I'd be happy to talk about that. I think it takes us away from the focus of this bill a bit, which is really focusing on what I would call rehabilitation and reintegration. The quantum of the penalty and how that debt to society should appropriately be discharged is probably not the focus of this bill, but this bill will go a long way in terms of reducing crime by preventing recidivism.
I think the Texan experience is similar to ours. Where you see heavy recidivism is in people who are addicted and committing lower-level property crime, where they're feeding the habit by committing crimes. You really need to get a handle on those addiction issues.
What you see coming out of federal prisons is that about two-thirds of the people in federal prisons are there for violent crimes. Violent crimes scare people, but unnecessarily so if you actually look at the recidivism rates. Those who are serving life sentences probably have the lowest recidivism rates of anybody when they get into the communities. You just need a slightly different approach for people who have exhibited violence.
It's quite a significant challenge to deal with those who are the cyclical property offenders. That's a real challenge in terms of breaking that cycle, but we need to figure out the appropriate supports to put in place depending on the individual's criminogenic factors and what would lead them back into crime. Certainly, some of the basics—being poor, not having a place to live, not having your mental health issues addressed—are all problems, and this bill really stands a good chance of building a framework to support an effective re-entry of people into the community. I think it's really good.
I'd be happy to talk to you at length about whether “tough on crime” approaches generally work well, but this reintegration support really does.