clamouring for more opportunities to put aboriginal people in jail. What they're looking for are facilities where people who have been damaged can be healed. What they're looking for are safer communities.
You mentioned the issue about jail and people wanting to be safe. The difficulty is that jail doesn't make people safe. There's a recent study by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics that talks about aboriginal people being much more likely to go back to jail after they've been in jail. They have a higher recidivism rate than non-aboriginal people. What that says is that this option isn't working. It's not making the community safer, because the person comes out and reoffends. So unless we can find real ways to break that cycle, people won't feel safe. The way to break that cycle is not to send people back to a place that doesn't work.
It has always struck me as odd--though I can't expect people to do things with it--but given the high rate of recidivism we have.... If I started a program at Aboriginal Legal Services in which I could guarantee that 75% or 80% of the people who went into it would then get out and reoffend very quickly, I wouldn't be funded for very long. And if I could say that on top of this, if they come in on a minor offence, later they will commit more serious offences, my funding would be cut off right away. Yet that's what happens in the prison system.
I'm not saying that we should get rid of prisons altogether, but we have to look at what the consequences are when we simply respond to legitimate public concerns by saying we're going to look like we're doing something and we're going to look like we're getting tough.