That's not my assessment.
The risk assessments say that a low-risk offender is defined against at least one of the risk assessment tools as four out of five will not reoffend in this manner. However, it's not directed toward the individual; it's saying that out of people with this profile, four out of five are unlikely to reoffend.
Public safety is always number one. There are perhaps different pathways to public safety. One of the advantages of getting people out in the community while serving their sentence is that there's a possibility then that they can actually do something to give back to the community while they're out on parole, as opposed to sitting in a prison cell thumbing through the TV channels. You can impose conditions that would be far more useful in terms of volunteer work, or indeed education or training.
I'm not just making this up. We did a big study of the inmate population at one point, because I was concerned. There are high-risk offenders that get a lot of attention. I wondered how many low-risk offenders there are and at what stage they are being paroled, and if we are spending or wasting a lot of money keeping them inside. That study was very revealing. It did not get a lot of attention, but it showed that about half the inmate population is actually considered low risk and that there are other alternatives. In some cases you have to create those alternatives. You can't just say, “Okay, you're out.”