Yes, I will make the changes that I've handwritten very quickly and send it back.
The point I was making was if you imagine that as a result of this bill something like 26 people a year—the number of multiple-murder incidents that we have had on average over the past 10 years—were to go to prison for an average of 15 years—somewhere between the lengths of the parole ineligibility periods for second-degree murder and for first-degree murder—in 15 years we would have a steady state of an average of 390 extra lifers in prison awaiting parole eligibility time.
We've been told that the cost of this policy is worth it because a life might be saved or that it serves victims' needs. We'll get to whether we can expect a life to be saved in a minute. However, adding that relatively small number of 390 people on top of the 13,000 or so now in penitentiaries in Canada would cost us about $40 million. This may not seem like much to you, but the question that needs to be asked is whether that is the best use of funds either for public safety and well-being or for services for victims. That's the debate that a bill like this stifles, because it commits scarce resources to a particular action without considering other possibilities.
Keeping people in prison longer has financial costs. Costs are zero-sum. Money spent on prisons means money not spent elsewhere. Let's put this in simple terms. We all agree that a man who, without real planning, kills his wife and family needs to be punished, and punished severely. Few would suggest otherwise, but the cost of a penitentiary inmate averages out to about $102,000 a year for one inmate for one year, so 30 extra years for such a man means about $3 million not spent on preventing similar crimes in the future, assuming that you're willing to spend it only in this area of public concern. That is, roughly speaking, the cost of an additional police officer for 30 years. If you want to think in terms of other interventions that have been shown to be effective in reducing crime, it is the cost of an active public health worker for 30 years. It could be whatever you want.
Surely if you were saying that you're willing to keep some hundreds of people in prison for extra years, at a cost of more than $100,000 per person per year, we should debate whether that's the best use of funds to reduce crime, increase public safety, or serve the very real needs of victims. There are choices.
The interesting thing is that we know that those who murder, when released, are not particularly dangerous. Figures from the most recently available performance monitoring report of the National Parole Board point out that of the 2,853 offenders on indeterminant sentences being monitored by the National Parole Board between 1994 and 2009, 81, or about 3%, were revoked for any form of violence, meaning anything from common assault to serious violence.
As you may know, a small number of those released on parole for murder do murder again. Indeed, a study of 4,131 people who had murdered and who were released between 1975 and 1999 showed that 13 of them murdered again, and here we do return to the adage, “If one life were saved, it would be worth it”.
Obviously these were tragic events, but the only way to have stopped them would have been to incarcerate all 4,131 forever because of the possibility that 13 of them, or three-tenths of 1%, would repeat their terrible crimes. The question then is whether the $300 million to $400 million needed to incarcerate these offenders would constitute the best use of public funds for public safety.
Could we save these lives, or ten times these lives, by investing elsewhere? That's the real policy choice. The choice is how many lives we save when we're talking about millions of dollars, not these particular lives. Presumably what we're trying to do is to maximize public safety.
This last fact underlines an important fact. Crime in Canada is not concentrated in a small group of people who can be identified as bad people in advance. Hence, solutions to crime are necessarily going to be difficult. Bills like the current one, which purport to be good news to victims and good news to Canadians, distort the reality of what we know about crime.
I would urge you to put your time and thoughts into addressing some of the real problems of sentencing and the administration of sentences in Canada. That way perhaps we could have a more coherent and sentenceable sentencing system than we have at the moment.
Thank you very much.
Again, I apologize for speaking too quickly.