Thank you very much for inviting me.
I received the invitation on Monday afternoon, and I submitted my powerpoint presentation yesterday morning, about 36 hours later. Unfortunately, it was too late to be translated. I did photocopy them, and everyone has a copy in front of them.
Before I go into the presentation, I want to say that my presentation is going to be very different from the other three individuals. I'm not here to advocate a particular penal policy or criminological policy.
Although I'm in a business school, my PhD is in public policy. I analyze budgets a lot. I have an article coming out shortly analyzing the problems of Greece and Spain and Portugal, in Europe. I have another article I'm working on analyzing the States: the U.S. budget versus the Canadian budget. I analyze financial statements and budgets because I'm a former banker.
What I'm going to do today is talk about some hard numbers that are on the public record. I do not use my own data. My methodology is to only use data from official sources, such as Statistics Canada, federal government departments, U.S. state and national government departments, the OECD, international centre for prison studies—that sort of data. I don't modify the data. I don't manipulate the data. I don't normalize the data. I photocopy the data, and that's what I'm going to talk about shortly.
One final point: I want to make a disclosure. I don't accept consulting contracts from anybody of any kind, anywhere.