Thank you very much. I want to thank you all for inviting me to appear before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to present testimony on Bill C-5.
As you noted, I am the director of a task force on long sentences at the Council on Criminal Justice. The task force is a new initiative dedicated to assessing the impact of long sentences in the United States and making recommendations that advance safety and justice.
The Council on Criminal Justice is an independent non-partisan think tank. We're dedicated to advancing the understanding of criminal justice policy choices and building consensus that will enhance safety and justice. To be clear, the council itself does not take policy positions; instead it forms working groups, task forces and commissions to study and make recommendations.
As a task force, it's just begun its work. We have not yet come to the recommendation phase, so while I am unable to speak in support of Bill C-5, I can talk to you about the research findings around mandatory minimums. To be clear, most of these research findings come from the United States, but I'm not aware of anything outside the United States that would be inconsistent with them.
Let me summarize these research findings in very general terms, and then I'll unpack three aspects that I think are relevant to Bill C-5.
Mandatory minimums are often extremely popular, particularly in the United States, but there is almost no evidence that they deter criminal behaviour. There's also substantial evidence that they cause significant dysfunction in the courts and produce unwarranted disparities.
Let me talk quickly about three findings to consider.
First, “mandatory minimums” is really a misnomer. Mandatory minimums are not truly minimum. Michael Tonry, the international authority on sentencing, makes this argument. What he's getting at is that research findings are very clear that mandatory minimums lead justice system actors, from police to prosecutors and judges, to take actions to evade decisions that they believe would be unfair or unjust.
It's also clear that these kinds of decisions have disparate impacts on particular groups, including racial and ethnic minorities. This really points to one of the structural problems of mandatory minimums: They're based on the assumption that through mandate, you can make discretion go away. This is the assumption, but what research shows is that mandatory minimums actually take away discretion, which is transparent and reviewable, from judges. They invest it into actors and moments that usually lack transparency and are often unreviewable and therefore unaccountable.
This leads to all kinds of system dysfunction. Associated with this, we see an increase in dismissals at the early stages of trials but an increase in sentences for defendants who are convicted. Associated with this outcome, research shows that mandatory minimums increase courtroom work, lengths of trials and also court appeals.
A very common finding in this research is that mandatory minimums produce disparities. Research has consistently shown that mandatory minimums generate unwarranted disparities by region, by courtroom, and as the U.S. Sentencing Commission found, also by race.
Finally, research is pretty clear that mandatory minimums do not produce a meaningful crime reduction benefit. I want to be clear that no one really disputes the fact that criminal penalties in themselves certainly produce some deterrent effect, but research suggests that the certainty of apprehension is what's really important. Increasing severity is not how you get deterrence, and as minimums try to use severity to get to apprehension, they probably undermine one of the core drivers of crime reduction.
While there is some evidence, mainly from economists, that maybe there's a very marginal impact, the overwhelming body of empirical evidence suggests there's no meaningful public safety benefit that comes from mandatory minimums.
That's my brief overview of the findings.
Let me just conclude that I am very honoured to be before you and happy to answer any questions you have.