Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
By the way, I'm not the Mr. Lee referred to earlier in the testimony.
Mr. Moore referred to the recent spike in firearm homicides across the country. Those are accurate statistics for 2004 and 2005. We've been through this little exercise before. I do want to let the record show that in Toronto, at least, the firearm homicides for 2006, up to the month of November, had dropped about 44%--a huge drop. Hopefully that shows the previous two years to be a spike, but time will tell.
I want to induce a response, if it were there, perhaps from Mr. King. With regard to the reference to the Kessler-Levitt study, just because this guy Levitt was on the front of some magazine and wrote a book called Freakonomics and was recognized as a very valuable contributor doesn't mean we have additional evidence on the issue of mandatory minimums in sentencing. I was just going to ask...and you may during your answers want to say yes, there is more evidence from Professor Levitt or Kessler or whatever. If there isn't any other evidence that's relevant, that's okay; if there is, we should try to take a look at it.
I have two questions, one to Professor Doob and one to Mr. King. With regard to sentencing rates, we've seen the crime increase from 1960 to 1992, and then it starts going down. Is there any evidence that fluctuations in sentencing rates were a factor in the increasing crime rate? We've heard about a lot of other factors of crime, but were sentencing rates ever seen or studied to be a factor in the increasing crime rates for 1960 to 1992?
Secondly, in your work in sentencing, are there any real benefits seen in legislation like this? Does increased incarceration, in a targeted way, as Mr. Moore refers to it, provide any benefits at all? For example, will it enhance appropriate incapacitation for the really bad guys? Will an extended intervention in an offender's life better assure access to programming that would allow the offender to get things turned around--go straight, as they sometimes say?
Thirdly, would increased incapacitation allow for the extraction of an individual from a crime context? Again, that's a neighbourhood where that's the way you get things done. You extract the individual, you get him convicted, and you put him away for extra time in the hope that programming might be the intervention needed to break the cycle.
I don't believe those things do happen, but if there's any evidence that you've come across in your studies and your extensive work, I would like you to please help us out.