Thank you.
A term that has come up here in this discussion is “incapacitation”. It's interesting to see how the lexicon evolves, because the average person speaking to me about this would say, “Well, if the guy's a real bad criminal, I want to get him off the street.” That's essentially incapacitation. That's not deterrence, because we've had a whole mixed bag of information on deterrence, to the point where it's not clear to me that heavy sentencing is a deterrent.
So we have this incapacitation thing, and it would be nice if we could just identify them, like back in the days of Oliver Twist or Les Misérables, when you could just say, “Those are the bad people. Those are the criminals and everybody else is a good person.” You could focus on incapacitating all of those bad people.
But criminals have a way of popping up in the strangest places these days, including in Parliament. I had a colleague who was convicted about forty or fifty years ago for the offence of armed robbery. Mr. Thompson had a colleague convicted of a very serious sexual offence. And you have the odd criminal who manages to find his or her way into a police force and into a church. So society isn't quite that simple.
Judges have to do sentencing, and you have young people and old people. I'm sure that if you had a 90-year-old who managed to get himself into difficulty somewhere with a firearm, a judge would be really happy sentencing that individual to a mandatory minimum.
I must say that local police have come to me and said, “Gee, I'd just like to put some of these guys away. Put him away for a period of time and you know he's off the street.” It's usually a “he”. Is there any evidence about this whole concept of incapacitation and what it might save in terms of crime? Has anyone tried, either from the point of view of the Elizabeth Fry Society or that of the RCMP, this incapacitation function? Would it work for us, realizing that you can't incapacitate somebody forever and that they do come back out on the street? Has anybody ever costed that?