Mr. Chair, I don't think the concept of a disease is particularly relevant to this issue. Let's set that aside for the moment.
The question is whether they can be rehabilitated in a way that reduces their reoffending. The answer to that question is absolutely, unequivocally clear. There have been two large-scale meta-analyses, for example. Meta-analysis is a statistical procedure for clumping together a whole range of studies and making them essentially into one. One of those studies, by Friedrich Lösel and his colleague, which was published in 2005, had a sample size of 22,000 sexual offenders from around the world, in a variety of studies, representing the average reoffence rate you would expect in the untreated group, about half of the 22,000. The other half, the treated group, had a recidivism rate that was substantially and statistically lower than the untreated group. It was less than half of the reoffence rate of the untreated group. That's across a whole range of treatment programs, some of which I wouldn't think were much good.
It's very clear from that and a variety of other studies that we could--