Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
I have a few remarks to make. I tried to think of things that would serve as an appropriate background for consideration of sex offender sentencing and sexual crimes against children.
The first point I want to make, and the one that's most important in this area and in dealing with sex offenders, is that sex offenders vary enormously in their likelihood of reoffending. This is the central datum that has to be dealt with in any kind of sentencing policy. That being said, there are certain categories of sex offenders who are relatively unlikely to commit subsequent “hands-on” or contact sex offences. Among these are incest offenders and Internet offenders without a history of contact offences.
At the individual level, a sex offender's risk of reoffending can be estimated with a fair degree of accuracy using actuarial methods. Our predictive abilities are good, but they're not perfect.
Sexual predators are those who are very likely to commit new “hands-on” sexual offences, especially violent sex offences. It is critically important to identify and to incapacitate these individuals. Given this, I think that criminal justice policies should seek to balance offenders' civil liberties and community protection by maximizing the incarceration of sexual predators and minimizing the incarceration of low-risk offenders. In this view, sentences should reflect both the gravity of the instant offence and the risk the individual presents to the community. We have to realize in this area that no sentencing policy can lead to the incapacitation of all sex offenders who are sexual predators without the lifetime incarceration of virtually all sex offenders. There will always be some missed. The issue is one of striking a proper balance.
The solution to this policy conundrum involves carefully appraising the risk of identified sex offenders and adjusting the amount and intensity of supervision and the duration of incarceration on the basis of risk.
I want to switch gears a little bit now and talk about the historical context within which we find ourselves contemplating changes in sentencing policy.
Throughout North America, the rates of homicide, rape, and a variety of other crimes have declined over recent years, sometimes substantially. These changes, reflected in both survey and official records, parallel drops in a variety of other risk-related behaviours and outcomes, including industrial accidents, driving without a seat belt, having sex before age 13, smoking, dropping out of school, and so forth. So there's a wide variety of indicators that are related to risky behaviours, some of them criminal, some of them not. They're all showing the same welcome trends.
We are doubly fortunate, I believe, that the rate of sexual offending against children has also markedly decreased in recent years. This is a North-America-wide phenomenon. We're doubly fortunate, because sexual offenders against children are more likely to have been sexually victimized themselves as children. It is likely, therefore, that the drop in sexual offences against children will lead to a further drop in the number of sexual offences against children.
That concludes my opening remarks.