Thank you for that question.
I think one of the things you get with a longer jail sentence is, for starters, more sophisticated diagnostics in terms of why somebody is there in the first place and what their needs are. We all know it's a multiplicity of things. It isn't just that they're drug-soaked, or whether they are. It's a lot of different things that need a lot of different people helping them out along the way.
The kinds of problems people face take time and take multiple assessments to give the offender and society the assurance that they're making progress. What you have within the prison walls in the federal system is sophisticated diagnostics, sophisticated and multifaceted programs, diagnosis for post-release, conditional release, and then wraparound services while on conditional release to ensure that what happens in prison carries over its effect to the community.
Again I would remind people to look at the track record of the National Parole Board for the last decade. The fact of the matter is that it is a record of improvement over the last decade. Most people who are given day parole succeed on that; likewise, so do most people who are given full parole. It works down towards the other end, in that the people who go to warrant expiry have the highest recidivism rates.
We should take a lesson from that. We have things that work. They work extremely well. Why don't we continue to build on those things and make them better? If we do that, we don't need to be talking about getting tougher; we are getting more effective.