First of all, on the issue of the Toronto gun crime, for example, which seemed to have galvanized everybody a year ago, again, I don't want to feel like anybody should relax about the seriousness of crime because gun crime might have gone down. My point is that we're not going to fix that. Whether it fixes itself or it is fixed because of some other reason, we're not going to fix it with sentencing. So if Toronto gun crime goes down, we still have a problem with guns and we still have people being killed. We should take that seriously. Again, whether crime is going up or down, we do all hope it obviously is decreasing.
I'll talk very briefly about the issue of incapacitation. The difficulty is, when you're talking about an incapacitation strategy, what you're really saying is something in addition to what is deserved by the crime. These are all serious crimes. These are all going to get very heavy sentences. None of us sitting here is suggesting, ever, that what we're talking about is taking these very serious crimes...and suggesting that they shouldn't lead to imprisonment. Obviously, what we're talking about is that the penalty should fit the crime, and I think there's a general consensus of this.
The final point I want to make is that the criminal justice system is not good at treating people. What we may be able to do with a sensible correctional system is to do the best we possibly can. If we're serious, this is a very expensive, individualistic endeavour of taking somebody who is committing serious kinds of crimes, putting them in prison, and providing them with programs. Again, if you look at it, if we're really interested in providing programs to people, this is probably not the way to do it. As I've said, we have to remember the ones we're talking about are going to be in prison anyway.
The problem that Mr. King has already mentioned is with drugs. The simple imprisonment policy, for example.... What you simply get in these circumstances, particularly with street-level trading of drugs, it seems, is simple replacement. Somebody else comes in and sells the drugs, so we haven't really accomplished anything; at worst, what we may have done is recruit another person into the business. So I think the feeling around all of us is that we're looking for a good solution with our limited resources. Certainly there are some studies published, in addition to Levitt's, that would suggest that harsher sentences will deter, but those are the exceptions. The exceptions tend to be, in effect, ones that are cherry-picked from studies, or cherry-picked examples that would be part of that last study I talked about in my oral remarks today.
So I think we have to understand that the evidence is fairly clear in one direction.