There's been a bit in the northern territory, and it is in more recent material coming out of Australia. There they looked at the number of aboriginal people, in particular, being imprisoned. Again, the human and social cost, as well as the fiscal cost of that in terms of impacting generations of individuals, was part of it.
I think the whole issue of not first dealing with what Mr. Woods has referred to in terms of early intervention strategies.... The more resources you put back into the system, the more resources you suck out of preventative strategies that in fact benefit the community far more.
From the statistics we have in Canada, in terms of what it costs to keep people in prison, if you look at women alone, the minimum amount we see in terms of the cost to keep a woman in prison in a provincial jail is around $50,000. It goes up to over $300,000 when you look at the various forms of imprisonment applied to women serving federal sentences, all of whom would be serving federal sentences under this new bill. If you're looking at that cost per community, we have yet to find a community--when we do our public events, when we do information sessions--that doesn't want to see those resources invested in their community for anything from child care, to education, to health care, to early intervention strategies for kids who may be getting into difficulty, to mentoring approaches. The list goes on and on as to what they first want to spend their money on before they would want to spend it on longer sentences.