Thank you very much.
I'm a professor at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Toronto. My research on various topics in criminology has been published in a number of peer review journals during the last 35 years. Recently, a colleague at the University of Ottawa, Professor Cheryl Webster, and I wrote a detailed review of the research literature on deterrent impact of sentencing for Crime and Justice: A Review of the Research, which is one of the major publication series in this field. A summary of my CV has been given to the clerk.
I'd like to make three rather straightforward points. First, contrary to what various people have said in the House of Commons and elsewhere, the research evidence does not support the conclusion that sentencing enhancements such as those contained in Bill C-10 will reduce crime. The best research on this is quite consistent. Mandatory minimum sentences will not reduce crime.
Second, you should be very cautious about accepting some of the evidence that is sometimes cited as demonstrating that mandatory minimum sentences can reduce crime. Much of the evidence contains obvious artifacts that can be easily demonstrated.
Third, you do the Canadian people a serious disservice when you imply or state that serious crime can be controlled, even in part, by imposing increasingly harsh mandatory minimum sentences. This disservice is easy to describe by focusing on approaches we know are not going to work; you fail to consider approaches to crime that would make our community safer.
At least one previous witness urged you to consider comparisons with the United States. He concluded these comparisons demonstrated harsh sentences would reduce crime in Canada. Simply put, I found his analysis to be astonishingly inadequate. Though I don't think these are the best data available for either side of this debate, I would like to spend a couple of minutes giving you a more adequate description of some of the differences across these two countries.
This is a graph of total crime and violent crime, as recorded by the Canadian police over the last forty years. I've multiplied the violent rate by ten to be able to see the shape of the curve. It is the shape rather than the absolute value that's important. Reported crime obviously went up rather steadily until the early to mid-1990s, and then it started to drift slowly downwards.
Crime is reported differently in the United States, hence you cannot legitimately compare the absolute values from these two graphs. This is the United States. What you see is a remarkably similar trend to what you saw in Canada; increases up to the early 1990s and then decreases since then.
Turning to homicide, because homicide figures can be made comparable, I've plotted the actual homicide rates of the two countries on this slide. American homicide rates are typically about three times those of Canada, but if you look carefully, you can see the overall trends in Canada and the United States are similar. Homicide rates peaked in the mid-1970s and then drifted downwards, heading up a little bit in the late 1980s and then downwards in the 1990s.
To be able to compare these trends visually, I've put the two countries' homicide rates on the same scale by setting the 1961 rate for each country to one and then plotting the change from that rate. What you see, again, is similarity. Increases from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, then a gradual and uneven decline, most notably in the 1990s.
What does this have to do with punishment?
This is the picture of Canadian imprisonment levels for the past 45 years. For various reasons, largely because we found ways of punishing those offenders who committed less serious offences in the community rather than by sending them to prison, we have had a rather steady level of imprisonment over the last 45 years.
In contrast, this is what the American imprisonment rates look like. U.S. imprisonment rates were rather constant for 50 years, ending in the mid 1970s, and then increased dramatically. U.S. imprisonment rates went from being slightly higher than ours in the early 1970s to about seven times that of Canada now. In the last few years we have jail data, which for various reasons weren't available until then, but what you see is an imprisonment rate that is about seven times Canada's rate.
Most criminologists would agree that the levels of imprisonment do not predict the crime rate. In this case, we have two countries, the United States and Canada, with patterns of crime that are fairly similar. Yet the two countries have dramatically different patterns of imprisonment. Therefore, when you're told that high levels of imprisonment will make Canadians safe, you should ask yourself why the shape of our trends are so similar to those of a country that has had very different levels of imprisonment.
I do not consider these to be the best evidence on the subject. I raise it only because apparently you've been urged to follow the American model of attempting to deal with crime by increasing imprisonment levels.
The conclusion from the actual data, if you want to think this way, would be that we have accomplished similar crime trends without having to spend billions of dollars imprisoning people.
To understand whether increased penalties affect crime, I would suggest that you look at the overall weight of the evidence. The conclusion that Professor Webster and I came to—
