Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank the chair and honourable members for inviting me here today before your committee. It's a real honour, and I appreciate it. And I hope it will be lively.
I'm going to be talking about what I characterize as the three urban legends. I'm using that term—this will come out during the presentation—because of my very public frustration with the Department of Justice ministry and the Public Safety ministry concerning a very important and serious literature called the Journal of Law and Economics.
I'll run through some of these very quickly. The first urban legend—and I've seen it quoted in Jeffrey Simpson's article earlier this year in The Globe and Mail, as well as in Dan Gardner's article in the Ottawa Citizen—is that violent crime is down in Canada. This is factually, statistically, and actually not true.
The slide being shown is from Statistics Canada, starting in 1962. I chose 1962 for a reason. I'm in the middle of the baby boom generation. In 1962 I was 10 years old. I remember 1962 and afterward very vividly. We could do things at that age—at 10, 11, or 12 years old—that we can't do today.
This is from Statistics Canada. The crime rate per 100,000--so we're not playing games with the absolute population--has gone up from 221 crimes per 100,000, and these are violent crimes, to 943 in the past 40 years, in my lifetime, the lifetime that I can recall and remember.
The second urban legend is dealing with the law and economics research program. I just want to speak to it very briefly. The law and economics research program is centred at the most prestigious universities in the world--Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Yale, Princeton, Harvard--and it was pioneered by a person called Gary Becker, who won a Nobel Prize about 10 years ago. There are about four Nobel Prizes that have been issued in this area called law and economics. This is a very serious and very highly respected research area. Gary Becker earned his Nobel specifically dealing with crime and punishment. The other three Nobels were in the law and economics area, but not dealing specifically with crime and punishment.
There is a certain researcher. I've quoted him extensively. His name is Steve Levitt. He's under the age of 40. He won the very prestigious Bates Medal for the most brilliant economist in the United States under the age of 40. He has published over 60 academic articles, which most academics will not publish in their lifetime. On top of that, Time magazine this year said he was one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He has published in journals of quantitative criminology and he has published some extraordinarily impressive research. This is one of the articles, as you can see, in front of you.
Why I'm talking about incarceration as urban legend two, before I go to MMS, is because it is the broad case. MMS--minimum mandatory sentences--are simply a special case of incarceration. To put it another way, if incarceration doesn't work, then minimum mandatories cannot work by definition--logically they can't--because it's a subset of incarceration. So this data set was interpreted and analysed by Steve Levitt in a series of articles published in some of the most important journals in the world, and he came to these conclusions. I would draw your attention to the third paragraph especially: “...the increase in incarceration over the 1990s can account for a reduction of about one-third of the observed decline in crime.”
In fact, in another article he did, analysing the reason for the very dramatic decline in crime in the 1990s, he came up with four reasons: first was incarceration, which accounted for one-third of the decline; second was the legalization of abortion, which accounted for one-third of the decline, approximately; third was the waning of the crack epidemic, which is 10%; and last, the increase in the number of police on the ground.
That brings us to the third minimum mandatory. Dr. Joanna Shepherd is a brilliant young researcher who is both a professor of economics and a professor at a law school. She has a double appointment. She has undertaken the most comprehensive analysis of minimum mandatory sentencing, studied in California, and she concluded that they decreased murders by 16%, aggravated assaults by 12%, robberies by 24%, rapes by 12%, and larcenies by 3%.
I'm going to skip over this because I really do want to make sure I have enough time in the ten minutes to get to my final set of points, which we can talk about later, concerning the California three strikes law. I would just caution you to note that there is a lot of mythology about the three strikes. One of them is, you can go to jail for stealing a pizza three times. This is not true, because the first and second strike is reserved for only violent crimes. The third crime can be any crime, but the California three strikes law requires that the first and second strikes be serious acts of violence. Again, this shows the data. We can talk more about it later.
Florida has come up with a similar law called 10-20-life, which again is a minimum mandatory. You can see up there the three years, ten years, twenty years, and then life. Again, this shows the statistics from the Government of Florida Statistical Analysis Center, which has stated that it reduced crime by 50% during the period that it has been in effect.
I'm shifting gears now to Canada, to the changing role of the Canadian federal offender. The CSC, the Correctional Service of Canada, has published a lot of empirical, statistical information over the past four or five years, and the commissioner, Dr. Keith Coulter, has given several speeches. The reason I want to emphasize this is that the profile of our offenders has changed very dramatically. They are much more violent today than 10, 15, or 20 years ago, and they are there for much shorter periods of time on average. These are statistical numbers from the CSC, not my interpretation. You can see the numbers there: nearly 50% of offenders have served a prior youth sentence; 75% of offenders in our jails are now there for violent offences; one in four are sentenced for homicide; 1,000 for first-degree murder; and one in six are affiliated with gangs.
This shows up in the statistic from Correctional Service Canada, showing that 70% of federal offenders are there for a violent offence. This is a statistic, which I hope everyone takes a very close look at, showing the average time actually served for a given sentence.
Sorry?