As a police officer, again, fundamentally we support rehabilitation. We understand parole. We understand you have to give hope to people who are incarcerated. You have to train them. You have to reintegrate them into society.
But when we're dealing with this most violent portion of offenders, I have to ensure that when I'm going out there and policing.... I worked 20 years in Regent Park, one of the most challenging policing areas in Toronto, where we dealt with people on parole.
I appreciate the concerns about having this monitored, as you say. But there are a lot of costs associated with having people monitored once they are released on parole. Again, when we're talking about policing dollars, who's going to pick up that cost and who's going to do that?
We have several halfway houses in, well, the largest density in all of Toronto. Being able to monitor those people 24 hours, when we're talking about people who have substance-abuse issues and those are the triggers, it creates a very difficult position for policing. We have to be really sure that when we're releasing people into the community, they will be reintegrated. There has to be that support structure. But again, the costs around that are going to be very challenging.