Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for bringing in the members to listen to this speech. I hope it will live up to its advance billing.
In this hopefully riveting speech I was talking about justice and the Reform Party's motion today on what we can do to improve and revamp our justice system.
The first thing we have to realize is prevention. How do we prevent criminal activity? If we are to do this we have to peer at the roots of criminal activity. If we look at the people who are incarcerated in our jails many of them have had family histories that can only be described as a house of horrors. While their history does not exonerate them from their actions, perhaps it makes us understand how they came to have fractured psyches.
It starts often at time zero. It is estimated that half of all people incarcerated in our jails have fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effects. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the leading cause of irreversible neurologic damage in our society today. It is increasing in geometric proportions. Some communities have incidence rates as high as over 60 per 1000 live births. These people have IQs of an average of 68. They have a great deal of difficulty in interpersonal relationships, a great deal of cognitive disabilities. It makes it very difficult for them to interact and engage in society. Some of these people go on to lives of crime or at best have difficulty interacting in society. We need to prevent this. In order to prevent it, we have to work in utero.
We also have to make sure that children are not subjected to abuse, sexual abuse, violence, improper nutrition or more subtle factors such as improper parenting and inconsistent parenting. All those factors in a cumulative effect have a dramatic effect on the building blocks of a normal psyche during that critical first eight years of life and in particular in the first three to four years of life.
Study after study demonstrates that the input we make in the first four years of life has a dramatic and profound effect on those individuals and is also highly cost effective. Programs from Moncton to Hawaii to Michigan have demonstrated a 50% to 60% reduction in youth crime, a 50% reduction in teen pregnancies, higher rates of employment, less dependence on welfare and a $6 saving for every $1 invested.
Head start programs are a win-win situation if they are done properly. I was very pleased that Motion No. 261 calling for a national head start program was passed yesterday by this House and I want to thank all the members who supported it from all parties, except the Bloc Quebecois that voted against it, and I applaud them for putting partisanship aside for the betterment of the children of this country. My hope is we will be working together to make this a reality.
Already five provinces and territories are on side and they want to work with the federal government, with parliament, to make this a reality. We can save a lot of people's lives and save a lot of money.
My colleague from Fraser Valley East put forth a very comprehensive victims bill of rights that we have been pushing forward. The government should adopt it. Far too many times we see victims are left in the shadows and salt is actually poured on to their open wounds as the result of a system that puts a preferential onus on the convicted and not on the victim.
We need to look too at alternative measures of sentencing. Restorative justice has been used in British Columbia and is starting to be used in a very cost effective manner. In British Columbia under this program it costs as little as $290 per individual, a dramatic saving from the $95,000 it takes to incarcerate a youth in a jail for a year.
Restorative justice works for a select group of individuals who are first time offenders for non-violent offences and where they have the approval of the community and, most of all, the approval of the victim. In a restorative justice program the incidence of recidivism has dropped dramatically. It is over 95% successful for individuals selected for that program.
We should also look at tougher penalties for individuals who are committing violent offences, repeat offenders, pimps, individuals who have shown an utter disregard for society. This population needs to be separated from the other individuals who are non-violent offenders, non-repeat offenders, first time offenders where there is a hope of trying to break them out of a cycle of crime, punishment and recidivism. My colleagues have put forth many constructive suggestions along those lines.
We have to look at naming young offenders, not only those who are committing violent offences, who are 16 and 17 years of age, but all violent offenders. The rationale is if we accept that restorative justice works at least in part on the principle of shaming, then why do we not name all individuals who are young offenders and committing offences, be they violent or non-violent offenders? Society has a right to know. The neighbour has a right to know whether the person beside them is a B and E artist or a sexual predator. The public has a right to know and public safety must be first and foremost in our justice system.
While these individuals are in jail let us make it obligatory that they engage in counselling sessions for violent behaviour or for their substance abuse problems. Let us make it obligatory that they take training programs so that once they get out of jail they can take up a role as an integrated part of society. There is no obligation. Right now people can be let out of jail and paroled with spending as little as one third of their sentence. When a person gets sentenced for nine years, they can be out after three. What kind of justice system is that?
Perhaps it is a better thing to say they are going to be sentenced to nine years but that they can earn having that sentence whittled down if they take the measures necessary to treat whatever problems they have, be they psychological, to get the skills necessary to become a functional member of society.
Also we have to look at post-discharge issues. When criminals get out of jail, we should have the systems in place to help them integrate into society. Many of them get lost in the shuffle, fall through the cracks and go back into a life of crime.
Let us talk about streamlining the justice system. We have a justice system that too often engages in a system where somebody is arrested and it takes a long time for that person to get to trial and be convicted. Justice delayed is justice denied. We can put forth a streamlined system and this is not difficult.
We should have immediately put forth a small group of individuals who can take constructive suggestions from around the world that have worked to implement right away into our system, to streamline it so that we manage to get the arrested person through to the court system to be judged by their peers and to either be exonerated or convicted and sentenced in an expeditious fashion.
This would be fair to society and to the victims. We also need to look at the system of how we put accountability into our system. Why do we not examine electing judges? Look at the experience in California where they have managed to elect judges while still managing to retain that separation of judicial independence from other parties such as this House.
It is possible to do that. It is possible to have elected judges and to still maintain judicial independence. It is just the way in which the individuals are elected. It would add accountability to a system that desperately needs an element of accountability.
We need to consider looking at changing our system of legal aid. Look at the public defender system. Again in certain parts of the United States they have managed to institute a public defender system that saved taxpayers millions of dollars while still, with retrospective analysis, showed that those individuals got as good or better treatment under the law as they would have in the existing system.
Look at a public defender system to replace the legal aid system we have now that is actually crushing under the demands placed on it.
If we fail to act that will be our biggest crime in this House. We have an opportunity not to study these issues for the nth time as we are apt to do in this House of Commons, not continue to examine an examination or study a study, but use the studies that have been done in this country, use the constructive solutions that have been put forth not only here but around the world, take the best of these solutions, discard what does not work and implement it.
For heaven's sake, for Canadians, for the victims, for the people we can prevent from getting into a life of crime, let us act now.
