Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.
I've been doing treatment and research with sexual offenders for the past 42 years. I was a professor at Queen's for 28 years and they gave me the opportunity to do this kind of work. I've consulted for somewhere around 25 countries around the world, helping them design treatment programs for sexual offenders in their prison systems, and I have set up programs in I think six different countries around the world for sexual offenders.
I have 380 publications, including 19 books, most of which deal with sexual offenders and their treatment. I have contracts with Corrections Canada, among others, and we've been providing treatment in corrections facilities in Ontario off and on for the last 30-something years. I started the very first treatment program in 1973 in Kingston Pen. It was the first in the country.
We've been following our offenders very carefully. We have, for example, a cohort of 535 that we've now followed for an average of 10.5 years. Of those 535 treated, 5.2% have reoffended over that period of time. Reoffences among sex offenders, whether treated or not, mostly occur within the first three to four years. So I think we're on safe ground to say this program is very effective.
Corrections Canada has been at the forefront in the world of providing rehabilitative services to all manner of offenders, and particularly sexual offenders. By the way, I concur with Mr. Fletcher that the average reoffence rate of untreated child molesters is 18% over a 10-year period. This is not a remarkably high level of reoffending, compared to other types of crime.
One of the problems in getting sex offenders into treatment is that they need to see some value to themselves. The opportunity for parole is a very important motivator in getting these men in prisons into treatment programs, as is the opportunity to function within a programs-oriented prison rather than a non-programs prison, as is, finally, the opportunity to find some redemption in securing a pardon.
Of course, no sensible community would give pardons to all sex offenders. What they have to do, in my view, is demonstrate, first off, that their danger and risk to innocent children has been reduced, and the best way to do that is through effective treatment in the prisons. Corrections Canada has the good sense to also require most sex offenders, particularly child molesters, to do follow-up treatment in the community once they're released as a condition of parole.
I think the incentive of a possibility of a pardon is crucial, but of course there are some people I would never recommend a pardon for, and I could string off a bunch of names familiar to all of you, I'm sure. We have to have discriminatory procedures. You have to discriminate amongst the level of risk and the efforts the person has made to rehabilitate themselves, not just through treatment programs, but also by their good behaviour in the community.
We can talk about unidentified crimes, but that's like knitting clouds, as one of my colleagues used to say; it's an unknown. We can't know how many unreported offences occur for any particular individual. All we can go by is the official record, their behaviour--information that the parole board can take into account in deciding on whether or not to give them a pardon.
So I would strongly oppose the idea of just wiping out pardons altogether. I think the incentive of the pardon is very important, but we need to make sensible decisions about that, and be, I think, quite conservative about it.